This is the personal blog of Bobby Caputo, Photographer from Queens, NY.
Traveling Photographer,
Music Lover,
Coffee Drinker,
Beer Nerd,
Data Junkie
I post what interests me. Photography, Music, Coffee, Craft Beer,Food, & Politics.
Plus a bunch of random nonsense I find entertaining on the web.
Follow my photography blog
I also run "Take a Photo, Pass it On"
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You can't create a great moment, they just happen. You need to capture it before it's gone.
All I know is that I’ve been to a lot of places and I will always prefer New York City.
Bagpipes in the sky, construction worker playing his bagpipes on construction site, 1957. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Photo from the Museum of the City of New York.
Midsummer in Latvia
Photograph by Espen Rasmussen, Panos
A young girl collects flowers on a hilltop near Pilskalns, Latvia, to decorate her hair for Midsummer celebrations. The festivities mark the longest day and shortest night of the year and usually take place between June 21 and 23. In Latvia, Midsummer is a national holiday.
(Source: National Geographic)
Focus-Stacked Macro Photos of Bugs by Photographer Nicolas Reusens
Photographer Nicolas Reusens has always been interested in insects, so when he purchased his first DSLR three years ago, he immediately dove into the art of macro photography. By using the technique known as focus stacking — combining several images taken at different depths of field — he’s generated some truly eye-popping photos of creepy crawlies from all over the world.
When we say all over the world, we’re not exaggerating. Reusens is half Swedish by birth and lives in Spain, but over the past three years, he has travelled to Costa Rica three times, Malaysia twice, South Africa twice, the Peruvian Amazon, Ecuador, Mexico and more to find and photograph his subjects.
His choice to user focus stacking arose from a need to increase his depth of field without stopping down his aperture. Stopping down the aperture requires longer exposure times, and in some cases leads to diffraction and reduced sharpness.
By combining anywhere from 2 to 200 exposures (no, we didn’t add an extra zero, Reusens actually uses that many exposures for some of his more extreme macro shots) using Zerene Stacker, he creates images that he tells us would be “physically impossible with normal imaging equipment”.
Street toy merchant,Union Square area, circa 1903 Photo from the Library of Congress.
Family in Karaj, Iran
Photo by Seyed Saeed Sadat Barikani (Karaj, Iran); Photographed May 2012 , Karaj, Iran
(Source: smithsonianmag.com)
Thailand’s Magical Tattoos
Cedric Arnold was on assignment in Thailand when he first saw a shipyard worker covered head-to-toe in tattoos. This was Arnold’s entry point into the yantra tattoo tradition, one that goes back hundreds of years and spans several countries in Southeast Asia.
Arnold’s project, “Sacred Ink,” consumed four and a half years of his life and took him all over Thailand to cover this tradition in its entirety, from the giant ceremonies for devotees to the rare tattoos that are only found in certain parts of the country.
Incorporating elements of Buddhism, Animism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism, the tradition is believed to go back as far as the ninth century, and there’s even historical evidence of soldiers wearing the tattoos for protection in battle during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Discovering the Fascinating Story of a Mother’s Life in 1960s Nigeria
One of the voids left behind in the digital age of photography is the excitement and mystery of picking up developed prints from a roll of film.
Imagine the thrillSenongo Akpemfelt when he and his family discovered a trove of slide film taken by their mother, Emily, during her work as a missionary and nurse in Nigeria during the 1960s and ’70s.
“I had no idea most of this stuff was there,” Akpem said about the images. “We knew this stuff was around, but I had no idea of the depth of it.”
A family friend in Nigeria collected the film and had it developed in the United States. Since then, Akpem has started to edit the film, scanning images and uploading them to a website he started calledLost Nigeria.
The images tell the story of his mother’s journey to Nigeria in the early 1960s, when she left her home in California to work as a missionary nurse at the Benue Leprosy Settlement. While there, she fell in love with a Nigerian reverend doctor and had three children—two daughters and a son, Senongo, the youngest born in 1979. The family moved back to the United States soon thereafter and lived between Michigan, California and Nigeria over the next decade.
