In the middle of TED, I'm almost inseparable from my big Nikons. In the spirit of continuing my little lo-fi TED photography project, however, I kept snapped off a few frames every time I pulled out my iPhone to stay in touch with the rest of the media team during the event. Here's a batch of nine from Long Beach. [gallery link="file"] Jam...

Stephen Wilkes explains a technique of photography he developed to combine multiple moments into a single, breathtaking image. "Photography can be described as the recording of a single moment frozen within a fraction of time," says Stephen Wilkes. "But what if you could capture more than one moment in a photograph? What if a photograph could a...

Usually when I'm photographing at TED, I'm using heavy digital SLRs with lots of lenses. This year, however, I'm also making a few fun photos with the most modest of cameras, my iPhone using the Instagram app. Here are a few of my favorites so far as the team gets the venue ready for TED. [gallery link="file" orderby="ID"] Duncan Davidson ...

Hubble’s photo editor, Zoltan Levay, explains how he captures the invisible colors of the cosmos. Zoltan Levay is eager to clear up a misconception about his job. Yes, he edits photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, but his work is not about subjective aesthetics. He’s an astronomer, and he’s not editing the images so much as enhancing them to...

I’ll never forget the first images of Sebastião Salgado’s that I ever saw. At the time, I was just getting into photography, and his images of the mines of Serra Pelada struck me as otherworldly, possessing a power that I had never seen in a photo before (or, if I’m honest, since). In the twenty years that I’ve been photographing, his work has...

Years ago, Steven Addis’s wife photographed him holding their 1-year-old daughter on the corner of 57 Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. On her second birthday, the family happened to be back in the city, so headed to the same corner for daddy-daughter photo, round two. The next year, Addis brought his daughter back to New York -- on pu...

TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein makes us look at the painful social issues that we may otherwise ignore through his bold photography. His project, "Shadow Lives, USA,” documents the journey of Mexicans and Central Americans migrating to the United States, recording their struggle as they reached American soil. The image above shows Gabriela Cruz -...

When Ron McCallum was a child, he loved story time. But he was sad not to be able to read a book on his own. It was the 1940s, and McCallum was blind since birth. As his mom told him, "You can't feel the pictures, and you can't feel the print on the page." "Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would ma...

Teen reporters Sadie Cruz and Nia Ashley conducted lots of interviews with speakers at the TEDYouth conference on November 17. Their Q&As will run on the TED Blog over the next few weeks. Here, a interview conducted by Sadie.  Photographer Rick Smolan brought the flavor of homes across the United States to life, helped 25,000 photogra...

Take the TED Conference and add a generous helping of play, a sprinkling of colorful creativity, a lot of red beanbags, an endless supply of coffee, and a plethora of riveting conversations around fire pits with a tribe of smart, quirky people from all over the world and -- voila! -- you have the recipe for TEDActive. TEDActive is a live simu...

With his tethered quadcopter Fotokite, Russian-born inventor Sergei Lupashin plans to put aerial photography and the power of unmanned aerial vehicles in the hands of of journalists, architects and artists. Interestingly, this device was actually inspired by a 2011 protest in Russia. We talked to Lupashin to find out more about this inciting...

Alexa Meade doesn’t paint on canvas. No, as she explains in her talk from TEDGlobal 2013, she paints on something very different -- human skin. “If I want to paint your portrait, I’m painting it on you -- physically on you. That also means you’re probably going to end up with an ear full of paint because I need to paint your ear on your ear,”...

Louie Schwartzberg is fascinated with exposing the world’s wonders through photography.  Three years ago, his talk, “Nature. Beauty. Gratitude,” demonstrated his uncanny ability to capture the captivating beauty of our natural world -- the tiniest shake of a flower petal, the stirring complexity of a bee’s wing. At TED2014, he shows a portion...

In his TED Talk, Steven Addis shared a tradition that he and his daughter have kept for 15 years, since she was just 1 year old. On a father-daughter trip to New York City, the pair asks a stranger to snap a photo of them on the exact same street corner. Addis calls these photos his 15 most treasured images. Yesterday, Addis and his daugh...

Award-winning Canadian photographer Ed Ou fell into photojournalism as a teenager, while studying political science in Jerusalem. Since then, he has blazed a trail of cinematic images covering the Egyptian revolution, the Somali Civil War, victims of radiation poisoning in the Soviet Union, and beyond, capturing moments of beauty and humanit...

