bits

• 2012-08-13

  The Weight of Objects

  A blog about people and their things, example:

  

  “I used to take off my wedding ring and place it in different spots and forget to wear it. My wife wasn’t happy about that, so I bought this flying pig last year in at vintage fair in Notting Hill to be the unforgettable spot to place my ring. Now, it’s the first place I look when I’m about to leave home, and it carries everything I love the most - pork, making the impossible possible, and my wife.”

  Diego Zambrano was photographed in New York City on October 22nd.

• 2012-06-08

  

  ISS Star Trails: 

  Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images: “My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”

• 2012-06-04

  

  Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, in 1869. A man can be seen with his horse at the bottom near the bridge (right).

  From this great collection of Timothy O’Sullivan photos.

• 2012-05-24

  

  Center of the Thousand Trees by arcreyes [-ratamahatta-]:

  Mt. Yoshino is famous for its thousands of cherry trees around the mountain. Having the trees on higher altitude means that they bloom much later so we totally missed it’s full bloom. Still the view from one of the observatory points is breathtaking.

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  Sentinels of the Arctic by Niccolò Bonfadini: 

  During winter, with temperatures ranging from -40 to -15, the trees in some areas of the Finnish Lapland get completely covered by snow and ice. This makes for a unique landscape, where everything is white and frozen as far as the eyes can see. That morning I slept in my tent to watch the sun rise from the top of a hill; an eerie mist was forming around the trees, enhancing the mysterious atmosphere.

• 2012-05-20

  

  Panographies: Panoramas on Steroids:

  Panographies are wide-angle pictures composed of several individual photos manually stitched together. When these component photos are assembled, they give the impression one would get standing in one place, looking around and unconsciously putting the pictures together in one’s head.

• 2012-05-17

  

  This 120° panoramic image of the Cincinnati riverfront, properly titled Daguerreotype View of Cincinnati. Taken from Newport, Ky, was reassembled from a later series of 8 × 10 film negatives. The original panorama consisted of eight full-plate (6.5 × 8.5”) daguerreotypes and was taken in September 1848 by Porter and Fontayne (although most likely just by Porter). It shows a two mile stretch of the Cincinnati riverfront, from the Public Landing to the town of Fulton.

  Make sure you embiggen this sucker to get the full scale. Much more about the Daguerreotype can be found on Codex 99 (including a map of the area in the panorama, details of the photos, and the full plates).

• 2012-05-07

  

  SUPERMOON by D.H. Parks. It’s like a painting. /via in focus

• 2012-03-19

  Elmo Tide

  I have no idea what to make of Elmo Tide’s photos, but I think they are best described by this NPR article from 2010: 

  His photographs seem like anachronistic souvenirs from a time that never existed, a weird mix of sleaze and nostalgia littered with archetypes of cowboys, firefighters, wrestlers and strippers.

  Yup, that sounds about right.

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  A World Without People

  For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have recently evacuated or otherwise abandoned a number of places around the world — large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to vanish from the planet altogether.

  Fantastic, this is my favorite of the bunch:  

   

• 2012-03-04

  

  I was browsing through the Lively Morgue and came across this odd shot, East Harlem Playground - 1967. So were all playgrounds this scary in the 60s?