OnelargeprawnIf you enjoyed the works of Flickr user alan_sailer, you may like shots from 52-year-old amateur Dutch photographer, Lex Augusteijn. He captures the moments frozen in time as real bullets fired from a coil gun come into contact with everyday objects like eggs, light bulbs, balloons, and droplets of water.
Have a look at some of his whizz-bang high-speed bullet shots after the jump.
In his series Your Beautiful Eyes, Armenian photographer Suren Manvelyan takes a wonderfully close-up look at the human eye. The detail in his photos are quite amazing and the windows to the soul look more like craters with a dark pool of nothingness at their centre. Have a look at his stunning macro shots after the jump.
Siamese fighting fish are beautiful aren’t they? Digital artist Heru Suryoko from Jakarta, Indonesia captures the grace and splendour of these creatures in his series aptly titled Betta Splendens. Have a look at his vibrant images after the jump.
Volcanoes have a fiery temperament. The aurora borealis paints the sky a pretty colour. Mix them both together and the sight will take your breath away.
Two photographers were at the right place and right time when the two phenomena met, and captured the most amazing images. Recently James Appleton, a Cambridge University graduate, was in Fimmvörðuháls, a pass between the Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull glaciers. Despite the inhospitable weather and warnings from local guides, he trekked to within 100ft of the volcano. Another photographer Albert Jakobsson also braved the biting temperatures in April to document the eruption, and was just about to leave when the aurora borealis occurred. They both captured the vibrant reds of the flowing lava set against the electric blue sky and green aurora.
The images are really incredible. See them after the jump.
Earlier today I had spotted a post on The Given Collective about the seriously sexy art of Italian illustrator Alberto Seveso. He has become quite famous for mixing black and white portrait photos with colourful vector designs. The style is known as “sperm shaping” and can be seen in his A me mi piace la gnocca! series (possibly NSFW).
I like exposed nipples as much as the next guy but do you know what interests me more than that? Seeing varnish coming into contact with water. In his Medicina Rossa series of photos, he poured a red coloured varnish into a fish bowl full of water, and used a blue varnish in his Sequence verdastra/bluastra/bastarda series. The images of this beautiful reaction look like they could have been computer-generated but Seveso assures people they are not. See them after the jump.
Here’s a novel way to take a panoramic photograph. When you pull the rip-cord attached to the Spinner 360° from Lomography.com, the camera spins all the way around on its axis and captures a 360-degree panoramic photo complete with the super-cool over-saturated effects that you’ve come to love from lomography, even the sprocket holes are exposed for that retro look.
The camera’s design is pretty simple using a rubber band drive to power it. It uses standard 35mm film and can create a panoramic image that’s four times longer than a conventional landscape photo. The makers have even created a set of standard shooting techniques including the overhead spin, timescan, rollercoaster, and manual exposure. Have a look at some images created by the Spinner 360° after the jump.
I don’t know what you’ve been up to all week but I’ve been sitting at my new desk in a new office for a new job and been battling my way around InDesign. I’ve felt like a retard most of the time but it hasn’t gotten me down (for a change) because I’ve been able to drift off into lovely daydreams about last weekend.
And before any of you jump to conclusions about Prawn’s holey underpants (reference), here’s the real story…
We piled dogs and all into the car and drove through the green and rolling countryside to a self-catering cottage in the utterly charming seaside village of Arniston. The cottage was adequate with a fireplace that worked eventually, and a braai that worked brilliantly (how typical). The village was quiet and peaceful with the only real buzz going on at the hotel on Saturday afternoon when people gathered to watch some rugby thing on the telly.
The beaches right near the village were beautiful but a short walk into the national park revealed panoramic views from cliff top paths, a cave large enough to park a wagon and a span of oxen in, and one of the most spectacular and unspoiled beaches I’ve seen.
We took our dogs everywhere we went and they had an absolute ball. We strolled along sandy roads, peed behind bushes, splashed in the ice-blue ocean, and bought huge delicious oysters from a guy who had “Doctor Satan” tattooed across his forehead. On our drives down country roads we stopped every few hundred metres to have a closer look at fascinating things like birds, bokkies, windmills, and an old ox wagon. Against my better judgement we even climbed the rickety wooden ladders to the top of the lighthouse at Cape Agulhas – it really was worth it though because the view from the top was great.
All in all it was the most fantastic weekend and we’re dying to go back as soon as we can.
See some of our happy snaps after the jump.
Launched on April 5th and having landed on April 20th, Discovery’s flight STS-131 marks the longest mission for the orbiter. During the six week that photographers Scott Andrews, his son Philip Scott Andrew, and Stan Jirman spent in and around the Orbiter Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, they took thousands of photos of the staff preparing Discovery for the mission.
The photographers condensed their shots into a glorious four-minute time-lapse video that chronicles Discovery’s trip from the processing facility to the pad, and eventually to the launch itself. It’s quite amazing to watch – there isn’t any audio on the clip,so we’d suggest Black Sabbath’s Into the Void as a good accompaniment. Check out Go For Launch! below.
BONUS: While we’re on on the topic of NASA, two of their satellites have been monitoring the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The movement of the spill has been captured in images which since been compiled into a time-lapse video. See that after the jump.
The first time we saw Pencil Vs Camera there weren’t many photos up so we waited a bit for talented Belgian artist Ben Heine to work more of his magic.<.p>
Heine is a painter, illustrator and photographer and in his latest project, he combines sketching and photography – using his own stock photos, his puts pencil to paper and introduce an odd element to the image, such as a gas mask to a classic Vermeer painting or a gun-toting T-rex to the a suburb of Paris. It’s a really nice concept and the results are charming. See some of his work after the jump.
You may recall research scientist and microscopist Alan Jaras and his fantastic photos of light refracting through various textured objects. If not, you can refresh your memory here.
I didn’t notice this on my last trip to his Flickr profile but Jaras had access to a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Between 2005 and 2007, he used the device to create a story about a group of travellers who land on a microscopic world and explore the alien environment. Have a look at some images from his MicroWorlds set after the jump.