Warhol's 'Flowers' sells for $1.3 million

One of Andy Warhol's 'Flowers' paintings

According to an article we found on upi.com  one of Andy Warhol's Flowers paintings sold for upwards of 1.3 million dollars on July the 20th.

Warhol was a well known promoter of the commercial  photobooth for the creation of artwork, and began a long running series of pop art photography in the 50's. In his career he successfully had his photo booth snapshots printed in publications like Harper's Bazaar and Time Magazine.

The sale of this artwork is substantial for a few  reasons: namely because it sets, not only the record for the price of a Warhol Flowers painting (there are 4 others known to exist), but also the record price for a fine art auction conducted entirely on line.

How To Easily Create a Photo Booth Save The Date

Originally published at http://weddingdejavu.com
By Hup | Published: April 25, 2010

There are all kinds of options when looking at ways to create a fun and unique save the dates, but one of the coolest ways that I’ve been taking a look at lately is what I like to call a photo booth save the date. I know it’s probably not too hard to figure out what this actually means, but just to be sure that we’re on the same page I’ll explain this a little bit more. This particular type of save the date is a way to take advantage of the cool, vintage feel of an old-school black-and-white photo booth and use it to give your save the dates a sense of your personality and creativity as a couple. I’m not really sure why photo booths are so cool, but I’ve spent my fair share of time in them during my 30 years on this Earth and let me tell you, I’ve had a lot of fun every single time.

The goal of this post is to help you recreate some of the awesomeness that is found when sharing a set of pics from a photo booth and add that into your save the date so that they not only get people’s attention, but so they also clearly communicate just how much fun you and your soon-to-be husband or wife are having together. Sound good? If it does, keep on reading so that we can get to work!

I’ll split up how to best do this based upon whether or not you want to/have access to a photo booth:

Want to use a real photo booth? Sweet!
So you want to give your save the dates an authentic feel, eh? This will probably take a little bit more work and planning on your end, but the final product will most likely turn out looking a little more authentic. As I was researching how to best add a real photo strip into a save the date design, I ran into this post about how it’s done. They had a great idea of how you could this by taking a piece of plain white stock paper into the photo booth and holding it in front of you while getting your picture taken. I wouldn’t suggest going with paper much bigger than an 8.5″x11″ so that you can make sure that it’s small enough to fit in the pictures, but big enough to where you’ll be able to add some text to it later when editing in Photoshop.

After you get the pictures taken and you’re happy with the way that one of the full strips looks, the next step would be to scan the full photo strip into your favorite photo editing application so that you can add it to a save the date file that you’re going to create. Save the dates can be of all shapes and sizes , but Stephanie and I ended up going with a 4″x6″ design size and we were more than happy with it. Anyways, after you get your photo strip scanned in, you then need to add a new layer of text on top of the piece of stock paper that you held in each of the photos. This is what will allow you to personalize your message and have some fun with the photos (see the example to your right).

After you get the text added you’re then ready to add all of the other details to the front and back of your save the date. What you add to the rest of it is completely up to the design and feel that you’re going with for the rest of your wedding. You can either make the photo strip your entire save the date (which will probably end up costing you more on printing thanks to the custom size) or you can simply make it a focal point of it. Just be sure that you don’t get so caught up in the design that you forget about the clearly communicating the information about when your wedding is going to be. I mean, that is why you’re sending these out in the first place, right?


Read the rest of the article @ weddingdejavu.com

Making good photography more portable on your travels

Originally published at http://www.wired.co.uk
by David Rowan

Last October, New York Times photographer Damon Winter was travelling around the Taliban-held village of Nahr-i-Sufi, in northern Afghanistan, with Delta Company, First Battalion of the US Army's 87th Infantry Regiment. It was a six-day mission for the soldiers, and Winter wanted to document every moment of their routine, from patrolling and firefighting to guard duty and down time. There's always a lot of down time. "We had seen missions like this before," says Winter, who is 36. "Everything started to become quite monotonous." So alongside shooting stills and video with his regular Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera, he also snapped more candid photos with his iPhone, "kind of as a joke".

To take the shots Winter used a paid-for app called Hipstamatic, which squeezes pictures through a set of filters to imitate the lo-fi images produced by vintage, analogue cameras such as Holgas. As Winter's story shaped up, its focus became the more humdrum side of war -- and running the Hipstamatic photos seemed the best option. "I wanted something casual-looking, a little more granular," he says. "Something that captured the mood of the story." In November the pictures were printed in the New York Times; three months later, the images bagged third prize in the Pictures of the Year International photojournalism competition.

That's saying something. Just five years ago, mobile phone photos were a low-grade, blurry affair with washy colours and a fisheye perspective. But with better image processing, greater storage space, and high-quality light sensors, handsets are capable of creating much richer images. That makes good photography more portable -- if you're trekking through Yosemite, say, you don't have to schlep a heavy SLR up and down hills in the baking sun. And apps such as Hipstamatic (or equivalents such as CameraBag) replace bulky special flashes, filters or different films. What's more, you're likely to take pictures in places where you'd not otherwise whip out your camera -- perhaps in a restaurant.

Still, sometimes you might want higher quality images -- the iPhone's not going to cut it on your honeymoon. But traditional digital photography presents two problems: pictures sit locked in your camera for months before you get round to downloading them, and until you do you can't share your photos online. Enter Eye-Fi. This card slots into you camera like any other, but it doesn't just store pictures -- it can also connect your camera wirelessly to the internet. Once configured to access your home wifi network, it will automatically send pictures to your computer or straight to a social media site like Facebook or Flickr. The upshot? You're only ever organising small batches of pictures, as opposed to wading through a baggy 700-image set of various holiday snaps. And the card can also be set to erase downloaded images as its memory fills up. "You effectively never run out of space," says Simon Faulkner, Eye-Fi's 49-year-old business director. "So you never need to get to the point where you're going on a trip, sitting on the plane, having to delete photos that you don't want to delete."

But that's not all. A new feature called Direct Mode, on Eye-Fi's premium cards, lets your camera connect to your smartphone wirelessly, even when out of range of a wireless network. Once on your phone, you can upload images to the web -- even on a beach. "It allows people to [instantly] share their photos in full resolution," says Faulkner. "We're taking the compromises away."

David Rowan is editor of Wired magazine