Chongqing, the world’s largest city – in pictures 2025 Apr 29
The Guardian published their reporter Alessandro Gandolfi's vacation snaps as he poked around the city of Chongqing. The article's bold text at the top claims "The largest city in the world is as big as Austria, but few people have ever heard of it," which seems rather contradictory to me. Or Euro-centric, perhaps. Anyway, they continue: "The megacity of 34 million people in central of China is the emblem of the fastest urban revolution on the planet. The Communist party decided 30 years ago to unify and populate vast rural areas, an experiment that has become a symbol of the Chinese ability to reshape the world." It's just a really big damn city not on the Western tourist's radar, is all. Whatever. Enjoy the photos. They're alright.

Photographer: Emma K. Alexander 2025 Apr 29
My Flickr contact Emma Alexander got featured in the Flickr Blog Photography Spotlight! Congratulations. Check out her inspirational shots of D.C. – are they street photography? Sure, why not? Gotta call them something. In her words:

Outside of the photography world, I think folks tend to have a very specific definition of street photography in their head, usually involving some rogue photographer with a giant flash running up to an unwitting subject and getting in their face. That stereotype kept me away from the term for a long time. However, I’ve come around to include cityscapes, architecture, photos of places without people, and even some abstracts, in my definition of street photography.

See why I'm a fan?

I went to London 2025 Apr 26
Last month, I spent a few days in London, just me and my cameras. I've finished going through my photos (finally) and I've picked a few to share, if you're interested. Check them out. Here's a teaser:

The Eggman's Printers 2025 Mar 11
Here's a promotional short for an upcoming photo auction of William Eggleston's work, but what's interesting here is that the short (and the auction) feature front-and-center not Eggleston himself, but the technicians who printed his work: Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli. According to the auction house, Stricherz and Malli are the "acknowledged masters of the dye transfer printing process" who created the "perfected master prints by which subsequent prints in a respective edition were judged" – including the Eggman's most famous prints.

California is on fire, again 2025 Jan 10
Linked is a set of phenomenal photos of Pacific Palisades burning to the ground by LA-based Ethan Swope (who is still a student). It's stunning, shocking, horrifyingly beautiful stuff – the best I've seen of this latest round of fires.

Meanwhile, in other fire-related things, a firefighting plane had to be grounded after hitting a drone flying where it shouldn't be, and this person on Bluesky who is a fire scientist and former firefighter created this thread about why these fires are so big (we gave them fuel) and burning so many structures (we like plants next to our homes). Also, check out Tag Christof's Flickr stream for more fire photos.

Burn, baby, burn.

'He looked at me with hate in his eyes’ 2025 Jan 7
The story of how Jewish photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured photos of Nazi Joseph Goebbels before and after Goebbels learned Eisenstaedt was Jew.

My Top Flickr Photos of 2024 2024 Dec 31
Linked is an album of my fourteen most fav'd photos posted to Flickr in 2024. I shot them all in 2024 (or just about) and similar to last year they're mostly-but-not-all from my "midnight" series, and all were struck by a case of Flickr's "Explore" daily engagement boondoggle. I'll let the viewer be the ultimate decider, but I think this year Flickr fav counts came better to overlapping with my own picks of the strongest photos I posted, but of course I'm as susceptible to public opinion as anyone and so I'm never quite sure what photos of mine I like because I think they're good and which I like because others do.

Anyway. Here's to another year full of photography! May 2025 be more and better and photoer.

Flickr: Your Best Shot 2024 -- Urban 2024 Dec 19
Hey look, my photo got featured in a Flickr-curated gallery as part of the "Your Best Shot 2024" contest. That's neat.

The power of lens compression 2024 Dec 13
I'm having fun reading around the rants on this Hollywood Visual Effects Artist Todd Vaziri's website, and this linked post in particular is right up my alley, talking about how using a very long lens to get dramatic visuals isn't actually a visual effect in the Hollywood sense. Worth reading his other blog posts, too.

Colton Allen: 1979-2022 2024 Dec 9
Colton Allen passed away just about two years ago, and unfortunately I am only learning this today. He was a photographer I knew through Flickr where him and I "followed" each other's photostreams and communicated in groups and comments. He began shooting photographs shortly after being diagnosed in 2008 (at age 28) with ALS, and he was never held back knowing his days were short. Near the end, he outfitted his wheelchair with custom camera gear to keep him shooting despite his failing limbs. His photos are genuinely fantastic – subtle and nuanced and majestic. I used his portfolio as material when I taught middle school photography, and I am lucky enough to have one of his photo books on my shelf. I knew when he stopped putting new photos on Flickr in 2022 that it was not a good sign, but lack of information there left me only speculating. Well, today I stumbled across the sad news, and am now grieving.

