Copyright © 2011, Image courtesy of E S Z T E R B U R G H A R D T

Eszter Burghardt is a Canadian-Hungarian artist based in Vancouver BC, Canada, and photographs miniature dioramas constructed primarily with wool, food, and random objects from her studio. She takes her inspiration from the landscapes of Iceland and makes free use of poppy seeds, coco powder, coffee, milk, and chocolate cake crumbs to create her beautiful landscapes. A macro lens on her camera helps her capture the illusion that the photographs were actually taken on site.

Visit our Featured Site: Eszter Burghardt.

FEATURED SITE: XYZ 360°

Brazil Carnaval 2011 - © Courtesy Daniel Farjoun

If you were lucky enough as a kid to have received a 3D View-Master, you know how much fun and awesome it was to watch your first pictures in 3D. The prinicple of 3D is simple enough: take a picture, make a copy and offset them by a few mm. Then, when you look into the viewer, each eye sees one photo and sends the signal separately to the brain. Our brain puts them back together as a 3D picture.

3D pictures fell by the wayside for a long long time and it looked like it would never come back again… until Avatar showed that you could make a 3D movie that did not suck or threw the spear at you at every turn. Suddenly, interest in 3D picked up. It’s funny this way, how technology first needs to progress to the point of being able to provide an experience that does not suck (for want of a better sounding term that encompasses what I want to convey here) before mass consumer adoption.

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Takin, China

Simple! Place cameras and sensors in strategic places where animals are known to visit. When an animal trips the sensor, camera starts to take pictures. Voilà! In all, the Smithsonian has amassed about 201,000 elusive animal self-portraits all around the world bu using Reconyx cameras.

View the collection at: Smithsonian Wild.

source engadget

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AvertedImagination

How about this for an out-of-this-world photography? Alan Friedman uses his Little Big Man 90mm hydrogen alpha telescope connected to a Mac to take some seriously spectacular pictures of the… Sun. The “camera” (image sensor) is a Point Grey Research Scorpion camera. His setup is not for the faint of heart.

Click on thumbnail to visit Alan Friedman‘s site.

source popsci

Featured Site: Naomi Leshem – Sleeper's Series

Naomi Leshem - Sleeper's Series

In Street Photography we take pictures of people going about their daily business unaware that we are photographing them, capturing and preserving a slice of their lives on celluloid, oops, I mean image sensor. But how do you call this kind of photography when that venue is the bedroom, the subjects are teenagers [photographed with their consent], and the time is when they are in deep [dream] sleep? Naomi Leshem refers to it as her “Sleepers series,” capturing a slice of their dream “lives.”

View the Sleepers Series at: Naomi Leshem.

source PDN

The first tweet says, “Well, I just got laid off.” Using geo-location, we can pin-point the exact location (more of less) where that was tweeted and, in this case, it turns out to be at the corner of W. Randolph Street and N. La Salle Street. The picture of that street intersection in itself does not amount to much, but pair it with the tweet, and they together suddenly becomes a poignant testimony of an intimate event. There are lots more of this type of tweets and associated images, some funny, one quite sad, but all making a strong statement.

See the slide show at: Telepathic Witness.

Read the article at: BJP.

LROC NAC image of the Apollo 14 landing site with astronaut tracks. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

Thanks to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (LRO) special high resolution wide-angle camera and two narrow-angle cameras, we now have the most detailed moon shots ever taken. The narrow-angle cameras took photos of the Apollo 14 landing site which show the paths made by the astronauts during their mission.

The wide-angle camera weighs under a kilogram, has an aperture of 1.2 mm across, focal length of 6 mm, and fits in the palm of a hand.

In all, the most recent set of 1,300 B&W frames were used to create a mosaic of the near side of the moon measuring 24,000 pixels across.

Read more at: NASA.

source Toronto Star

Did anyone not tell the CIA that there’s no secret on the Internet? That posting photos on Flickr is a no, no? But if you want to see the cool gadgets the CIA used during WWII, check out their official Flickr site at CIAgov. You’ll find pictures and information about the Enigma Machine, waterproof escape map, a neat letter removal device (that rolls the letter inside the envelope and could still see useful gadget life today), and, is it any wonder, spy cameras: a microdot camera (to photograph and reduce whole pages of information onto a single tiny piece of film that could then be embedded into the text of a letter as small as a period), the minox camera, the pigeon camera (light enough to be carried by a pigeon), a miniature tobacco pouch camera, and various bodyworn surveillance equipment.

View more at: CIAgov.

Courtesy Image: Michael Oliveri

What you are looking at is a landscape from the nano world, i.e. at the atomic level. In this case, it is a photo of zinc oxide nanorods being produced in a furnace burning at 600°C (1,100°F). The rods are 50 to 150 nanometers in diameter. In case you’ re still wondering what all these measurements mean, objects in the nano world typically are up to 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

The photos are the work of Michael Oliveri, University of Georgia digital media professor, who uses a scanning electron microscope to capture these images. He combines up to 40 smaller images to create the panoramas.

Read the article and view more nono world photos at: Scientific American.