Spring Selections. The Nothing Major staff shares its picks for Spring 2013.
Shoot from the hip and enjoy the moment. The Black Slim Devil camera is as unassuming as your camera phone, makes no noise, and eliminates the urge to spend 10 minutes obsessing over which filter to apply to your photo for Instagram. With the Black Silm Devil, you get what you get, but you might just love that.
Years ago, the cult-classic Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim camera was beloved for its uniquely vivid shots, light weight and kind pricepoint. The good people at SuperHeadz have reissued the rugged 35mm film camera under a new name. It's even made at the same factory as the original.
Also, at $30 and under, it won't break the bank. So get snapping.
Find out more at SuperHeadz.com
If we told you there was a mammoth underground bunker in Pennsylvania's Iron Mountain built to withstand a nuclear attack, you might believe us. If we told you the former limestone mine also happen to hold 1.7 million square feet of archives, including master tapes for Sinatra, Elvis, and Glen Miller as well as original prints of E.T., that might not even bother you. If we told that heavily armed guards kept watch over it all, including the massive, photographic, physical Corbis archive, you should actually believe that, too. We were skeptical at first, but it's true. And it seems Sonic Editions and Impossible Cool author Sean Sullivan teamed up to visit the mythic archive and pull some of the greatest and not-often-seen images for another installment in The Impossible Cool Collection. So today, you don't need security clearance to see The Greatest driving a bus, you can buy the photo and hang it on your wall.
About 16 years ago photographer John Schabel had the habit of taking his telephoto lens to the airport and shooting grainy black and white portraits of unsuspecting travelers as they sat on the runway. As Visual News points out, the photos were taken in the time of pre-9/11 airport regulations, and the most trouble he ever he ever found himself in was occasionally being asked to leave the airport. The passengers' faces are all mostly obscured to the point of anonymity, but their emotional states are very much intact.
More portraits are available in his book, Passengers.
Whether you're a shutterbug still shooting 35mm because you adore the format and your trusty old SLR, or have archived rolls of 35mm film you'd like to get into the digital and online-shareable realm, the Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner may come in handy. It's a quick and easy way to get those images from film onto your social sharing platform. We think it also might come in handy for spies, especially time-travelling spies. Lomo is promising a LomoScanner App to help us edit those images. The Film Scanner is compatible with both iPhones and Android smartphones. And naturally, it comes from Lomo, the company that makes those adorable film cameras. Bonus: those film perforations are scanned, too.
The Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner is $59 online and also available in Lomography stores worldwide.
Jordi Huisman's photos have a way of revealing process and consequence. In his series about the economic downturn in the Netherlands, he skips the predictable portraits of unemployed Dutch workers, and instead shoots their creepily unoccupied offices. His series of stressed-out soccer dads depicts more suburban drama than action photos of an actual game could. He has a fascination with urban planning and development, and his photos have political concerns, but human drama is never sacrificed.
Often converted industrial spaces are softened up with chic details for the sake of contrast. Longman & Eagle's latest addition, the 120 sq foot Off Site Bar revels in its cinderblock and industrial garage door construction. Land and Sea Dept., which headed up the renovation of the two bay garage into a bar, commercial kitchen, event space and tasting room writes, "We referenced its original use, and incorporated a variety of ‘garage’ elements into the overall aesthetic, the most prominent of which is a working seventies drag racing motorcycle. Other elements include a considered beverage program, tightly curated music and vintage audio equipment." That's to say it still looks like a garage space, one outfitted with McIntosh amplifiers, monster speakers and a gnarly yellow motorcycle, as well as art objects from the multi-talented Ryan Duggan.
OSB at Longman & Eagle is now open Thu-Sat.
Photos courtesy of Clayton Hauck
Luke Brown, Jordan Dolheguy, Totem Visual and photographer Dan Crawford collaborated on a flag-draped look for an EP cover and additional images for Melbourne industrial producer P C P. It's inspired work. And no wonder as P C P just happens to be Brown, himself.
Listen to PCP on SoundCloud and see more of Luke Brown's work at lukebrown.com.au.
Dedicated cyclists need no introduction to Rapha, perhaps the penultimate contemporary cycling brand, and its cult-like following. With warm weather on the way, we're eyeing some upgrades to our own cycling kit and Rapha's seasonal lookbook for training, racing, women’s wear, and city riding—shot by Ben Ingham in Australia and Corsica—is just the thing to get us inspired.
Find out more at Rapha, which has yet to announce its special collections for the season.
Before you even ask, the answer is "Yes, the loads these bicyclists of Shanghai carry are real." Photographer Alain Delorme shot them during an artist's residency in Shanghai, one in which he spent countless days biking and photographing the ordinary working folks of his temporary city of residence. We love the contrast of the modern and mechanical, the gritty and the sunny.
See more of the photographer's work at alaindelorme.com.
Once the cameras on our smartphones started getting legitimate, a need for a good photo-editing app to drive the lens became apparent. We've been getting along with options like Snapseed and VSCO, but today Apple finally released the iPhone and Android version of their iPad app—Adobe Photoshop Touch. It does what those other great apps do (applying effects, cropping, sharing), but also provides some of those useful features familiar to users of the Photoshop desktop application (advanced selection tools, layers, filters). If you're a user of Photoshop and Adobe Creative Cloud, you can edit the same project from all of your devices—start a project at work and finish it on the train.
Find Adobe Photoshop Touch at Google Play or the App Store for $4.99.