My Father’s Garden from Mirko Faienza on Vimeo.

Much more here.

Photos of carnivorous plants here. This is a Pinguicula Titan.

Slideshow here.

Here’s a website devoted to, yup, iconic photos, such as this one of James Dean by Dennis Stock. This nonsense from Gopnik is amusing:

A cynical curmudgeon, protege of Henri Cartier Bresson and chronicler of post-war Hollywood, Dennis Stock–who died last week in Florida–was more famous for the iconic photograph he posed for Andreas Feininger. Stock’s own most famous photograph is probably that of James Dean hunched on the Times Square, ‘bearing the weight of a generation on his shoulders,’ according to Adam Gopnik writing for The New Yorker.

More likely, he was just keeping out the rain.

A nice collection from Boston.com

Returning from a three day shoot in Santa Barbara, I spotted this sailboat that was beached by the storms that have battered most of California. After three years of drought, no one is complaining.

A larger view here.

Lovely video shot with a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR.

Check out this 360 degree panorama of Prague.

Zoom in for amazing detail.

Full list and portfolio from Discover here.

A gallery of photos of things that look like places.

That’s a hair from the inner ear. Full gallery here.

Canon released its 5DMark II one year ago, the first digital SLR capable of also shooting 1080p HD video. What you see below is a montage of shots from an upcoming documentary shot in Cairo and Beirut.

As media budgets shrink, photographers are being forced to do more with less, sometimes blurring the lines between videographer and still shooter.

Egypt / Lebanon Montage from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo.

From the WSJ photos of the day, a village surrounded by flood waters and a lovely autumn scene in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Great photographs from China’s recent 60th anniversary celebration.

This was taken yesterday, one day after SoCal’s first rain storm of the 2009 season, at the base of the Conejo grade in Camarillo, facing south. If you flew straight across the mountains, you’d reach Malibu.

Plenty more excellent images at The WSJ photo blog.

The human face is unlike anything else a photographer shoots. Why and how people react to faces, and photos of faces (especially their own), fascinates me.

The images above are from an article in Scientific American on the neuroscience of visual illusions.

The left seems more feminine, the right more masculine. The only difference is the degree of contrast between the eyes/lips and the skin. No wonder women use eye shadow, mascara and lipstick.

But this raises the question: do we perceive the higher contrast face as more feminine because we’ve been exposed to women wearing makeup or is the tendency innate?

Check out all ten examples in the article.

Ralph Lauren’s folks go overboard with the Photoshop.

Story and picture here.

HT: Tigerhawk.

Full story and more photos here.

Photographer/artist Liu Bolin makes himself disappear in his photographs. Check them all out.

Having shot portraits for two full days last week, I can appreciate a good smile. Some can’t do it to save their life.
But Obama has one of the most consistent smiles I’ve seen. This video was made from a series of 130 shots taken last week during his UN visit, all available on the White House website. Video by Eric Spiegelman.

Barack Obama’s amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Oliver Yeh is the kind of guy who cooks up ideas so kooky, so out-of-this-world, that even his fellow MIT students tend to roll their eyes when they hear them.

But that never stops him.

His latest concept — to launch a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler — fell flat when he sent out an e-mail message to dozens of his classmates, asking for help.

Unfazed, Yeh managed to find one friend willing to chip in. And on September 2, the go-it-alone pair floated a balloon-camera high enough into the atmosphere to photograph the curvature of the Earth and the deep black of space, all on a lunch-money budget of $148.

“For me, it was just about not being afraid to do what I love to do,” said Yeh, a 20-year-old MIT senior studying computer science and electrical engineering. “Before, people were just kind of like, ‘That’s a crazy idea; there he goes all over again.’ (Yeh once convinced a friend to float the Charles River with him on a raft made of plastic bottles.)

“I didn’t have a lot of people who wanted to do it with me, so I’m really glad I stuck it out and succeeded in what I wanted to do.”

If you’re interested in how he got the shot, go here.

A Contact Air plane made an emergency landing at Germany’s Stuttgart airport Monday after having problems with its landing gear. One passenger was slightly injured and a stewardess was taken to a hospital for observation.

Check out the full set of images from around the world.

Click for portfolio of Sergey Maximishin’s images of Russia.

Annie Liebovitz, celebrity photographer, that is.

New York’s chattering classes are aghast at the renowned photographer’s downfall, making her the latest spectacular victim of the bad debt crisis and nationwide recession.

Victim?

Maybe of her own raging ego and irresponsibility. New York magazine has a long piece on her career and financial downfall.

Her reputation for dubious money management apparently traveled with her. “Getting her accounts at rental houses and film labs was a struggle,” says Andrew Eccles, now a highly regarded photographer who worked as Leibovitz’s assistant from 1983 to 1986. “I had to get people to believe me when I said it wasn’t the old days anymore. People would actually get paid for their equipment.” Because of her credit issues, Leibovitz was forced to deal almost exclusively in cash. In 1987, American Express offered her a plum ad campaign. Ironically, Leibovitz’s application for a card had been denied many times. After the ad agency found out she’d lost an envelope containing several thousand dollars in a phone booth during their shoot, strings were finally pulled to get her a card.

…

Eccles says Leibovitz could be downright tyrannical. “I once narrowly escaped being hit by a pair of shoes,” he says. “To this day, I’ve never been as nervous photographing a subject as I have assisting her. And that includes the several times I’ve been sent to the White House.” Leibovitz, Eccles says, once slammed her fists on a table, swearing she was going to kill him after a lighting test hadn’t gone well. “Go ahead, hit me,” Eccles said. He was by then so accustomed to the behavior, he says, that he didn’t flinch. “You’re not afraid of me,” Leibovitz lamented, skulking off. “It’s not fun anymore.” After her outbursts, Eccles says, Leibovitz would almost always call and apologize. Still, he left on good terms. “I adore Annie,” he says. “I’ll go to the mat for her as the greatest photographer there ever was in any genre.”

She takes great photos, but she’s a selfish bitch who stiffs people.

She spent more than she earned, something that eventually catches up with you no matter how much talent you have. That’s not victimhood; it’s self indulgence.

From the BBC Day in Pictures.