Recently in Photographs Category

Been meaning to post this for ages...

The Guardian's Jonathan Glancey wrote:

In some areas of Britain, you'll see mobile phone masts in plain view in all their stark, skeletal nakedness. In others, well, you won't see them at all. Why? Because they've been hidden in the clockfaces of town halls (Hungerford, Berkshire), or in street signs (Northumberland Avenue, Westminster), while out of town they are commonly disguised as trees. In talking to and txt msging one another we . . . talk to the trees. For seven years Robert Voit has photographed these bizarre artificial trees - including faux cypress, pine, palm and, in Arizona, cactus. Many, as you can see, are simply funny. Cartoonish. Awkward. Outlandish. Kitsch. They are meant to blend in with their natural surroundings, yet, as Voit's eyecatching photos prove, they rarely do. On the other hand, would you want the world's landscapes pockmarked with mobile phone masts?

It's a tough choice - take a look at some of the solutions. There are a few really good ideas but many clunky ones due to the sheer size of the things compared to their surroundings.

Last June, Help My Physics placed some photographic film into a tin canister with a small hole punched into its side. The tin canister was then attached to a clothes pole in their back garden and left.

This afternoon I fetched the canister and took the photographic film out. My son John scanned the photographic film and with the aid of some image software made the image negative. The result is the picture above. The picture clearly shows the path of the sun through the sky over the last six months. I believe you can see we didn't have a great summer by the broken lines at the top. More sun shone in the month of October.

[Via Help My Physics]

Simply wonderful. I can't put it better than the original article, below.

This picture was taken by Soichi Noguchi looking out of the newly installed ISS cupola, which provides dramatic vistas of space from inside the station. You can see the Soyuz module that carried astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson on board- incidentally, with Discovery on its way to the ISS carrying three women, this will be the first time four women will have been in space simultaneously.

This image is simply fantastic. The aurora, commonly called the northern lights, are caused by subatomic particles slamming into our atmosphere and ionizing the oxygen and nitrogen atoms there like shrapnel from bullets hitting a target. Guided by the Earth's magnetic field, these particles tend to hit at high latitudes. The glow itself is similar to that of a neon sign: when the wayward electrons recombine with the atoms, they give off light. The colors are characteristic of the atom in question, and can be used to identify the atmospheric constituents.

The green glow is actually much lower than the ISS; that part of the aurora is usually at a height of 100 or so kilometers (60 miles), while ISS is at 400 km (240 miles). The red glow can reach higher, to more than 500 km (300 miles), so when Soichi says he is flying through the aurora he is literally correct. The fantastic speed of the ISS is apparent in the trailing of the stars in the image, and the streaking of the purple clouds below.

Astonishing, lovely, poetic, beautiful... and Holy Haleakala, real. When we humans want and choose to, we can fly through the northern lights. What else can we accomplish when we set our minds to it?

[Via Discover]

Inspired by Tom Barrett's Twitter post about his classroom, and asking for photos of others, I took these photos at the end of yesterday.

Clearly, the chairs are up for cleaning, and the room is a little messy as we'd made biscuits and there's a fair bit of drying art work lying around - but these things happen in a working classroom!

I took photos from a high angle to avoid showing you just the backs of chairs stood in each corner of the room. It's a Victorian building (just, 1901) with high ceilings. The room was converted from being the staffroom a few years ago and is quite long but pretty narrow for Year 5 children and furniture - makes getting around a little difficult.

If you want to know about any of the displays or work, just post a comment.

Photos taken on an iPhone 3GS, click for a larger version.

EDIT (12:11): Altered the pop up images to have scrollbars and be resizable.

I apologise for the pun, but there has been a lack of joined up thinking from the teams in Formula One of late... This made me smile.

Do you remember that clever Skoda advert? You know - the one where they make a giant cake version of the Skoda Fabia, which actually turns out looking better than any real Skoda we've ever seen? Well, some crazy chefs working for a Singapore restaurant seem to have embraced that crazy (and slightly wasteful) idea by coming up with an F1 car made entirely out of bread.

In our sad little minds, we like to think of Lewis Hamilton driving this in the Singapore night race; pushing the roll-shaped accelerator pedal to the floor, flicking up through the gears using his bagel paddle shifters - taking this bread-made bad boy up to speeds of 200mph and more. But then, can you imagine how soggy the doughy seats would get after a couple of hours out on the track? Yuk!

But there is a positive story behind this, with the chefs creating the car (made from 22 different types of bread) to raise money for a local school - clearly demonstrating that the Singapore F1 race is having a positive social impact on the island city-state, which is always good to hear seeing as the sport has been through some tough times of late.

Via: Orange Cars

My last entry discussed how Google's search homepage has been used to celebrate many significant events throughout history - very worthwhile if you ask me.

However, Google Maps is also very useful. Most trips I make to places I don't know are planned out on Google Maps first, either using satellite images, or maps or a combination of both.

Google Maps was recently put to great use by Rachel Young. She spent 15 hours trying to find all 26 letters of the alphabet on the British Isles. Here are her results.

Via: Telegraph.co.uk

At the end of May, although it seems like much less time has passed, I visited a couple of friends who now live in Lincolnshire. While I was there - actually, while they were working during the day, I visited the gorgeous Belton House.

Here are the photos.

Earlier this month, I took a trip to Lotherton Hall and its very lovely bird garden.

Here are the photos.

I've edited the Slide widget at the top of the homepage today to remove images that were not taken or edited by me. Previously, I used this widget to highlight images from various posts around the site - mainly because I hadn't taken enough images to fill it up!

But as the site has grown and I've taken more pictures, I thought it better to replace the older images with ones from my various trips. Also, many of them were from a good long while ago!

All of them have been captioned with the location and date taken, just hover over an image to pause the movement and discover where they are.

It snowed over night. I couldn't get in to work. Good times.

Click the photos for an embiggenated image, which will open in a new window. All photos taken with a Nokia N95 8GB phone!