Since TED Prize winner JR launched his INSIDE OUT project in 2011, thousands of people have contributed their faces to the world’s largest public photo gallery. And now the project has made its way to the northernmost part of the Earth. A group of 16 environmental activists used the project to protest industrial destruction of the Arctic. They a...

Social violence in Guatemala, Mexican and Central American migrant communities in the United States, the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, children with cerebral malaria in Uganda -- for the past decade, photographer Jon Lowenstein has been documenting the often violent and traumatic daily lives of individuals and communities living at the ...

JR’s art isn’t meant to be hung in an ornate frame in a museum or gallery. For more than a decade, the street artist has printed poster-sized photographs and pasted them on city walls to dramatic effect, always with a social point in mind. JR has pasted images of the teens living in housing projects on the streets of Paris, and tiled images ...

Photographer Angélica Dass captures some of humanity’s truest colors through her portrait project Humanae, a catalogue of human skin color displayed as a simple, captivating collage of Pantone portraits that reflects the deepest shades of brown and black, to the lighter tones of white, pink and everything in between. For Dass, Humanae is more th...

MIT professor Ramesh Raskar starts his talk by showing the classic Doc Edgerton photograph of an apple being shot by a bullet. It demonstrated an exposure of a millionth of a second. Wonderful, right? he asks us, to wide agreement. Only now, 50 years later, technology advances mean we can photograph a million times faster than this. "Now we ...

A 12-year-old boy in a Stormtrooper helmet – and a tutu. A hulking man wearing a pre-Raphaelite collar of Barbie dolls. A bride standing wistfully in a garden, her face obscured by a wrestling mask. Russian photo-based artist Uldus Bakhtiozina’s whimsical and surreal images -- which feature models as well as herself -- raise an eyebrow at id...

With TED2012 still two days away, the media production team has already been here at Long Beach for three days setting up our operation, and a set of IT volunteers started work two days before that. Above is a photo of one small part of the TED Media Cave, the nexus of all video, audio, and photography produced at TED. In the picture abov...

For the TED conference this year, we wanted to entertain attendees between talks -- and support and encourage up-and-coming filmmakers. Meet TEDFilms, a new program for promoting the creation of original short films. Executive-produced by Sinéad McDevitt and led up by TED's director of Production and Video Operations, Mina Sabet, the short fi...

Wedding photographer Charleton Churchill is willing to hike the extra mile, plunge into the depths of caves, and scale the highest peaks (think: Everest) to highlight the splendors of nature -- and ensure his images of couples are just as memorable as the ceremonies themselves. A wedding performs many functions. It grants a new legal status to ...

  If you could pursue your most extraordinary passions, what would you do? Be an asteroid hunter out to save planet Earth? A theater director who brings indigenous voices to the stage? Or a news publisher who helps young people protect freedom of speech in Kyrgyzstan? Yes, real people get to do this incredible work. In fact, they’re all T...

Taking great photos isn’t just about having a nice camera. I’m a firm believer that good photography comes from smart photographers who think creatively and know how to make the most of what they’ve got—whether they’re working with fancy DSLR or an iPhone. On TED’s design team, where I manage TED’s Instagram account, we’re always on the l...

Bosnian photojournalist Ziyah Gafić photographs the aftermath of conflict. (Watch his TED Talk, "Everyday objects, tragic histories.") In his most recent book, Quest for Identity, he catalogs the belongings of Bosnia’s genocide victims, everyday objects like keys, books, combs and glasses that were exhumed from mass graves. The objects are still...

We are saddened by the news that ocean photographer, filmmaker and storyteller Mike deGruy died yesterday in a helicopter crash in Australia. Mike was truly one of the great teachers and advocates for the oceans, as you can see in his TED Talk, filmed aboard Mission Blue in 2010: In this talk, as in his photography and his many films,...

To a techno beat, this video introduction to “Imagined Beauty” celebrates hip-hop dance. Body-popping in a black, white and grey world, the dancers’ movements create colorful shadows that stand out beautifully against the dreary background. This concept perfectly highlights the session, which includes talks from a cloudspotter, a poetry crit...

After studying architecture in Minnesota, Joshua Wanyama established his own Kenya-based digital marketing agency, Pamoja Media. Happily back home in Nairobi, Joshua uses his company to tackle some of Africa’s most daunting social challenges -- including climate change, hunger, and AIDS -- while also maintaining a photography website dedica...