Rest in Peace: Wartime Relics Reclaimed by the Land and Sea

Saw this article on Flipboard. Photographs are beautiful.

Dietmar Eckell's series "R.I.P" is a utopian vision. His images of abandoned and neglected military installations and equipment around the globe suggest a peaceful world where these instruments of aggression, no longer needed, have been left to rust or sink into the sea. Since there are no people in the pictures, however, it's easy to imagine the series as a post-apocalytpic future where pieces of military hardware remain as monuments to mankind's folly.

{His website is cool.}

An abandoned Sherman tank off the coast of Saipan, a Soviet radio telescope in Latvia, runways on Tinian Island, Mariana Islands, launching point for the atomic bomb attacks against Japan, and this: Tower forts built during World War II to defend against air attacks off the coast of England.

Lift that house

On Thursday 3 April 2014, as I turned onto Westminster Road, in Cedarhurst, I saw these trucks:

I thought back to when our house in Chichester had to be jacked up, to have the foundation fixed. Never saw that, just the before and after.

And yesterday, Thursday 10 April 2014, I saw this, the end result of the lifting; but, clearly, more remains to be done.

Photographer Explores the Very Extensive Network of Tunnels Under Montreal

Andrew Emond, a Canadian-based photographer and explorer, has been on a mission since 2009: he’s creating an absolutely incredible resource by documenting the 3,000 mile-long network of tunnels hidden underneath the streets of Montreal.
Titled Montreal Underground, Emond’s recently redesigned website takes you on an extremely unique journey of Montreal’s underground infrastructure, some of which dates back as far as 1832. The photographs he captures during his adventures shine a light — both literally and figuratively — on an entirely new, almost ethereal world, as you can see in a collection of his photos below:

St-Pierre collector sewer.

Old Cote St Paul Collector Sewer.

Image of a Planet and Its Star Over 63 Light Years Away

Although it might not seem like much, the photo above might just be the most extraordinary image you have ever seen. Not because of crazy high megapixel count or amazing composition or even subject matter — we’ve seen images of planets orbiting stars before — but because it is the first ever image of a planet and its star over 63 light years away.

The image was taken by the Gemini Planet Imager, an incredibly powerful instrument that sits right here on Earth — in Chile to be exact. Using the magic of Adaptive Optics, they were able to capture this groundbreaking image of the 10-million-year-old planet Beta Pictoris b orbiting the massive star Beta Pictoris. 

Super Creative iPhone Photos

Robert Capa in colour sheds new light on a black-and-white master

Guardian (UK) article, found on Flipboard.

New immigrants disembarking from the Theodor Herzl, near Haifa, Israel], 1949 -50 Photograph: Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/ Magnum Photos

What a fish

 Article found on Flipboard, from Petapixel.

A few years ago, Bangkok-based photographer Visarute Angkatavanich started selling his work through microstock sites, and so he went in search of some interesting subjects to populate his gallery and generate some sales. Interestingly, he found what he was looking for in his own house: his pet fish. Ever since he was a little boy, Angkatavanich has owned different kinds of fish — everything from goldfish, to guppies, to Siamese fighting fish — and he quickly realized that they made the perfect subjects. “I found that nowadays there are so many different kinds of fish that come in unique shapes, colors and pattern,” he told us over email. “I am fascinated by them, and so I started taking their photo.”

late 2013

Some recent pictures.

Make your own parking spot with this tiny thing. Along 149th Street in Flushing/Whitestone, Saturday 2 November.

André Kertész

Patron came in looking for books on André Kertész. Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved. Today he is considered one of the seminal figures of photojournalism.[1][2]

The Fork, or La Fourchette, was taken in 1928 and is one of Kertész's most famous works from this period.[9] 

Distortion#49, one of the images in the Distortion series Kertész took during 1933

 


Patron recommended Of New York ... *

Southern Queens egret

4 in the afternoon. Tuesday 21 May 2013, Brookville Park, Queens.

Delaware

Walking back to Rocinante after taking Magnus to the veterinarian, I saw this street sign:

It always reminds me of the Fats Waller song, (You're a) square from Delaware.

Charleston, S.C. pelican

Looking from Mount Pleasant, across Cooper River from southern tip of Charleston, SC, toward Fort Sumter. 4/8/2013, 2.58pm

Blue water

First one to use the bathroom in the morning.

Spring colors

4/21/13, 5.54pm - magnificent Magnolia tree just off Northern Boulevard, on 149th Place

 5/4/2013, 6.09pm - courtyard littered with fallen petals from cherry trees

Mariposa

9/1/2012, 3.08pm  —Mountain Top Arboretum (mtarboretum.org‎)

County Road 23C

Tannersville, NY 12485

Roman Vishniac (1897-1990): "best known for his scenes of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the years before the Second World War."