A photographer fixed the light rendering math in the 3D graphics industry 2024 Dec 5
The linked PC Gamer article explains the whole situation, but briefly: early Valve employee, computer engineer and photographer and animator and creator of the G-Man Ken Birdwell was working on Half Life 2 when he noticed something off about the way light interacted with curved objects. He put in the effort to solve the bug, but then realized that the fundamental lighting math was wrong on the 3D graphics accelerator chips, something far out of the purview of Valve's video game software world. Birdwell says:

I had to go tell the hardware guys, the people who made hardware accelerators, that fundamentally the math was wrong on their cards. That took about two-and-a-half years. I could not convince the guys, finally we hired Gary McTaggart [from 3DFX] and Charlie Brown and those guys had enough pull and enough… I have a fine arts major, nobody's gonna listen to me. ...

The problem was, when I pointed this out to the graphics hardware manufacturers in '99 and early 2000s, I hit the 'you've just pointed out that my chips are fundamentally broken until we design brand new silicon, I hate you' reaction. That wasn't a fun conversation. It went through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, etcetera, all in rapid succession with each new manufacturer.

This reddit explains the technical side of things.

Tokyo Light Stream 2024 Dec 4
Linked is a fantastic and inspirational set of hundreds of Tokyo night shots – photos where light and energy pierce through the darkened streets – by the amazingly creative photographer ajpscs. Also, don't miss his TOKYO FORM album where Tokyo becomes mandala in a psychedelic kaleidoscope of beauty.

This is not a photograph 2024 Nov 16
The wonderfully vibrant photography of Edwina Hay, who specializes in musicians and portraiture.

Lucius Felimus 2024 Oct 22
Hard to tell where the 3D renders stop and the cyberpunk renditions of Manila begin, Lucius Felimus's website offers a breathtaking smorgasbord of neon scenery that skews heavily into high tech low life.

Why 85mm focal length is misunderstood 2024 Oct 11
Linked is a YouTube video from a long-time working portrait and landscape photographer Martin Castein, one of his series of videos about photography. YouTube abounds with this stuff (and much of it's not very useful) so why am I linking this one in particular? Because, unlike most, I feel like I actually learned something here.

I've always struggled with that 85mm field of view, but Castein breaks down in this video how to compose compelling shots at this angle, how to include backgrounds, how to go about piecing together the elements you are including and not including in the frame when using these short telephoto focal lengths.

Fraser Project 2024 Oct 8
A fascinating collection of photography, rendering the world in bright and flat lighting and completely devoid of people.

What Treason Looks Like 2024 Sep 23
Los Angeles Times photographer Kent Nishimura was covering the Jan 6 protests on the ground around the Capitol building when the protests turned to riot and the rioters became insurrectionists attempting to overthrow our government. In the link is nearly 30 minutes of barely-edited GoPro footage from his helmet where you can see Nishimura working and watch the events as they unfold.

Which is Getting Better: Photographers or Cameras? 2024 Aug 23
Here's a unicorn: an article about photography and cameras written by someone who actually knows what they're talking about. Erin Brooks is a top photographer, and in this substack post she tells us what she thinks about the proliferation of cell phone cameras and their impact on photography and what it means for all of us.

EM Photography 2024 Jul 2
Emily Menges is a photographer and also a defender on the Bay FC, the NWSL club near me. So that's pretty awesome.

5000 Photos 2024 Jun 14
I just posted my 5000th photo to Flickr (according to the photo counter on the Flickr page). That's a dang lot of photos – assuming a rate of one per day, it works out to every day since 2011. Where did all these photos come from? What am I doing with my life?

Levi Wedel Photography 2024 May 18
Levi Wedel is the greatest living left-handed photographer of industrial alleyways using instant film in Calgary, Canada. His photography is fascinating and inspirational.

Dylan Andersen Photography 2024 May 1
Dylan is a Southern California portrait and lifestyle photographer & videographer, based in Orange County. Him and I also have met up a few times to chat and take photos together.

Suburbs 2024 Apr 26
Hayden Clay is a photographer and visual artist who creates magical surreal imagery. "Suburbs" is his newest project.

The Canon Digital Rebel 2024 Apr 21
I've linked the Sep 4, 2003 review of the first affordable dSLR – the Canon Digital Rebel. I was fortunate enough to be able to afford one such camera right at the cusp of my entering the workforce a year after it was released, and it is a camera I still have to this day. Of course I do not use it much anymore, but it still works. And to prove such, I went out and shot some photos with it. What's remarkable is how strongly the image quality holds up. The major problem it turns out with using this 20-year-old digital camera is that the interface itself is clumsy. Click on to read more musings attached to the images direct.

The Past and Future of Flickr 2024 Apr 11
Linked is an interview by This Week in Photo's Frederick Van Johnson of SmugMug/Flickr COO Ben MacAskill which is surprisingly frank and transparent, talking about the challenges that Flickr has had in the past, why SmugMug of all company's are their latest (and probably last) acquirer, some of the technical feats the team pulled off in freeing Flickr from Verizon (including datacenter specifics), and a glimpse at the fascinating factoid that SmugMug was the very first Amazon Web Services customer (back before it was even called AWS). I'm not just linking to any random Flickr videos, this one's actually good.

Transitional Landscapes - JM Golding 2024 Apr 8
JM Golding is a photographer and artist who works largely with Holga and other toy cameras. Transitional Landscapes is a collection of ethereal landscapes made from multiple overlapping exposures.

