On Instagram and Flickr

I signed up with Instagram the other day, like a lot of other people have been doing lately. The new photo-sharing site has about 500,000 members now, after going live only about six weeks ago. Amazing.  Lightning in a bottle.

And as Robert Scoble found out during an interview with Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, most of those new users are from places other than Silicon Valley and New York, which is good. It may seem like Instagram is just a new photo fad for the cool kids, but it's obviously become a lot more than that, and fast.

(A personal ancedote: The other night, I took a look at the photostream of someone who had started following me on Instagram, and I was blown away. Beautiful stuff, and the photos were obviously not generated solely from the Instagram filters, which are admittedly  cool, but limiting. These photos were layered and double-exposed and imaginatively original and just plain fun to see. And the other fun thing was, I didn't recognize a single place I was seeing. Turns out the user was from southern Australia, near the water. A powerful new loose connection.)

So now Instagram has been a featured app of the week on iTunes, and the four very bright young people at the helm have the happy task of figuring out what to do next. No, Systrom told Scoble, they don't plan to go to the web immediately, but when they do they want to keep things simple and let users have a fresh new experience. No, they're not looking for ways to make money yet, they're just trying to keep up with demand on their infrastructure. Good for them, I say. (But Tech Crunch reported that they did sign their first major partnership today, and it was with National Geographic. Not a bad place to start.)


 Instagram is taking off because it is a simple, well-executed platform for launching your photos across most of the major social media outlets -- Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and .... oh the irony, Flickr!

Flickr! The original photo-sharing site of the digital age, or at least the one that made everyone stop and think about the possibilities. And It makes you wonder why Flickr didn't see, or chose to ignore, what was happening around them. Why aren't you able to send photos from Flickr to Facebook or Twitter?  Rather than ride the tsunami it created, Flickr turned inward. Their universe is limited to the people who are photographers and enthusiasts. Flickr invented photo sharing, ferchrissakes, and they should own the whole sector. But they don't.

Instagram, on the other hand, is positioning itself as the photo sharing site for all of social media. That's a very powerful place to be.

Stunning and amazing stop-motion graffiti

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Street artist BLU released a breathtaking new stop-motion graffiti video called “Big Bang Big Boom.” It’s a fascinating artistic piece on the beginning, and potential end to life on Earth. Blu also created MUTO, another wall animation in the same way, using public walls and street objects as an enormous canvas.

from  PetaPixel

A completely fabulous look at Los Angeles ... with no cars

Running on Empty from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

via Jim Heid

What if you could take the same picture 30 years later?

British amateur photographer and paramedic Chris Porsz likes to take pictures around his home town of Peterborough. Over the years, he's put together quite a large body of work. But in recent years he's become fascinated with the idea of re-creating some of the pictures he took in the early '80s. But he wouldn't be satisfied with then-and-now photographs of buildings or intersections -- he wanted to track down the people in his pictures and get them to re-create the moment he captured 30 years ago.

Porsz got a local newspaper to help; they'd run the original photographs with an appeal for information. And some of the  subjects have come forward. The amazing thing is, these weren't posed photographs. Porsz didn't know any of his subjects; they were captured as he practiced his street photography.

"I love capturing spontaneous moments and taking pictures of people," he told the Mail Online. "If something caught my eye, I would snap it. But if I'd asked the subjects to pose, it would have ruined it."

Porsz is continuing his project and hopes to eventually produce a book.

More images and a story are over here.

Re-Creating "The Girl With the Pearl Earing" using just a Bic pen

via New York Magazine

Yes, this blog is about photography, but sometimes we come across image-making that we just can't pass up.