Sergey Maximishin is a russian photographer who has been taking pictures for the past couple decades.  His work is beautiful in its own right, and the context is bizarre and wonderful.

There’s a surreal set of photographs at the library of congress taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii of various scenes in Russia, mostly around the turn of the century. This was long before color photographic paper was developed, and the images were taken using multiple exposures and color filters. The finished work was projected through color filters again to reconstruct the original image. The picture above has the following description:

The Solovetskii Monastery, founded in the early fifteenth century on an island in the White Sea in the far north of European Russia, was for centuries one of the most important monastic and cultural institutions in Russia. The thick walls shown in this photo protected the monastery from foreign invaders on several occasions. The monastery was partially destroyed in the early Soviet period and became the site of the first major concentration camp of the Gulag system. In the post-Soviet era it was returned to the Orthodox Church and is once again a functioning monastery.

Some more interesting shots:

Infoaesthetics posted about some researchers who downloaded 35 million geotagged images from flicker and did some data mining.  The images below show the paths travelled by photographers in New York, based on images from the same camera taken within a few minutes of each other.

The researcher’s site has links to the full paper as well as a few more images including this heatmap:

This seems like an interesting way to analyze people’s movement patterns – you could make interesting video showing the frequency and location of pictures taken at different times of the day , days of the week, or days of the year.

Imagine 20 years from now using the accumulated photos of billions of people to create time-lapse fully immersive 3d environments which would allow you to ‘slide’ forward and backward in time.  The technology to create 3d models from a set of images already exists:

A virtual reconstruction of the Statue of Liberty, created from tourists

The coming ubiquity of GPS-enabled gadgetry will undoubtedly create all sorts of interesting information visible (for better or for worse).

On the same theme, Time just published an incredible set of photos of Detriot.