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National Geographic magazine photographer Joel Sartore is taking a working tour of the American zoos in order to take portraits of the world’s animals. It’s all part of the the Biodiversity Project. Learn more about the Biodiversity Project and see some of those awesome portraits up close at the Neatorama Spotlight Blog. Link
You’ve probably heard that the Kodak company has filed for bankruptcy. Kodak introduced its first camera 120 years ago, and revolutionized the way we see the world. The Kodak No.1 expanded photography from professionals to anyone who wanted to take a picture.
The Kodak produced circular snapshots, two and a half inches in diameter. The Kodak was sold already loaded with enough paper-based roll film to take one hundred photographs. After the film had been exposed, the entire camera was returned to the factory for the film to be developed and printed. The camera, reloaded with fresh film, was then returned to its owner, together with a set of prints. To sum up the Kodak system, Eastman devised the brilliantly simple sales slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’
The idea was resurrected many years later with the “development” of the disposable film camera. Link -via the Presurfer
This adorable old picture would have made a great postcard. It is part of a collection of photographs of Dutch life published in the 1906 book De Aarde en haar volken (The Earth and Its People). See more at IllustratedPast.com. Link -via Everlasting Blort
The police mug shot was invented by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in the early 1880s. Those mug shots were accompanied by body measurements for criminal identification in what was called the Bertillon System. By 1896, the New York Police Department was using the Bertillon System, and the image here is of the first NYPD mug shot. See a gallery of early mug shots at Flavorwire. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
(Image credit: NY State Division of Criminal Justice Services)
Dr. Phil Plait selects his favorite space pictures every year, but this year he had a lot to sift through. The top 16 pictures taken from the viewpoint of space include volcanoes, hurricanes, earth formations, the moon, eclipses, and spacecraft, including the final space shuttle missions. Astronaut Ron Garan took this photograph of the moon from the International Space Station. See the rest at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
Buzzfeed compiled a collection of images from the year’s news stories that will remind you how many really big events happened in 2011, from natural disasters to citizen protests to legislation to war. Pictured is a girl in isolation in order to assess her exposure to radiation after Japan’s nuclear facilities were compromised by the March earthquake. Link
Expect it every December: lists and more lists of the best and worst everything of the year. This photo gallery helps us to sum up some of the important events of 2011 with photographs that made us pay attention. Reuters covered those events and has a gallery of 100 of their best photos for your perusal. Shown is a protester recorded in January in Cairo. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)
Artist Paul Chiappe has a lot of talent when it comes to making pencil drawings, enough talent that he can actually make his drawings look like blurry vintage photographs. Enjoy more of his impressive works over at Flavorwire.
Who knew lizards came in so many different colors? While most animals are happy to take on the colors of their environment for camouflage purposes, different species of lizards dress in colors designed to stand out from the crowd during mating season. Luckily, photographers see them as well. See 20 different colorful lizards posing for their pictures at Environmental Graffiti. Link
(Image credit: Ester Inbar)
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How to Be a Retronaut has a collection of portraits of married couples a hundred years back or more. Some look strangely alike, and they all look fairly uncomfortable posing for the photographer. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Environmental Graffiti has a gallery of images from an underground crypt in Belgium. It was used for burials for decades, but maintenance was discontinued because of the expense. After years of decay, access to the crypt was closed for safety reasons. But you can see it still. Photographer and urban explorer Sven Fennema takes you on an underground tour with fascinating pictures from his book Anderswelten (Other Worlds).
“The air was very cold and wet, and you could see your every breath – also an experience I will never forget. It was as if death was close beside you somehow. The crypt was full of those strange plastic flowers – still with their bright colors – but it was also full of spiders’ webs and other kinds of decay.”
(Image credit: Sven Fennema)
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It’s not easy getting trees to build a tunnel -they have to grow that way! But after many years, you end up with something spectacular. Check out a list of lovely tree tunnels from around the world, blossoming, growing, dormant, and even photographed in glorious autumn color. This photo shows a tunnel in Portugal. Link -Thanks, David!