Rodrigo Moya

http://goo.gl/fFDTX

item in February ? 2013 issue of the New Yorker

Child care

Cared for Charlie Schuyler for a couple of hours Saturday last.

Hyper photos

A story in Slate, This Picture Is Worth 1,000 Pictures.
Hyperphotos are to panoramic photos what Google Earth is to a globe. You can keep clicking and zooming and clicking and zooming, seemingly endlessly, until you find yourself on a dramatic balcony, looking up a statue’s nose.  (Try it on the image above. The more one zooms in; the more real the image begins to seem.)

Lytro

Another article from Makeuseof: Lytro Light Field Camera: Snap Happy Or Photo Gimmick?

Described by an employee as “the first major change in photography since photography was invented”, the Lytro light-field camera is certainly a revolutionary device. The camera shakes things up by replacing much of the heavy and sensitive technology in your typical camera with software. Whether or not it’s worth your hard earned money at this stage is still unclear, however. Even the earliest of early adopters might want to think twice about the Lytro, despite the amazing technology and interactive results that are possible.

A typical camera measures the intensity and colour of light of a scene, be it captured on a roll of film or the sharpest digital sensor. Once you’ve taken your snap, Photoshop aside, there’s very little you can do to change the point of focus on a static image. That’s where Lytro differs. By capturing the direction light is moving and then reconstructing this along with color and intensity, Lytro allows you to change your point of focus once the image has been captured. This is called light field technology, and it’s bound to revolutionise the way we take photos.

Writing own obit

From a column about digital cameras, in Makeuseof: In 1975 the first digital camera came to be after an engineer for Eastman Kodak was tasked with creating what was then dubbed an “electronic camera”. The ensuing breakthrough laid the building blocks for digital photography as we know it today.

A Kodak engineeris responsible for the death of Kodak as a company.

Criminalizing photography

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/criminalizing-photography/

A tiny little bat

NIR ELIAS / REUTERS

Israeli researcher Noam Tzvikel holds a bat in a laboratory at Tel Aviv University during an examination of the changes in the its nose structure, which reflect the focus, direction and width of its sonar beam, July 23, 2012. Israeli researchers aim to reveal the secrets of bats to shed more light on the behaviour and cognition of the species. They hope their findings could pave the way for new and improved radar systems and robotic technologies. Picture taken July 23, 2012.

From Reading at lunchtime

Lightining

Picture from wUnderground. And, this other one from back on 19 July:

Tour de France, 2012

Gathered here are images from the first half of the 2012 Tour de France. Part 2 will be posted after the finish. [40 photos].

Some of these in the first batch are magnificent. Such as this:

Wow. How I wish, one day, I could take such a photo.

And, part 2 [42 photos] includes:

Breathtaking shot.

 Nice shot.

Subway an open book

Alongside subway commuters with noses buried in bodice-rippers, biographies and Bibles, Ourit Ben-Haim clutches her camera and waits for just the right shot. The free-lance photographer creates surreptitious portraits of the New York riders as they turn their book pages, publishing the results on her website. 

 In some cases, the subjects are in a reading reverie and never know they have been photographed. The 700 bookworms featured in photos she has published on Underground New York Public Library, the blog she launched in December, are identified only by the titles of their books.

 Someone, a PN patron, I think,  told me about that site.

Her blog approximates the sensation of reading over a stranger's shoulder. Ms. Ben-Haim acknowledges that the act of taking photographs of strangers without permission might make some people uneasy.

There is a question of ethics, indeed.

On her website, she writes that taking photographs of people without their permission is "not wrong" legally. Ms. Ben-Haim also says that she never hides her camera, answers questions from those who notice what she's doing and discards photos if she thinks the subject would find the results unflattering.

Silhouette Photography

From the Argus newsletter, 29 examples of silhouette photography.

Etymology of the name: 1798, from Fr. silhouette, in reference to Étienne de Silhouette (1709-1767), French minister of finance in 1759. Usually said to be so called because it was an inexpensive way of making a likeness of someone, a derisive reference to Silhouette's petty economies to finance the Seven Years' War, which were unpopular among the nobility. But other theories are that it refers to his brief tenure in office, or the story that he decorated his chateau with such portraits. The verb is recorded from 1876.

