Blog About Photography

This is for real. WhatThe­Font by devel­oper MyFonts does for design what Shazam did for music. If you see some type on a sign or some­thing that you like but can’t iden­tify just snap a pic­ture of it and send it in. If you’re using WiFi, WhatThe­Font will return your answer in about 20 sec­onds. It’s not per­fect and some­times has some hic­cups but still pretty fuck­ing cool. If you don’t hap­pen to have an iPhone, you can still snap a pic­ture with what­ever cell phone you’re pack­ing send it in thru the web­site.

I’m in cen­tral Penn­syl­va­nia today, hang­ing out with my father and step­mother. I’m not here for very long and there’s not that much to do any­way, but we did man­age to squeeze a walk in before lunch. My father is a very spe­cial man, some­times in the way that word is tra­di­tion­ally used and in other times in the more mod­ern short-​​bus kind of inter­pre­ta­tion. And so I want to share some of this with you.

In the above pho­tographs, Dad is explain­ing how high-​​capacity trans­mis­sion wires work and how they’ll have to change as we update the power grid and switch over to renew­able energy. (They’re going to have to be twice and tall with a right-​​of-​​way twice as wide.)

And this is Dad pok­ing shit with a stick to inves­ti­gate what kind of ani­mal it came out of. (Coyote.)

And this is Dad explain­ing (and enact­ing) his scheme for poach­ing fire­wood from pub­lic land.

What I’m try­ing to tell you is that I’m very for­tu­nate, genet­i­cally speaking.

© Lynsey Addario

It might be that some of you look at edi­to­r­ial news pho­tog­ra­phy and get all snooty but, lis­ten, that’s kind of dumb. This pic­ture is totally blow­ing my mind, to bor­row a phrase from a friend. And the arti­cle it’s illus­trat­ing is inter­est­ing also. But not as inter­est­ing as the picture.

Lynsey has an incred­i­bly impres­sive bio: voted young pho­tog­ra­pher of the year 500 times by 500 dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions, been in the PDN 30 and has pho­tographed for the New York Times, Asso­ci­ated Press, and is cur­rently the recip­i­ent of a Getty edi­to­r­ial grant to con­tinue her work in the Mid­dle East. She takes this work so seri­ously, in fact, that in 2003 she moved to Istan­bul to be closer to the action. And I’m going to travel there to work for her, I swear to god.