bikes and things

NASA have been busy recently, planning manned missions to Mars as well as plans to land on an asteroid. Fortunately in between this they still have time to make awesome images such as the one below entitled Black Marble. The title is a reference to the famous 1972 image taken on the Apollo 17 moon landing mission.

Whilst the original was famously taken with a Hasselblad (I’d still really like one) the new version was made from a composite of satellite images. The full set can be seen on the NASA Flickr stream.

This new global view and animation of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took satellite 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

It’s well worth viewing the full sized images on Flickr which show the staggering levels of detail in the files as per the below 100% crop.

And how about this shot for an even more interesting perspective of the original blue marble shot? Worth poking around the Flickr stream for more examples of this kind of thing.

Via PetaPixel.

…or video as some people might call it.

A conversation yesterday with Jim reminded me of this video by Tim Crocker which still completely blows me away with it’s quality, composition and the new ideas that are shown in it – it’s two years old and still seems fresh.

A lot of video of Architecture seems to be fairly poorly produced with utlra wide shots, lots of third point of perspective and wonky buildings, too many pans, dolly shots, focus pulls etc – all of which distract from the narrative surrounding the Architecture in my opinion. Essentially there seems to be a lack of subtlety which most successful Architectural photography creates. In this video a series of frames are created which would be powerful architectural shots alone, but then the frames come alive with movement from the people and the play of light on the buildings and trees in the frame. The Architecture then seems to form the backdrop to the life contained within, having created a pleasant public space for this activity to take place.

It appears that Pedro Kok is also fairly handy with Architectural video – tip of the hat to Dave Morris for the link.

I found Ben’s work after following him on Twitter for the last few years. I really enjoy his work, which at first glance appears to be medium format due to the tonal qualities and square format along with architectural ‘verticals, vertical’ style which is very much reminiscent of the work of Sander Meisner. As with Meisner a lot of his photos appear in my favourites page on Flickr. Intriguingly though he is using a compact digital camera and making corrections after in Photoshop. This by no means diminishes the quality of his images though.

Ben could be accused of being obsessed with dark, gloomy or dull spaces. For me the images are more about finding beauty in the every day or the mundane that surrounds us. The consistency of his work is incredible, something I’ve completely failed at with my Flickr. I’ve added a few of my recent favourite images below but you should definitely spend some time going through his photo stream.

A quick image of a visit out of town yesterday.

Spot on.

Via Justin Leighton

A recent shot taken at the office which I’ve just got round to editing properly. I’m working hard to improve my post processing workflow at the moment and pretty pleased with how this one has turned out. A lot more work is needed but I think it’s worth it. The roof beams are set to falls, but the shot is square on – honest.

T-shirts, they’ve launched fucking T-Shirts! They’re letting an amazing platform die and the only news that comes out of Flickr in recent memory is T-shirts? They have to be shitting me. How about better features like smart sets – based on tags to organise your content? Smart geo-tagging features? A decent mobile app that allows better engagement with your content? Notifications on your phone when someone comments that isn’t via email to further that engagement?

Actually that’s not fair, they changed the individual image page to show the ISO, ƒ stop, lens and shutter speed of the shot. Big whoop.

There’s loads they could do to improve the platform and see off or even engage with competition such as Instagram.

But no, we’ve got FUCKING T-SHIRTS!

RIP Flickr.

I was browsing the AJ website the other day when I came across this post showing the winners of the AJ/Open-City photography competition. All of the images are great but this one really jumped out at me.

And then I saw it was by Chris Romer-Lee of Studio-Octopi and it’s his daughter in the picture. The space is fantastic and although you can’t see the face of the little girl you can almost feel just how enthralled she is by what is going on on the table. The shadow play and tones are simply fantastic as well as the details within the image – the cobwebs, the timber floor, the trees outside, the lamp that just catches the light and also the seemingly pure white table in an otherwise drab and run down space. Upon speaking to Chris, and asking for this image, it transpires that the studio where this was shot is under threat from development which is tragic. I’m hopefully going to visit soon and have a look round and fingers crossed they make it through.

Image © Chris Romer-Lee.

Not sure where I found this but below is a video introduction to Robert Burley’s project recording the various disappearing film companies (Kodak, Agfa etc), which he has been working on since 2005.

It seems shocking how quickly film is disappearing and he notes that he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to finish the project. The book is available on Amazon and I think I’ll be ordering a copy soon. It doesn’t look like I’ll be getting the pleasure of shooting large format anytime soon. More information and images can be found over at PetaPixel.

Seemed to have taken a lot of pictures this weekend, some professional which I can’t show yet, and some for pleasure which of course I can. Some fairly dim flat light on Saturday but a superb Autumn day on Sunday. GB’s worth of shots into the Lightroom library. Took the D700 out instead of the X100 this time. Always forget how super sharp it is with the 50mm ƒ1.8 on.

And my personal favourite was this dog keeping a watchful eye over the people on Lordship Lane.