It started in a basement. Sarah Koenig, a producer on This American Life, a weekly radio program, had pitched a new kind of show. Instead of choosing a different theme for each episode and creating stories related to that theme, Koenig and her colleague Julie Snyder would tell a single, long story over multiple episodes. The show would follow a format as old as Dickens. Each episode would build...
In November 2015 stock photographer Antonio Guillem posted a picture on Shutterstock. It showed a young man walking in a city street with his girlfriend. His head is turned back and he ogles a woman walking in the other direction. His girlfriend has a look of disgust. The picture was shot in Gerona, Spain, and it was one of a number of pictures that Guillem had made featuring the same three...
In January this year, a man in China’s Bozhou city received a parking fine. He wasn’t happy about it. “Grandma’s legs!” he wrote on WeChat Moments, using a light Chinese curse. “I only parked for ten minutes to pick up my kid and it’s a 100 yuan fine.” The next day, the local police wrote their own post on Weibo, a kind of Chinese Twitter. The post reported that a man in Bozhou county had been...
Now that we all have high quality cameras in our pockets and access to stock sites packed with millions of images, creating or finding visual content should be a breeze. See a beautiful scene, and you can shoot it, edit it, and put it on a website, a commercial, or a product. Imagine a picture you want to use—whether it’s a beach in the Caribbean or the bottom of a mine shaft, and you can either...
For publications and designers in need of travel images, these should be glorious days. With a camera in every pocket, a photogenic scene around every exotic corner, and social media sites offering a platform for anyone who snaps a shot of the Eiffel Tower or a Venice canal, there really should be no shortage of images for businesses to use. In practice, it hasn’t turned out that way. Despite the...
When Chad Ingraham completed his photography studies in 2004 he wasn’t entirely certain what he wanted to do. A Canadian from New Brunswick, he knew he wanted to see the world and he knew too that waiting for a photography client to turn up and give him an expense account to cover his air fares would mean waiting in North America for a very long time. “It was either working on a cruise, or...
When photographer Paul Nicklen climbed from his Zodiac into the Antarctic Ocean to take pictures of a massive leopard seal for National Geographic, the former marine biologist from Baffin Island, Canada, had no idea what to expect. A short distance from an enormous marine predator and in freezing waters, he swam up to the seal with a dry mouth and shaking legs. As he began taking pictures, the...
Photographers attempt to freeze a moment. They capture the beauty of a scene, the character in a portrait, the drama in an event. But would it still be photography if the images were made without a camera, only a monitor, if the landscapes were virtual and the portraits were of people who really are two-dimensional? The technical process might be completely different, demanding coding and hacking...
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