(Image credit: Flickr user Raul Lieberwirth)
Environmental Graffiti found ten oases in the middle of cities that provide a good dose of nature for urban dwellers. Some are big enough to have hiking trails, lakes, zoos, forests, gardens, and even observatories. These 26 pictures are a refreshing treat for the eyes! Pictured is the gorgeous Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island in Victoria, B.C. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user WisDoc)
The words “swamp” and “beautiful” do not often appear in the same sentence. However, wetlands are a valuable part of the environment, and if you look past the mosquitoes, they can be quite fetching. See a collection of gorgeous photographs of swamps around the world at Environmental Graffiti. Pictured is the Pantanal, which spans the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user miquitos)
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This picture of “various isolates of ascomycete fungi grown on agar nutrient plates” is from a Tumblr blog called Electric Orchids, which features great photographs of anything to do with biology, from exotic animals to fossils to microscope images. Link -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Dr. David Midgley)
You know these two fine-looking young men, even if you’ve never seen a photograph of either one before. They are both featured at My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, a photo blog dedicated to the hotties of history, dating back to the invention of the camera. Really, who knew that Hermann Rorschach (of the ink blots) resembled Brad Pitt? The site is accepting submissions of more attractive public domain photographs. In case you are still wondering about the guys here, on the left is Almanzo Wilder, husband of author Laura Ingalls Wilder. On the right is Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. Link -via Metafilter
There are pictures we are all familiar with, but who are the people in the pictures? Some of the most famous images are those of people who had nothing to do with the photograph’s fame, and some weren’t even aware of them. Like Geraldine Doyle, who was well aware of the Rosie the Riveter poster seen everywhere during World War II, but had no clue that her face was the inspiration for it -until 1984!
Doyle, incredibly, had no idea of her connection to Rosie the Riveter. In fact, she didn’t even know about the original inspirational photo, which given her posture, lends an unsettling peeping-Tom vibe to the whole thing. At the time, she’d just graduated high school and, like many other women, had taken a job in a factory in order to support the war effort. American Broach & Machine Co. had her on a metal press in no time at all, probably after a vigorous and thorough safety-training program that only that decade could deliver.
Fearing an injury that could impact her ability to play the cello, Doyle quit after only two weeks on the job. She endured the potential hand crushing long enough for a photographer to snap the picture without her noticing. Someone who did notice, however, was J. Howard Miller, an artist commissioned by the government to draw up some motivating pieces of art.
Read the rest of her story, plus those of other famous faces, at Cracked. Link
The Mothball Fleet is the group of decommissioned Navy ships stored at Suisun Bay, just north of San Francisco. These ships served in conflicts going back to World War II, and now they are gradually being scrapped. Photographer Scott Haefner and friends managed to spend several days exploring and photographing these ships, despite security guards. Read about how they pulled off the caper, and see the collection of photos at Scott’s website. Link -via the Presurfer
Some cuttlefish can mimic the shape of objects around them for camouflage purposes. But recent research shows they can also mimic the shapes of two-dimensional photographs of objects! National Geographic has a photo gallery of cuttlefish doing their best to mimic their backgrounds, whether natural, plastic, 2D, or 3D. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image credit: Justine Allen, Marine Biological Laboratory)
John F. Ptak came across an 1908 newspaper photo essay entitled “The Pleasant Lot of the Inebriate in Captivity: The comfortable quarters of the inmates of a state reformatory for inebriates.”
The life in the state reformatory as an alcoholic British woman was hardly “pleasant” as the title states, though we don’t know what the author was comparing this to. I suspect it was a general prison that was the benchmark for pleasantness, though perhaps it could have been an insane asylum , assuming of course that they didn’t seem nearly as pleasant as the “pleasant” scenes in these pictures. The reformatory for alcoholics in Great Britain was established more along the lines of an almshouse or mental institution and seemed not terribly coercive–though given the border decorations for the photos on these pages–keys–there is no doubt that these people were incarcerated “for their own and the community’s good.”
Although the photographs are obviously posed, they are worth a look for their historic value. Link -via Everlasting Blort
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The Great Pyramid of Giza contains narrow passageways and chambers that have never been explored. A small robot was sent into an 8-inch wide chute in 1993 and 2002, but both expeditions ran into something impassable. Now a new robot called Djedi with the ability to take pictures around corners is making headway and sending back pictures of previously unseen hieroglyphs and architecture.
The winning robot, designed by Leeds University, has indeed gone further than anyone has ever been before in the pyramid.
