Photograph Archives | Moss and Fog

Colors

Greenland’s Disappearing Beauty

September 5, 2019 Colors

Greenland is melting. The enormous island has been almost entirely covered in ice for millennia, but has started an alarmingly fast melt in the last decade. Human-caused climate change is rapidly changing and shrinking the ice caps, as documented by teams of scientists, as well as ample satellite imagery.

Photographer Albert Dros has a stunning collection of photography of Greenland, showcasing the melting and rapidly disappearing glaciers. With two distinctive red-sailed sailboats, Dros and his team explored the beauty of this fragile place, reflecting on its recent popularity with cruise ship tourists, all of which will further speed up the melting. Both beautiful and tragic, we’re lucky to have professionals like Albert Dros to share these moments with us. Via Bored Panda:

Design

Touching Strangers

October 29, 2013 Design

A striking and imaginative series of photos called Touching Strangers, by Richard Renaldi. The people being photographed are total strangers to each others, but posed as if they are long-lost friends, or lovers, or family. It’s a series of images incredibly simple to devise, yet genius in execution.

Art

Famous Photographers Holding Their Famous Photos

March 2, 2013 Art

A great series called Behind Photographs. Lots more here.

Art

San Francisco Earthquake Composites

September 6, 2012 Art

Some somber yet fascinating digital composites from 100 years ago and today.

Via Laughing Squid:

Since 2010, San Francisco photographer Shawn Clover has been working on a striking series of then and now composite photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (part 1 & part 2). To create the series, Clover collected archival photos of the earthquake’s aftermath. He then replicated the photos himself, down to the location, camera position and focal length (to the best of his estimation). The resulting composite photos hauntingly combine stark images of the earthquake’s devastation with modern scenes of life in San Francisco.

photos by Shawn Clover

Art

Desolate and Beautiful Arctic

September 4, 2012 Art

The Arctic is vast, wild, and cold. Olaf Otto Becker spent three long years traveling solo through it to photograph his stunning collection called Broken Line. And his trip around Greenland was all done from a rubber dinghy using a large format camera.

Via FastCo Design:

His photographs from those years, published in a monograph called Broken Line, number less than a hundred, each the product of careful deliberate planning. Becker would often spend weeks preparing to take a shot, waiting for the perfect conditions. The long-exposure images are haunting, full of luminescent waters and glowing glacial ice, and every so often, a human, clambering across dirty snow melts or clinging to the coastline in ramshackle fishing huts. It’s difficult to reconcile the knowledge that such pathetic-looking creatures are slowly but surely destroying the sublime landscapes in Becker’s photographs, but they are.

As argued by Utata’s Greg Fallis, his photographs contain a strong political subtext, though it may not be immediately obvious. Each image is accompanied by the precise GPS coordinates of where it was shot, implying that Becker (or some other person) will eventually return to that exact location, perhaps to photograph it once more. What they find, warns climate data, will be a vastly changed place.

Future

Long Exposures from Space

June 11, 2012 Future

Colossal has a collection of long exposure photography taken from the International Space Station. Pretty amazing stuff. What a view…

Star Trails: Incredible Long Exposure Photographs Shot from Space

Star Trails: Incredible Long Exposure Photographs Shot from Space space photography

Over the past two months NASA has been releasing a number of wonderful long exposure photographs taken by astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station. While there are many photos like these taken from the perspective of the Earth’s surface, Pettit’s images are unique in that they incorporate the passing blur of entire illuminated cities, aurora, and the sporadic flashes of lightening from thunderstorms. Check out many more photos from the series here. (via petapixel)

Art

Picasso Painting With Light

May 4, 2012 Art

Pablo Picasso remains probably my favorite artist of all time. I was thrilled to come upon this gallery of him painting with light.

Via LIFE:

LIFE magazine’s Gjon Mili, a technical prodigy and lighting innovator, visited Pablo Picasso in the South of France in 1949. The meeting of these two marvelous minds and sensibilities was bound to result in something extraordinary. Mili showed the artist some of his photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates, jumping in the dark — and Picasso’s lively mind began to race.

“Picasso gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment,” LIFE wrote in its January 30, 1950, issue in which the images shown here first appeared. He was so fascinated by the results that he posed for five sessions.”

This series of photographs, known ever since as Picasso’s “light drawings,” were made with a small electric light in a darkened room; in effect, the images vanished as soon as they were created — and yet they still live, six decades later, in Mili’s playful, hypnotic images. Many of them were also put on display in early 1950 in a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Finally, while the “Picasso draws a centaur in the air” photo that leads off this gallery is rightly celebrated, many of the images in this gallery are far less well-known — but no less thrilling.

Art

Amazing Undersea Life

January 19, 2012 Art

Via io9:

Russian photographer Alexander Semenov creates photographs of marine life that just burst with color and energy. You may have understood, on some intellectual level, that the ocean depths are an ecosystem, teeming with life and all connected. But looking at these stunning photos will make you seeit in a new way.

Semenov is a diver and project manager at the White Sea Biological Station in Russia, and he studied zoology (particularly squid brains) as a college student. Semenov writes:

When I first began to experiment with sea life photography I tried shooting small invertebrates for fun with my own old camera and without any professional lights or lenses. I collected the invertebrates under water and then I’ve shot them in the lab. After two or three months of failure after failure I ended up with a few good pictures, which I’ve showed to the crew. It has inspired us to buy a semi-professional camera complete with underwater housing and strobes. Thus I’ve spent the following field season trying to shoot the same creatures, but this time in their environment. It was much more difficult, and I spent another two months without any significant results. But when you’re working at something every day, you inevitably get a lot of experience. Eventually I began to get interesting photos – one or two from each dive. Now after four years of practice I get a few good shots almost every time I dive but I still have a lot of things that need to be mastered in underwater photography.

Nature

Beautiful Storm Photography by Mitch Dobrowner

December 9, 2011 Nature

Storms. Giant thunderclouds, ominous skies and that spooky, electrically-charged air before all hell breaks loose. That’s the kind of scene that photographer Mitch Dobrowner can capture in an elegance we’ve never seen before. His compositions are gorgeously calming , despite their kinetic foretelling.

Dobrowner’s portfolio is packed, and each and every one is a stunner. We would love to see his work printed wall-size. And beyond just capturing storms, he has an amazing ability to photograph craggly landscapes and barren nature in an almost dreamlike way. The blacks and whites ooze off the screen.

Design

Zombie Wedding

September 27, 2011 Design

Wedding photos, jeeze they sure get boring. No, I’m not hatin on true love, but people, those overly heart-throbby airbrushed galleries make us want to puke. Thanks to this couple for keeping some humor, creativity and originality alive, even on the day of nuptials.

Via YouMightLikeThis: