On this blog we do a weekly roundup of Photography News that is unusual, even peculiar or weird.  Today, however, this weekly post is about charming, fascinating, and awesome Photography News.

Charming Children

Grant Podelco brings the story of a photographer who focusses on children with their toys.

Gabriele Galimberti’s series of photos does not aspire to be high art; rather, it is a charming document of childhood, highlighting that which is most precious to children of different socioeconomic strata and different nations.

One can’t help but wonder at the collection of cheap plastic sunglasses owned by a happy little girl in Zambia (5), or marvel at the Kenyan boy’s sole pride and joy, an old stuffed monkey (2), and compare it with the play riches of the Chinese toddler (7).

Don’t miss contrasting the Albanian doll-like girl surrounded by a slew of dolls in a pink bedroom (12) with the Latvian boy with his countless corgi, matchbox and other toy cars (13) – classic girl and boy toys!

Do you wish that Galimberti had come by your house when you were a child?

Fascinating Fotos

Tim Barribeau brings our fascinating segment in PopPhoto.  He recently reported on ‘Living Photographs’.  Though admittedly quirky and unusual, this technique of building a picture or composition was also indubitably an advanced form.  It seems to have reached its high-water mark back in 1918.

Technically, the most fascinating point is that “the compositions had to be designed to correct for the perspective of the 80-foot tower the photographs were taken from, so fewer people had to be at the base of the image than at the top.”  This is clearly visible in several photographs.  The process of creating and setting up a single photo “took weeks.”

To actually see these photos, you’ll have to go elsewhere – Barribeau’s feature presents only one.

An extensive gallery of these images has been compiled by Vincze Miklós on io9.com.  It has several truly fascinating ‘living photographs’, including an eye-catching Liberty Bell, complete with crack, made up from 25,000(!) people. 

It reminds one of the old child’s toy, Picture Peg, but being played with persons in coloured clothes as the pegs.

Awesome Waves

If ever a title precisely, exactly, nailed a hard-to-describe set of images, “frozen sculptures” to define Pierre Carreau photographs of waves is it.  Lauren Davis introduces Carreau’s photos on io9.  

However, what you see on that page is merely an appetizer; Davis points her readers to Carreau’s website. 

The textures, glints, shapes, that you see in the first slideshow are simply astonishing.  Some of the waves look more like sculpted ice and Neptune-carved glaciers.

Proceed to the second slideshow to be astonished all over again, this time by the awe-inspiring magnificence and heft of the waves.  

Because the shutter-speed is so extremely high (is there a 1/50000 speed?!), the waves are ‘frozen’ and all feeling or effect of motion is lost.  Though there is field blur, in many photographs there’s nary a trace of motion blur.  This somehow deceives the eye and brain into thinking that one is looking at some fantastical real-life still object – a “frozen sculpture.”