The famous portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, probably best known the many for the recent ‘scandal’ when having a photographic session at Buckingham Palace with the Queen has been interviewed by Vanity Fair. The article can bee read here.

In the iinterview she talks several of her best images including that of the Stones whilst at Rolling Stone magazine, Demi Moore for Vanity Fair and the recent Queen portrait.

Thanks to BOfH for the link

With the current run of Hurricanes hitting Haiti, Cuba and the United States a friend pointed me to some amazing images from low orbit, such as:

Hurricanes, as seen from orbit – The Big Picture – Boston.com

The Big Picture at the Boston.com website has a collection of amazing photos.

I came across some amazing photography, I saw a version of the image below in a magazine news letter.  The picture below is a genuine shot of the Dubai skyline taken from the Burj Tower which is being constructed. Once the Burj is complete it will be the world’s tallest building at around 800 metres, that is twice the height of the Empire State Building.  It is worth keeping in mind that the oil princes in Dubai are competing with each other for the tallest and most elegant tower blocks.

Look carefully at the clouds to the left of the buildings, the cloud is blowing in from the right and you can see how the buildings are breaking up the cloud and creating ‘shadows’.

This photo was taken by a guy called Jack Frost who is a seriously talented photographer and has lots more amazing photography here and blog here.

  I came across a fabulous project from reading Robert Scoble’s blog – The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Project.  The goal is create a large scale gigapixel image of the valley walls to help research such as rock fall in the park. The work has been done with xRez. The XRez site for the Yosemite project is here.  I have to admit that I’ve always liked Yosemite since I first saw photos taken by Ansell Adams, and having been there and tried to capture the glory of the place myself find photography in the area fascinating.  To see how beautiful the valley is and the stunning detail of the gigapixel images checkout the Glacier Point photo xRex have posted here.

I recommend installing the plugin and looking at some of the high definition pictures the image detail is simply stunning. Here is a clip from a zoomed in view to illustrate …

And my efforts …

Photojojo have come up with an interesting and fun challenge.  Rather than sending a letter and getting the people to send on the letter to everyone they know (a chain letter), this works by taking a picture with a picture in it, or retrospectively adding the picture digitally.  Pass this on to friends who repeat the process.  So eventually you have a photographic Russian Doll effect.  It would be interesting to see how many pictures can be nested.

The full article and example can be found at http://photojojo.com/content/photo-projects/the-photo-chain/.

  The New York Times have created a lovely article on one of my favourite photographers – Ansel Adams. The NY Times have a some on Ansel’s famous Yosemite images, with a map showing the locations and some audio explaining the significance of the picture.  To see the site go here.  Therei is also an article on the New York Times site here.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been to Yosemite, and you can see some of my photographic efforts here.

Other interesting links:

• http://www.anseladams.com/
• National Parks site

  If you pick up photo magazines regularly you’ll know that they  will devote pages to tips and techniques, interesting places to go take photos and so on.  But I’ve never read anything addressing the issue of the law beyond the usual model waiver (giving you copyright to your photos that they appear in).  So it has been good to read an article at photojojo  (here) which describes in simple language the basic legal position of taking photos in public places.  Although photojojo is American based the principles of their ’10 commandments’ should be valid in most western nations, but they have made the attempt to also provide links to sites that outline the legal situation other English speaking countries (to have a list of sites covering non English speaking countries would make the ultimate reference for this sort of thing – particularly for when you’re on holiday in a country that maybe a little more sensitive).

The National Geographic magazine has a reputation for having some stunning images.  Well the good news is that they’re making some of their images available as Desktop Wallpapers and Screensavers.

Many photography enthusiasts (myself included) first found our way to behind the camera as a simple act of trying to get out of being photographed and as a result discovered the pleasure of capturing images.  Despite this, sooner or later it is good to have a picture of our selves, be it for a website etc. Given our sensitivity to having our picture taken, who better to get the picture than ourselves?  Getting a self portrait does present a few problems.  Fortunately there are a few websites  that provide advice on photography, of those photodoto.com provides a nice page of suggestions on how to capture a good sharp self portrait.