Tag Archives: photography

Bugs are scary

These days digital cameras can take pictures with downright breathtaking quality of color and detail. A sweet deal… but then someone had to go and take pictures of bugs close up and holy crap these guys are freaky looking! It’s actually pretty remarkable how intricate the features of a tiny little insect are, when you get right down to it. Anyway if you have a moment or two, find your nearest enemy and put one of these up as their desktop background:



More from Dalantech.
If you also happen to own a 5000$ camera you might try taking some pictures of bugs yourself, this guy gives some tutorials. He managed to get some of his pictures into National Geographic!

Plastic bag leadership nowhere to be found


When I was in South Africa a few summers ago I was really happy to notice that the stores charged extra for plastic bags. The result: everyone had re-usable cloth/thick plastic bags to carry their shopping with them. Since then I’ve learned that they were just one of the first to start the ball rolling on something most of the world has now taken on, the banning of the disposable bag.
Environmentalist uber-blog “Inhabitat”:http://www.inhabitat.com has a “great article”:http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/12/17/africas-outlook-and-ban-on-plastic-bags/ about the move away from throw-away plastic in Africa and I’m just left wondering, outside of San Francisco where is this movement in the United States. Like a lot of environmental movements, we in the States are in a great position to take the helm on this and yet we sit with our heads so firmly stuck in the sand I’m not even sure we can feel the winds of change blowing around us.
The above picture is taken from an awesome contributor-based photography site called the “Plastic Bag Gallery”:http://www.photonet.org.uk/plasticbag/. Individual credit goes to Jessica Backhaus from the UK.

Street Fashion


Number “35”:http://www.askmen.com/specials/2007_top_49/scott-schuman-35.html in “AskMen.com”:http://www.askmen.com/ ‘s “Top 49 Men”:http://www.askmen.com/specials/2007_top_49/ list, Scott Schuman is a man of the people. Or at least as much as someone in the fashion industry can be. Scott has found a way to use his love of photography and his fashion experience to bring the world’s sense of street chic to the masses. His blog, “The Sartorialist”:http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/, is a well of inspiration as to what the cool people actually *are* wearing and is very much a joy to browse with pictures from Paris, China, Manhattan and more. I highly recommend a visit.

Thousands pose nude for photo

17 to 18 thousand people turned out in Mexico City the other day to take their kit off and pose for the world’s largest nude photo shoot. The photographer, Spencer Tunick, had previously taken similar pictures in Barcelona with 7,000 people posing. The throng posed in a number of configurations including this one with the entire naked crowd saluting the Mexican flag.

More at the “Daily Mail”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=453166&in_page_id=1811.

Retro Robots Recorded


It’s a miracle how social networking can lead to such wonderful treasures as those killer robot pictures above. I followed a link trail from one of my “Last.fm”:http://last.fm neighbours and somehow ended up at “LeSophie’s Flickr stream”:http://flickr.com/photos/25168809@N00/. The highlight of the stream was this “set”:http://flickr.com/photos/25168809@N00/sets/72157600033291647/ featuring retro robot pictures taken with a digital SLR through an old Kodak Dualflex camera viewfinder. That’s why each of these super-sweet robot pictures lies within that retro-looking frame and has a grain to it.
These pictures are so cool that LeSophie ended up turning them into “greeting cards”:http://lesophie.blogspot.com/2007/03/greetings.html for friends. I’ve never wanted to be someone’s friend so much.

Photoblog Perfection

Every once in a while you stumble across something so beautiful that your jaw drops and stays ajar. Now imagine having that experience repeatedly as you page photo by photo through a stunning exposition of verdant vistas, stark machinery, luminescent locales, and shadowy cityscapes. Exploring Julien Roumagnac’s variegated adventure through some of the most visually appealing scenes that life has to offer has truly been a joy.

I simply cannot get enough of the above picture, and it will live as my desktop background for a long, long time. Roumagnac utilizes Adobe Photoshop to create some of the effects seen in his photos, but I believe that this adds an interesting layer to the art. The photoblog is well-organized and easy to navigate; visit it at “http://www.j-roumagnac.net/”:http://www.j-roumagnac.net/

The real point of the internet

According to “Avenue Q”:http://www.avenueq.com/, the bawdy Broadway satire of Sesame Street, the internet is for “porn”:http://www.focusonthefamily.com/. But if you’ve been around long enough in this web-tastic world, you know that the internet is really just an elaborate vehicle for the dissemination of funny pictures. There are the thousands of “lolcatz”:http://www.acc.umu.se/~zqad/cats/ pictures, the “overly cute”:http://cuteoverload.com/ pictures, and now, for some reason published in Russian, the “transportation pictures”:http://onliner.ws/2007/04/09/idiotskaja_chelovecheska_logika.html. I’ve put my favorite below, but it’s well-worth looking at all of them, and then e-mailing them to loved ones. There’s nothing people like more than an inbox full of hilarious pictures, especially if it means they miss an important dental appointment because of it.

Interactive photography exhibit online

http://photography.si.edu/ _'invites you to explore the world of Smithsonian photography'_ by creating sequences of user-tagged images and sharing them with others. Of the hundreds of available photographs to manipulate, order, and play with, I couldn't find one that wasn't absolutely beautiful. This site is worth visiting just for the great pictures, but the very interactive way in which the photos are presented makes it even more fun, transforming a traditionally passively-enjoyed art form into something more communicative.