The family name is a Frenchified form of a Basque surname; Arnaud de Silhouette, the finance minister's father, was from Biarritz in the French Basque country; the southern Basque form of the name would be Zuloeta or Zulueta, which contains the suffix -eta "abundance of" and zulo "hole" (possibly here meaning "cave").

D-day

Photos from Life magazine.

"Paris is like a magic sword in a fairy tale — a shining power in those hands to which it rightly belongs, in other hands tinsel and lead. Whenever the City of Light changes hands, Western Civilization shifts its political balance. So it has been for seven centuries; so it was in 1940; so it was last week." — LIFE after the French capital was liberated in August 1944.

40 powerful photographs

Iconic photos, including:

Sisters pose for the same photo three separate times, years apart. Via: blameitonthevoices.com

Retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis is arrested for participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011.Via: johnnymilano.com

18 pictures for 5/31/12

A day in the world. From Kazakhstan, New Delhi, Alabama, Anctartica, among other places.

Spare Moments: Workers take a break in Dakar, Senegal.

Life And Love On The New York City Subway

Following in the footsteps of Walker Evans, a young Stanley Kubrick, during his tenure as a staff photographer for Look magazine in the 1940s, captured New York City subway passengers on their daily commute in a series called "Life And Love On The New York City Subway." In an age before iPhone cameras filmed every subway brawl and busker, Kubrick shot his subjects from the hip, in unassuming black and white portraits.

Photo-Op: Wave Theory

RoddOwen
Next time you're lying on the beach, listening idly to the sound of the surf, contemplate where those waves come from. What we think of as the main event—the crest, the crash, the spray—is actually the end of a journey that may begin with a storm halfway around the world. Evan Slater, a big-wave surfer and the former editor of Surfing magazine, has an intimate understanding of the sea. His 'Swell: A Year of Waves' (Chronicle, 143 pages, $29.95) is not only a gorgeously photographed guide to the best waves in the world but a lucid introduction to the science behind them. Those imposing breakers that pummel places like Huntington Beach in Southern California may have marched more than 6,000 miles from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, while an unruly wave off west Australia, like the one above, results from the 'Roaring Forties,' winds that push water across jagged reefs and rocky ledges. Waves that break in particular places have received nicknames like 'The Guillotine' and 'Tombstones.' Mr. Slater applies terms such as 'triple-suck' and 'mutant' to the 'freaky wave behavior' that makes these water forms deadly as well as beautiful. Each winter, swells from Siberia hit Hawaii, California, Mexico and Peru, creating irresistible but dangerous waves, most famously North Oahu's Pipeline. It takes a kind of sang-froid to contemplate the sporting side effects of the 2005 Sumatra earthquake (which 'destroyed some breaks and improved others'). But Mr. Slater's plain-spoken prose shows deep respect for the elements, as do photographs that, at their best, seem to freeze the full power of the sea for study. Flipping the pages slowly, inspecting one wave after another, the reader can almost hear them splash against a nearby shore. The Editors

This book review appeared in the Wall Street Journal and on its website. A fascinating idea.

French kiss

Robert Doisneau: (14 April 1912 – 1 April 1994) was a French photographer. In the 1930s he used a Leica on the streets of Paris; together with Henri Cartier-Bresson he was a pioneer of photojournalism. He is renowned for his 1950 image Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville (Kiss by the Town Hall), a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. Robert Doisneau was appointed a Chevalier (Knight) of the National Order of the Légion d'honneur in 1984.

 The pictures are:
Le Remorqueur du Champ de Mars (Tug on the Champ de Mars), 1943

Trois petits enfants blancs (Three little white children), 1971

Le baiser de l'hotel de ville (Kiss by the Hotel de Ville), 1950

Le Chien a Roulettes (Dog on Wheels), 1977

Aside from his Wiki-biography, there are various posts about him.

Spring 2012

Corner of 73rd Avenue and Francis Lewis Boulevard, 24 March, 5.30 in the afternoon. I recall a picture I took at the same corner, perhaps 9 years back, maybe 7, of daffodils in snow. This year, no snow. Not down here. We did great a 'flash snow' upstate, in the Catskills, this past weekend.

I took this picture near the Phoenicia School, looking north. Looks wintry. And it did, but snow began to melt that day, and was almost fully gone by Sunday.

Magnolias trees have been blooming with lush blossoms this year. They, and other flowers, seem especially vibrant.

This set of forsythia bushes is in front of a house on Lawrence Avenue.

This gorgeous tree stands in front of the Hewlett Woodmere Public Library.

A budding tree in Brookville Park, a favorite walking spot of mine.

On a drive along side streets through southeastern Queens, another pretty spring sight.