Pencil Shaving Portraits by Kyle Bean
Adventures in Tokyo
In late 2011, photographer Ture Lillegraven traveled to Tokyo with captains of their industries – comedian Aziz Ansari, chef David Chang, musician/producer James Murphy and GQ writer Brett Martin. Avid Twitter-user Ansari posted that he and his pals should go to Tokyo with the caveat that someone else should pay for it. GQ answered, and obliged. The photographic result was a smattering of energetic, fun and colorful Lillegraven images. It’s safe to say they had a good time. Lillegraven compiled outtakes from the Tokyo shoot in a promo book he sent out earlier this year, simply called “TURE: Three Photographic Projects from Ture Lillegraven” that included this adventure, Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon photographed in rural Wisconsin and the band Milo Greene shot in Big Sur, California.
Aziz Ansari is currently on tour. Check him out tonight at the Palace Theatre in Albany, NY.
(Source: pdnphotooftheday.com)
Comic-Book Collage Portraits of Women By Montreal-based artist Sandra Chevrier
(Source: sandrachevrier.com)
From Plastic Surgery to Gender Reassignment: Searching for the Perfect Body
Michelle Sank is interested in young people and the issues they face.
One of her early projects, called “Bye Bye-Baby,” explores the way boys and girls interpret their understanding of masculinity and femininity. Following suit, her more recent series, “In My Skin,” deals with the pressure young people feel from media and pop culture to achieve a specific physical standard.
“Social consensus in Western society today is particularly focused on physical beauty and achieving and maintaining the ‘perfect’ face and body,” Sank writes on her website.
Sank said this has been a problem in previous generations, but that today’s young people are exposed to more images than ever before on the Internet. She said she hopes her series makes viewers “question the pressure that is created around this ideal for perfection at such a young age.”
That pressure manifests itself in different ways. Some of the young people Sank photographed for the series have had or are considering having cosmetic surgery. Others are recovering from eating disorders or suffering from body dysmorphic disorder.
A few are transgender and have had sex reassignment surgery. Sank said she hopes to show that transition as “a positive experience for young people who have struggled to conform to a gender that is alien to them all their lives.”
A handful of her subjects don’t fit into any of those categories, like Roland, a young man who dresses like Lady Gaga and occasionally assumes her identity when he leaves the house.
Photo Series Documents American Life by Capturing Families Eating Together
For the past decade, photographer Douglas Adesko has been creating a photo series that is half photography, half anthropological study. His series Family Meal captures families of all types, cultures and sizes sitting together and enjoying a meal.
According to photographer Timothy Archibald, who became the subject of one of the project’s photos, Adesko takes the photos using an 8×10 view camera. The resulting images are powerful in the subtlety with which they capture each family member’s relationship to one-another.
Discussing the photo series, Adesko explains:
There are only a handful of activities that are truly fundamental to our existence, and eating is one of them. Family Meal is a visual exploration of this primal act in the context of contemporary American family life.
Each photo shows a family engaging in their version of what is essentially a culturally universal ritual: sharing a meal together. Be a mother and her four children, two good friends, or a family that spans several generations, each photo reveals a family dynamic that may never be as obvious as it is at the dinner table.
Photo Series of a Young Girl Dressed Up as Great Women Throughout History
Photographer Jaime Moore‘s daughter Emma recently turned 5 years old. Naturally, being a photographer, Moore wanted to commemorate the event for her daughter by putting together a cute photo shoot for her, so she turned to the Internet for inspiration.
Much to her chagrin, however, something like 95 percent of the ideas she ran into were actually the same idea: how to dress up your 5-year-old as a Disney Princess. Moore wasn’t keen on that, so she went another way. Instead of dressing her daughter up as a made up ideal, an “unrealistic fantasy” as she put it, she chose to dress and pose her daughter as some of the greatest women throughout history.
The point was to convey to little Emma that she could be anything she wants to be. As Moore explains it on her blog:
My daughter wasn’t born into royalty, but she was born into a country where she can now vote, become a doctor, a pilot, an astronaut, or even President if she wants and that’s what REALLY matters.
Each photo is also captioned with an inspirational quote by the amazing woman it portrays. To see all of them in higher resolution and read more about Moore’s inspiration for the project, head over to her website by clicking here.
(Source: petapixel.com)
