Fantastic. The kids are incredible. The last lines are great, listen carefully.

[via wimp.com]

Me Ra Koh lists some extremely useful tips on doing baby photography. I must say she’s got great advice that’s easy for anyone to use and generalize for almost any kind of photography.

A former Sports Illustrated cover model is suing an Estee Lauder company for allegedly damaging her career with a fake promo using a Photoshopped picture of her. The suit is the latest wrinkle in the global phenomenon of photo retouching.

An interesting example of this type of photo retouching is this Dove Evolution piece.

Here’s another piece by Tom Piper commissioned by Dove called “Beauty Pressure.”

Reminds me of the documentary America the Beautiful (available on Netflix) which takes up the theme of our obsession with beauty and our standards of thinness, among other things.

The chicken-egg of this is, are advertisers (producers, editors, retouchers) leading us to want certain things, or are they responding to what they perceive (correctly or incorrectly) as our desire for these things?

No doubt it’s a bit of both.

Wonderful video piece on Fred R. Conrad’s shoot of the Westminster Dog Show. Watch full screen, it’s worth it.

LaPorte, Indiana Trailer from Joe Beshenkovsky & Jason Bitner on Vimeo.

My wife’s a Hoosier (from the Evansville at the other end of the state) but this documentary is something I’d be interested in anyway. Thousands of images from a local studio photographer rebuild the history of a town much like a Ken Burns film (it seems).

The trailer reminded me of the movie A Christmas Story which somehow seems like it was filmed or supposed to take place somewhere in Indiana, the middle of middle America.

Browse around and order the DVD here: LaPorte, Indiana: A Documentary Film.

[via Coudal Partners]

I’ve always thought it would be cool to photograph the cover of Macworld magazine using an iPhone as my camera. When the new iPhone 4 was released with the 5MP camera, the editors at Macworld were excited to see if it could be done. What better way to showcase the phone’s new camera than to have an iPhone take the photo of the iPhone on the cover?

Look at the fantastic jig he’s got for the shoot. Great documentation.

[via Daring Fireball]

I’ve been using my DSLR and a tripod to do this for years but this is a nice step by step set of instructions on how to build a copy stand for a point and shoot camera.

Here’s another post at the same site: Copy Stand – Cheap and easy to build.

This is a large collection of portraits of window washers, plumbers, bakers, waiters and more, shot in the early 1950s in New York, London, and Paris.

Penn is both one of the greatest portrait photographers and one of the greatest photographic printers and these images are spectacular.

These images have never been shown together before and I’ve rarely seen a show of Penn images this large: 155 gelatin silver prints and 97 platinum/palladium prints, beautifully displayed and documented.

Anyone who knows Penn’s work should make the time to see this show and any portrait photographer really ought to see this show as part of an essential photographic education.

The book covering the entire show is available from Amazon: Irving Penn: Small Trades (Hardcover).

[via Daring Fireball]

My friend and Seattle photographer Steve Korn posted this image which he was contracted to shoot with the following caption:

I was contacted last night for an urgent photo session this morning. The shot is for an article about the up coming series presented by the Chamber Dance Company at the University of Washington. Because of class scheduling, I had 30 minutes to set-up and execute the shot. We managed to enter the room, set up my gear and get the whole thing done in 20. I then raced home, processed the shot and sent it off to the editor.

The dancers are: Matthew Henley and Catherine Cabeen.

The image is the header on this page: University (of Washington) Week and is used in this article.

Not only is Steve an excellent photographer but he shares most of his various studio processes in his flickr stream. Given that I’m a rank novice with studio lighting and flash I can imagine being his apprentice for a few shoots like this and learning a lot.