The Boston Globe’s incredible gallery of Martian landscapes, as photographed by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
And also: CGR posted a wonderful picture of the Martian night sky, in which both the Earth and Jupiter (and its moons!) can be clearly seen.
David Hlynsky’s Communist-Era Store Windows depicts advertising (or the lack thereof) in East European countries in the late 1980s. This kind of cleanliness is now unseen, Mac stores being the exception (I knew there was something totalitarian about Apple!). But cynicism aside, what strikes me is not so much the difference between the then and the now, but how similar in fact the windowdressings depicted in the series are to my own memories of Portugal (a non-communist country) in the 80s. Perhaps it’s wrong to see these images set in a capitalism vs communism context. I see them in a rampant-capitalism vs whatever-else context. Advertising just wasn’t such a big part of the overall economy back then.
In Helga Steppan’s All My Things, the artist sorts her belongings by color. A fun project idea for the next time I decide to indulge in an obsessive-compulsive weekend activity. (via VVORK)
Pretty useful. Add a moon and tide calculator and a weather forecast, and it’d be the perfect photographer/filmmaker’s almanac. If on my (not fancy) cellphone.
Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre’s Theater Ruins Portfolio has an eerie quality about it, despite the HDR. (via gmtPlus9)
I happen to have a few boxes of staples at my office. Here’s an idea for when I get bored. ‘Staple Architecture’ by Peter Root. (via Some Random Dude)
That’s it. I switched to Flickr. I loved the slick Fotologue, but I got tired of its unbearable slowness. So there you have it, I resisted it for years but now I’m a Flickr user like everyone else. At least the map function is pretty cool.
I really like the photo Boutique Airports I by Jasmina Cibic. I imagine an alternate history in which aviation started in the Baroque Age… (via VVORK)
A sign of the times: It had been over a year since the last time I used film. So yesterday I loaded some Fuji 400 I had in the fridge into my old EM (it has a shutter that sounds and feels like a heavy slap in the face, but alas, my favourite camera - the Electro - took a nasty blow to the lens and is stuck on infinity). I went to the street and got to do what I seem to do best (because I’m a coward who doesn’t photograph people): silly planimetric street typologies.
This public domain photo of the whaling ship Chance aground at Bluff, New Zealand, in 1902 is the most haunting image I’ve seen all day.
Perhaps not on the same plateau as Miroslav Tichy, the Czech that builds cameras from stuff found in the trash, but still amazing: Kwanghun Hyun is a Korean designer who builds very functional-looking cameras from scratch. Be sure to check his portfolio.
The Null Device links to the ‘dark flash’, which is an infrared flash that could turn bright flashes in the night obsolete (saving all those people in say, football stadiums, the embarrassement of being seen using a light source with a range of 8 meters to snap a picture of the far side goal). But I started thinking, isn’t this something you can already do. There are plenty of tutorials on how to remove your camera sensor’s infrared filter, and I’m pretty sure you can fit a IR-transmitting filter to a flash to achieve the same effect. Lots of interesting exposure calculations (as you need to compensate exposure in higher wavelenghts) will follow, I’m sure.