The project began with the exploration of the southern shaft, which ends at the so called “Gantenbrink’s door.”
The robot was able to climb inside the walls of the shaft while carrying a “micro snake” camera that can see around corners.
Unlike previous expeditions, in which camera images were only taken looking straight ahead, the bendy camera was small enough to fit through a small hole in a stone “door,” giving researchers a clear view into the chamber beyond. It was at that time that the camera sent back images of 4,500-year-old markings.
“There are many unanswered questions that these images raise,” Richardson told Discovery News. “Why is there writing in this space? What does the writing say? There appears to be a masonry cutting mark next to the figures: why was it not cut along this line?” Roberston wondered.
Read more about the Djedi project at Discovery News. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Djedi Team)
Photographer Todd McLellen’s latest project involves disassembling machines and appliances, sorting and shooting the parts, and then throwing them all in the air as if the gadget is exploding! At his website (click “new work”) you can see more photographs, and a fast-moving video of the process. Link -via Buzzfeed
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Photographer Horace Warner took hundreds of pictures of street urchins in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields in 1912. At the time, it was one of London’s harshest slum areas, but has been gentrified in the past few decades. These photographs are a peek into the world that inspired Charles Dickens.
Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They make look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.
Link -via Nag on the Lake
Photographer John C.H. Grabill took pictures of the American West between 1887 and 1892, and sent 188 of those photographs to the Library of Congress for copyright protection. Those photographs are now in the public domain, and give us a good look at the people and places of the frontier. The Denver Post published a collection of the pictures, including this portrait of two Oglala chiefs, American Horse and Red Cloud, taken in 1891. The border is printed with “The Grabill Portrait and View Co., Deadwood, S.D. Our company is incorporated under State Laws. Views all copyrighted. Will give a handsome reward for detection of anyone copying our pictures.”
Link | The Grabill Collection -via the Presurfer
Now that Lent is here, we can look back at the pageantry of the Carnival season with a collection of 52 photographs at The Atlantic. See celebrations in Australia, Brazil, Hungary, Italy, Haiti, Colombia, Greece, France, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, and the U.S. Some pictures may be NSFW. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: REUTERS/Jose Miguel Gomez)
The first ever Miami Comic-Con was last weekend, and Jen from CakeWrecks was there with her camera. See a lot more pictures of Ghostbusters, Bat people, zombies, and assorted super heroes at Epbot. Link
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A couple of years ago we posted about an infinite photo called As Seen on Earth. National Geographic has a new infinite photo project called Tropical Island. At the link, you can select a piece of the image and click to zoom in on more images, and then click again to zoom in to yet more! You’ll also find information about the creatures pictured. The images are of the life forms of the beautiful South Pacific island of Mo‘orea. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: the Biocode Project and National Geographic contributing photographer David Liittschwager)
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Do you remember what stood at the site in New York City before the World Trade Center was built? It was the Hudson Terminal Building, a massive office building covering two city blocks. This century-old picture of the Hudson Terminal Building is part of a wonderful collection of pictures called Vintage New York at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
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The Liljenquist family collected thousands of photographs of Civil War soldiers over the years. Brandon Liljenquist saw a collection of war photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan and was inspired to make the Civil War photos public. This year, the family donated 400 of those pictures to the Library of Congress for a collection called The Last Full Measure.
Laying out the photographs at home for the last time, and thinking about the collection in a whole new light, I couldn’t help but notice how similar the faces of these boys were to those we’d seen in The Washington Post. Here were the young men who did most of the fighting and dying. In their eyes and the eyes of their loved ones, I could see the full range of human emotion. It was all here: the bravado, the fear, the readiness, the weariness, the pride and the anguish. The loneliness in their long, distant stares overwhelmed me.
The original photographs will be on display next year in Washington, but are available now online. Link to story. Link to photographs. -via Metafilter
Sacha Goldberger took a fanciful series of photographs of his grandmother Frederika in a super hero costume. The 91-year-old was delighted with the project. You see her here stopping traffic; other photos show Super Mamika campaigning for office, flying into buildings, and even one where she’s in bed with Superman! Mrs. Goldberger’s real life story is a fascinating read as well. After the photo shoot, “Mamika” attracted thousands of fans on MySpace and elsewhere. Link -Thanks, Alice!
