Photographer Travels Across the US with His Camera, Girlfriend, and LED Hula Hoop

This past May, photographer Grant Mallory and his girlfriend Maria celebrated Maria’s college graduation by embarking on an epic road trip around the United States. Mallory wanted to capture each National Park’s scenic locations in a unique way, so he brought along an LED hula hoop and had Maria pose for light painting portraits.

“Although it took a lot of patience to get the shots, I am glad that we took the time to do it right,” Mallory tells PetaPixel.

Here are some of the photos they’ve made thus far:

Crater Lake, Oregon

Golden Gate Bridge, California

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

Redwoods National Park, California

Olympic National Park, Washington

Badlands National Park, South Dakota

Olympic National Park, Washington

The couple are documenting their travels on their blog, He and She Travel. You can also follow along with his photography through his Flickr photostream.

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Image credits: Photographs by Grant Mallory and Maria Jacob and used with permission

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Picsbuffet Lets You Explore Millions of Photos, Google Maps-Style

picsbuffet is a new visual image browsing system that lets you explore and search millions of photographs through an interface that feels like Google Maps.

Developed by researchers HTW Berlin, the service groups photo search results into multiple layers. The highest level is least specific, and it contains all kinds of photos about all kinds of subjects. As you zoom in to a particular photo, the photos on each level are more and more similar to the photo you’re zooming into.

Clicking on a photo enlarges it and gives you a link to the source where it was found. A heatmap in the upper left corner of the screen shows you other areas of the layer where there may be relevant and interesting photos.

Here’s what a search for photographer looks like when starting from the highest level and then zooming into the photo “map”:

Here’s a video showing how picsbuffet works:

picsbuffet version 0.9 currently contains over 1 million stock photos found on Fotolia, and the service works with Chrome and Opera browsers. The team is planning to add more photo sources and more browser compatibility in future versions of the service. Head on over to picsbuffet if you’d like to try out the system for yourself.

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This 1902 ‘Photo’ of General Grant is an Early Example of Compositing

Want to see a super early example of a photo being faked through compositing? Look no further than this circa 1902 photo, titled “General Grant at City Point.” It appears to show General Ulysses S. Grant posing on a horse with a large number of soldiers in the background, but it’s actually the combination of three different photos.

The photo, which is found in the Library of Congress’ catalog, is attributed to photographer Levin Corbin Handy, the nephew (by marriage) of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady. Handy worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, shooting portraits and offering his photo services to the US government.

Here’s a look at the original photos that were used to create the image above: the head is from an 1864 portrait of Grant by photographer Edgar Guy Fowx:

The horse and rider’s body is from an 1864 portrait of Major Gen. Alexander M. McCook:

Finally, the background is an 1864 photo of Confederate prisoners captured at the battle of Fisher’s Hill, Virginia:

NPR writes that after Brady died in 1896, Handy inherited a a collection of negatives from the renowned photographer and began to license images to various publications. To satisfy demand for the photography, he also created new photos that blurred the line between real and imagined.

And that’s how we ended up with this bizarre composite photo of General Grant posing on someone else’s horse on someone else’s body.

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P.S. This example of historic photo fakery was featured in the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at the Met from 2012 through 2013. The show has also spawned a new book with the same name.

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You Can Use a CD to View the Color Spectrum of Your Light Sources

If you want to view the color spectrum of a light source in your studio, there’s actually a super cheap and easy way to do so: an ordinary CD or DVD can do the trick. Simply allow the light to reflect from the surface of the disc into your eye — it acts as a diffraction grating, allowing you to see the different color bands in the light.

Here’s an 8-minute video in which Matthias Wandel demonstrates the technique using different lights in his woodworking shop:

Using this trick, you can see how different types of lights emit wavelengths differently. Here’s a still frame from a comparison Wandel does between a CFL bulb (left) next to an LED bulb (right):

As you can see, the CFL emits very specific wavelengths of light, whereas the LED bulb is very smooth in comparison. While these lights may look similar to the naked eye, the spectrum differences can make a difference in photos. For example, objects will look completely different in black and white photos depending on which kind of light you use (Wandel demonstrates this in the video above).

If you have a CD lying around, try using it to examine the quality of the lights you’re using for your shoots.

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Thanks for sending in the tip, Julian!

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Image credits: Header CD photo by Luis Fernández García, and video and still frame by Matthias Wandel

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