Photographer Mike Hawkins 2024 Apr 7
Another long-time Flickr contact of mine Mike Hawkins was today featured on the Flickr Blog due to his astounding backyard astrophotography.

Robert Scoble interviews Thomas Hawk in his home 2024 Apr 4
Apologies for linking to TwitterX but that's where this interview is posted. It's a half-hour video stream of Robert Scoble chatting with photographer Thomas Hawk about his slide scanning "obsession" where we learn a bit about Hawk's motivations and process and inspirations. I've been tracking Hawk for decades on Flickr (and have met him) but this was still a fascinating behind-the-scenes insight.

Olympus OMPC 2024 Apr 3
The perfect camera write-up doesn't exisI have now discovered the perfect camera write-up. I don't own and have never used an Olympus OMPC but now thanks to this article I don't have to. It's everything I ever wanted to know. Every camera write-up should strive for this article's perfect and concise brilliance.

Slit-Scan Photography 2024 Mar 26
The Horizon Perfekt is a 35mm camera which exposes the film through a rotating lens, creating panoramic negatives wider than the lens can expose at any one moment. What if a digital camera could do the same? Enter slit-scan photography – a digital sensor that's thousands of pixels tall but only one pixel wide. Traditionally used in document scanners and industrial tools, what would a field version of a slit-scan camera look like? Photographer and engineer Daniel Lawrence Lu shows us exactly this on his website, but he doesn't go into much detail on how these photos came to be. Luckily for us, Paul Mison back in 2018 interviewed Lu about his innovative techniques, and we can now learn just how challenging it is to photograph using slit-scan.

Socotra 2024 Mar 3
Avid travel blogger WRenee shares her experience going way, way off the beaten track in a solo trip (guided) to the Yemeni island of Socotra. The entire island is a UNESCO World Heritage site and GWB Huntingford – the English anthropologist who studied east African languages and people – called it "the most alien-looking place on Earth."

What is archival ink? 2024 Feb 8
I don't ever want to link to AI-generated text without knowing that it is AI-generated and labeling it as such, but so often now-a-days informational pages like this one are being created by some hallucinating algorithm. That said, this article explaining what exactly is "archival ink" and what makes it different from regular ink was helpful to me, so I suppose whether or not it was AI-created doesn't matter... unless it's wrong. And I don't know enough about ink to know if it's wrong.

San Jose in 1975 and 2006 2024 Jan 28
A collection of photos of downtown San Jose streets shot in 1975 by city staff, and updated shot 31 years later in 2006. Even though it's been another 18 years since 2006, the changes since 2006 are minimal. I may find the gumption to go do an update, though.

This Journalist Recreated Gran Turismo Photos in Real Life and Can’t Tell the Difference 2024 Jan 26
This is an interesting take because while the headline claims the article's about photography, it's not. The author gets pensive about the ever-changing city and how different times of day make downtown Los Angeles into a completely different beast. It's a fascinating piece, really.

Josh Marcotte Features Lost San Jose at the Triton Museum 2024 Jan 18
I've been following Lost San Jose for a long while now, and I'm excited to go check out his work at the Triton. This article in the Metro discusses that exhibit and his photography in total.

5050 Travelog 2024 Jan 12
One of the authors of this blog – Morten – and I follow each other on Flickr. Is that why his and my gear lists are so similar? Not intentionally. But I frequently find myself reading his gear musings instead of just skimming over them as I so often do others, because I recognize the gear kinship.

My Flickr Year 2023 2024 Jan 10
This is Flickr's attempt to summarize a year with statistics. There's really not much insight, unfortunately. Especially compared to the 2021 original. It is, however, better than last year's which was such a joke I didn't even share it out.

gothamFlux 2024 Jan 3
A photo project by Wilson Hurst.

Jack Takahashi 2023 Oct 20
Leica-using photographer with some fantastic photos, and lens reviews of his gear.

Nikon Df Long Term Review 2023 Oct 14
In anticipation of the upcoming Nikon Zf (a retro-styled advanced camera that's going to start arriving in photographers' hands next week) let's take a stroll through some long-term reviews of Nikon's attempt a decade ago, the Df. A year ago I had my hands on the Df, but it was bulky and awkward and I did not care for it. Others, however, like it much more.

The Apple "screenshot" sound is a Canon AE-1 2023 Oct 14

Apple's camera click sound ... comes from Reekes' old 1970s Canon AE-1 that he purchased in high school. He recorded his camera and then slowed down the shutter speed in order to build the custom sound. ... He said he has attempted to use it as a pickup line in a bar as well. 'Hey, I made that sound!' But Reekes said it mostly just results in a strange look.

Mulafossur by Zeb Andrews 2023 Jun 15
The Faroe Islands fascinate me with their beauty and isolation, but they remain someplace I have not yet had time to visit. In the meantime, photographer Zeb Andrews brings them to us in all their stunning magnificence in this photo set on Flickr, complete with full descriptions of what it's like to actually be there, on the Faroes.

Fairyism 2023 May 4
A photography portfolio. "There is no theme, there are no rules, there is just light, shadow and color."