Pictures from inside America's overcrowded prison system

These revealing pictures illustrate America's prison system at breaking point - with overcrowding in the nation's jails at its highest for eight years.

Correctional institutions across the U.S are bursting at the seams with more than two million Americans behind bars. The worst hit state, California, houses 140,000 inmates when its 33 adult prisons are only designed to hold a maximum of 80,000.

Overall, the Bureau of Prisons Network is around 39 per cent over 'rated capacity' - their highest level since 2004 - with that figure expected to soar to 45 per cent above its limit by 2018.



Inmates are housed in a gymnasium at the California Institution for Men state prison in Chino, California. The Supreme Court has ordered California to release more than 30,000 inmates over the next two years





An inmate stands in his overcrowded cell at the Orange County jail in Santa Ana, California. The state's prisons are so overcrowded that they are said to provide inadequate mental and health care





Hundreds of prisoners at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California are also housed in makeshift living quarters in the prison's gymnasium



One inmate is forced to sleep next to phones where fellow prisoners make phone calls home at the Orange County jail



The Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, pictured, is another of those drastically overstretched by increased prisoner numbers




no copyright intended image credit Reuters

Using your iPhone Photos in The Darkroom Experimentation

Lincoln, UK-based photographer Adam Rhoades came up with an interesting way of printing digital photographs using analog darkroom processes. By mounting his iPhone (displaying a photo) onto a 35mm enlarger, he’s able to enlarge and focus his digital photograph on photo paper as if it were a negative being projected.

Using a grain focuser, he’s able to see the individual red, green, and blue pixels of his phone’s display.

There isn’t that much that needs to be done to the digital photos prior to darkroom printing. Rhoades simply flips the image and inverts it to create a “digital negative”, which ensures that it’s printed correctly.

Rhoades writes,


Dramatic vignetting can be seen in the prints, this is partially because of limitations of the rig and the slight darkness of the iPhone screen in the corners. Results vary depending on the size and contrast of the image.

I’ve had the best results with prints that are similar in size to the iPhone screen, much larger and the grid pattern of the pixels starts to show. However, reproducing at 1:1, as with the retina display, the pixels are indiscernible to the human eye.

These prints where made using Ilford Multigrade paper, exposed for between 4 – 10 seconds (depending on size) and wet processed using a mixture of Ilford/Kodak chemistry.

Here are a couple of sample photos he shot using this technique:


This process is like Polaroid Instant Lab on steroids.

How was Jay-Z Blueprint 3 Album Created

The photo above is the album cover for Jay-Z’s 2009 album Blueprint 3, featuring a photo of a pile of musical instruments and recording equipment with three red lines across the front. It might look Photoshopped — an easy way to create such an effect — but it was actually done with perspective trickery and good ol’ fashioned hard work.

After stacking the white-painted equipment into a corner, the team dimmed the lights and used a projector to display the three lines across the scene. They then took paint and covered all the areas that were highlighted by the projection. Once these areas were filled in, all they had to do was replace the projector with a camera to obtain the neat perspective illusion seen in the photo.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes time-lapse video showing how it all came together:

35mm Film Fridge Magnets DIY

If you still process your own film in a darkroom, you probably regularly toss empty film canisters into the trash can once you’ve popped off the cap and retrieved the film inside. The next time you’re in there, try saving those canisters: you can upcycle them into neat magnets for displaying photos on your fridge — perhaps even prints of latent photos that were once in those canisters!

All you need to do is glue some strong magnets to the insides of the empty canisters. Neodymium magnets work nicely for this, and can be purchased for about a dollar a pop.


Regardless of whether you make them or buy them, magnetic canisters are a fun idea for replacing your boring ol’ fridge magnets with ones that are more in tune with your inner photography geek.

Parents Taking 2 Many Photos of Their Own Children?

Digital and mobile phone photography have made it easy for parents to document every waking (and non-waking) moment of a child’s life, but what effect is this constant picture-taking having on kids? David Zweig has written up an article over at the New York Times arguing that our culture of photography is intruding on the preciousness of youth, and that parents should take fewer photographs of their children.

Zweig writes,
Our children’s lives are being documented to a degree never done before. My parents have one photo album for every year or two of our family’s history, with four pictures on each page, carefully placed under the cellophane. By contrast, I often have over 100 new pictures per month added to iPhoto on my computer. Like adults, kids often act differently when they know the camera is on [...] The very act of documentation, ironically, affects the moment it is trying to document both components of our photography obsession — the experience of parents and others regularly clicking away, and the regular viewing of the results of this relentless documentation — are making our children increasingly self-aware. And this is a shame because a lack of self-awareness is part of what makes youth so precious.

Not everyone agrees with Zweig’s points. While some parents commenting on the piece are thanking him for being “spot on”, others are calling his argument “utter nonsense.”

Shutter Speed or Frame Rate?

Here’s an old-ish video that’s been making the rounds again lately (viral videos are like viruses — they don’t go away very easily). Titled “Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency,” it shows what can happen when your camera is synchronized with the RPM of a helicopter’s rotor blades. The resulting footage makes the helicopter look as though it’s just floating in the air!

Photographer Chase Jarvis shared the video today and quizzed his readers on the cause of the phenomenon. More specifically, he asked whether the effect is due to shutter speed, as the title claims, or frame rate.

Business Gel Cards :)

Dissatisfied with the way your smartphone photographs are turning out when the built-in flash is fired? When desperate times call for desperate measures, you can make your flash match the ambient light around you with the help of a colored gel. The flash is often just a tiny LED, though, so how do you comfortably “mount” the gel to your smartphone?

Better yet, you could do the same thing with two business cards in order to have a portable accessory you can carry around in your wallet!