National Geographic is, of course, best known for its stunning and exotic photography. You could do nothing but travel the world for the rest of your life, and you’d never get to see all the visual treasures their photographers are able to collect. 2006 is considered possibly their best year to-date in terms of exceptional work in this area. You’ll be blown away by this collection.
The story of Michael Jackson is a fascinating one, and at times, quite sad. Of course, there were the child star days, then his superstardom status in the Eighties and Nineties…followed by the accusations and court cases…and eventually, his disappearance from the US to parts remote (Bahrain, I believe). It’s been suggested that much of his weirdness can be chalked up to an attempt to recapture his lost childhood. Apart from the “incidents” involving young boys, nowhere is this quest more evident than in his greatest non-musical creation, Neverland Ranch. Someone was able to get inside Neverland and take some pictures at night. The images are quite fascinating…especially the stars in the sky behind the various attractions. It’s worth the 2-3 minutes it takes to watch the slideshow:
How’d you like to roll out of bed each morning and walk outside to get a few lungfuls of fresh air…only to be greeted by a site like this? This little seaport in Norway is called Ålesund…and it seems that there’s almost no way to take a bad picture of this place. Simply breathtaking!
You can see more of Ålesund, up close and personal, with these three beautiful images:
A very interesting first-person account of one man’s experience underneath Niagara Falls, where he explores the remains of a 100-year-old attempt to capture the hydroelectric power of The Falls. Accompanied by spectacular pictures of the tunnel itself, even more fascinating is the writer’s description of the experience:
“Lying below a river that will relentlessly tear into the bedrock until all has been obliterated from Queenston to Erie, this tunnel thirty-three feet in diameter is imprinted into my being forever. A swirling army of red brick millions strong, the eye of a petrified hurricane leading us right into the centre of the stalled but fighting storm that is Niagara Falls. Standing in its back-blast, in a place far deeper and darker than any middling storm sewer, I breathed and drank from the fount of the universe and swam closer to its centre than I ever will again.”
This picture may appear to be a stylish photograph, but it’s actually a drawing created with a ballpoint pen.
31-yr old artist Juan Francisco Casas creates images like this, up to 10 ft tall…going thru 4 pens or so per canvas.
He began the drawings three years ago based on photographs of nights out with his friends.
The only drawback is that he can’t erase any errors. He said: “Mistakes are the main problem. It’s better if I make them at the beginning.”
Look, we all know how irritating a dirty monitor screen can be, right?
Don’t use harsh chemicals and elbow grease to solve your problem.
Instead, try this new organic technique!
Beautiful picture of Perito Moreno Glacieris, a glacier located in the Los Glaciares National Park in the southwest of Santa Cruz province, Argentina.
It’s one of the most important tourist attractions in the Argentine Patagonia and has a front of 5 km long and a height of over 60 meters above the level of the water.
Jennifer Maestre creates amazing sculptures with sharpened little nubs of pencils. She drills holes in them and stitches them together using a sculptural beading technique called peyote stitching. The resulting texture is a combination of smoothness and sharpness that’s visually striking, especially when viewed from a slight distance.
She also makes pencil jewelry, which can be found on etsy.com.
See more of her work and read a short interview on Reuben Miller’s blog.
There’s so much going on in this picture that you look, and look again, and look more deeply. The edges aren’t quite as sharp as a real photograph….there’s a certain sheen to it that would make you almost certain that it’s actually an illustration from a graphic novel with apocalyptic overtones.
But it is, in fact, a photograph…taken at Nippori station in Tokyo. It’s actually a triple-exposure shot which been processed through Photomatix software, which accounts for much of the texture. Quite spectacular!
It’s a cute idea…empowering the masses to unleash their creative cartoon ideas in panels or strips, whether or not they can draw (and, frankly, whether or not they’re funny…). Toonlet lets you quickly create strips or even add new characters and show them to your friends. And they can even reply with strips of their own.
It’s a fun idea…functionally implemented. The site itself could use a graphic facelift (especially the sloppy ad integration), they need to allow sorting by language (most of the ones I saw weren’t in English, and I was therefore unable to appreciate them) and they could use a profanity filter (or, if they have one, a better one).