“Wooden Box with Horseshoe Magnet”, Caleb Charland.
From Petapixel photography blog:
Caleb Charland is a Maine-based photographer who combines a love of scientific experiments and photographs into wonderful and amazing photographs.
Fun stuff. More here.
China: The Dong family of Beijing
Food expenditure for one week: 1,233.76 Yuan or $155.06
Favorite foods: fried shredded pork with sweet and sour sauce
Seeing the weekly diet of families all around the world gives an insight into how much we and our diet are affected by economic, social, and political factors. Reasonpad blog:
Come see What The World Eats. A few years ago photographer Peter Menzel and his wife Faith D’Aluisio started to photograph what family’s around the globe eat and wrote down what their weekly expenditure is. In 2005 they published an award winning book called Hungry Planet: What The World Eats.
This project turned out to be so educational that he’s currently still giving lectures at universities about this very subject. A current exhibition is held until May 9, 2010 is hosted by the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota.
As you look at the photographs and see what they spend per week, you can draw a lot of different conclusions about their dietm their surroundings, their personal/economic circumstance and how globalization has influenced what people eat.
Reasonpad have put all the images from this Time article on one page, and provided the info for how much was spent, where the families are from, etc.
Photo: Luca Galuzzi (click for original size)
Abandoned former quarters of the Dalai Lama at the Potala. The empty vestment placed on the throne symbolises his absence
The BBC website has a beautiful audiovisual slideshow with fantastically detailed photos of plankton, and a commentary to go with it.
Photo by David Fisher
Photo by Sebastian Lewis
(photos via light boner)
Just a small section of another great Shorpy image that caught my attention. See the full image.
Martine Franck. “Torry Island” 1995.
Martine Franck (born 1938) is a Belgian photographer, and a member of the Magnum Photos agency. She was the second wife of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson after his divorce with Ratna Mohini, and is president and co-founder of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, which administrates his estate. (from wiki)
(via 3qd)
In this mindboggling video, photostock magnate Yuri Arcurs gives a tour of his vast studio in Denmark. There he knocks out stock images on an industrial scale, selling pictures for as little as 20c each — devastating the competition.
The video offers a fascinating insight into his whiter than white, faker than fake world! (via growabrain)
Photo by Steve Greaves (lovely name, no?)
As the cap matures it deliquesces into an inky black fluid. This specimen was found by the side of a path in deciduous woodland.
It deliquesces!
1. to become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air, as certain salts.
2. to melt away.
3. Botany. to form many small divisions or branches.
There is a collection of similarly unique mushrooms (such as the “scarlet waxy cap” — poetry! — and the aptly named “turkey tail mushroom”) at Matador.
Nikon’s website has a neat little gadget that allows you to compare the effect of different lenses in their range. This is about as close as I’ll get to these lenses for a while, I think. (Sorry about that pun, by the way.) Nikkor Lens Simulator
Above: Heidi’s Giant Black Bean Salad
Heidi Swanson’s recipe blog 101 Cookbooks is glorious: All adventurous, healthy and yet covetable food, described intelligently and photographed beautifully.
The premise this site was built on is best summed up in two sentences: When you own over 100 cookbooks, it is time to stop buying, and start cooking. This site chronicles a cookbook collection, one recipe at a time.
Meticulously organized, lovingly maintained: what a resource this site is!
A series of carefully constructed scenes, nicely explained by the photographer Holly Andres.
Above: Giddy London. Circa 1949.
John Lunney’s happened upon a nice collection of old Kodachrome images on wikipedia uploaded by the photographer’s son (user sba2). John says:
This Wikipedia user has scanned and uploaded some of his father’s old photographs, from America and Europe, seemingly from the 1960s. What strikes me is the difference that still existed between places, a far cry from the homogenous urban and suburban landscapes of today.
See the collection here.
As usual, the most recent postings on Shorpy represent a spate of historical images similarly fascinating. Here’s a row of tenement housing in New York from 1900:
Fantastic! Though you have to see it full-size.
The BBC website has a round-up of the Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 award (catchy!) winners.
Urmas Tartes won the Animals in their Environment category for this image of a springtail, otherwise known as a “snow flea” navigating its way through delicate snowflakes.
When the temperature drops below freezing, the insects climb down through the frosty crevasses to the warmer soil below.
See the rest at the Beeb.
The above picture demonstrates in colour the amount of detail that is now attainable with the upgraded Hubble telescope (right) by comparison with what it was capable of before (left). Both images depict the Butterfly Nebula. More comparison pictures at universetoday.
Human eyes are not capable of appreciating the many shades of light of which images taken of Space are composed. That’s why photos taken by telescopes, such as the recently upgraded Hubble space telescope, are literally photoshopped before they reach the press and the public eye — to convert the invisible shades of light to colours within the humanly-perceptible spectrum.
Slate has reprised an article from 2005 in which this process is described:
First, they put the image into a file format appropriate for media. That means that the data from the FITS files, which show a range of about 65,000 shades of grey, must be squeezed into a standard JPEG or TIFF file, with only 256 shades. This process is counterintuitively called “stretching” the data and must be done carefully to preserve important features and enhance details in the finished product.
Then each grey-scale image is assigned a color. In reality, each shot already represents a color—the wavelength of light captured by the filter when that picture was taken. But in some cases the images represent colors that we wouldn’t be able to see. (The Spitzer, for example, registers the infrared spectrum.) To create a composite image that has the full range of colors seen by the human eye, an astronomer picks one image and makes it red, picks another and makes it blue, and completes the set by coloring a third image green. When he overlays the three images, one on top of the other, they produce a full-color picture. (Televisions and computer monitors create color in the same way.)
Shorpy’s seemingly inexhaustible source of high quality, high definition, vintage photographs from all eras of American history never ceases to fascinate and impress me.
Here’s a terrific shot from 1943 of a teenage girl relaxing in her bedroom after a day of work in a war factory:
And below that is one from 1863!
July 1863. “Gettysburg, Pa. Three captured Confederate soldiers, likely from Louisiana, pose for Mathew Brady on Seminary Ridge following the Battle of Gettysburg.” Wet plate glass negative, half of stereograph pair.
Terrific.
