Wouter Brandsma lives in the Netherlands, is a Ricoh compact camera fanatic and is an excellent photographer.
This was posted in 2009 but I’ve been following Wouter for a while and I’m bumping it up (changing it’s posting date) so those of you who don’t know his photography can take a look.
He’s one of the finest photographers of of the many I follow and he does all of his brilliant work with compact Ricoh cameras. There is no doubt that Wouter could make great images with any camera but I find it fascinating that a photographer of his caliber chooses these cameras, which by the way are’t all that popular except they do have a cult following among serious street photographers and photojournalists.
My god, I remember this and it seems just as exceptional and funny now as it did then.
Wenceslao Moreno was Señor Wences, an exceptional Spanish ventriloquist who many of us saw regularly on the Ed Sullivan show. He died in 1999 at age 103.
Salisbury, Connecticut. The newly leafed canopy looked great against a cloudy sky this morning. When we got on top of Bear Mountain we were enveloped in a fog/mist and the view was completely gone.
This is a great piece on the history of the clothing company Patagonia and a mini-biography of its founder Yvon Chouinard.
I happen to have a few original Chouinard pitons I bought from him in the Camp 4 parking lot in Yosemite Valley in the 1970′s. I’ve followed his climbing and mountaineering career as well as his business career and I must say, he’s done well with alms everything he’s touched.
Last week a black bear was wandering around the Colorado University campus and ended up in a small tree. A student called 911 and they came and darted the bear, padded his fall from the tree with a foam pad, and took him away. A student captured the bear in mid-fall and the image made its way into the school newspaper which sold the image which then went viral.
It’s an interesting situation and commenter Bob Cooley has the most fair minded commentary about it (in comment thread).
Then there’s Taras Dzedzey’s link to a Russian site with Photoshopped variants that made me laugh pretty hard.
Fantastic collection of iPhone photography from a professional photojournalist. The NY Times piece, by James Estrin is beautifully written:
If you believe that Hipstamatic and Instagram could inspire tens of millions of people to become more interested in “serious” photography, then think of Mr. Lowy as a prophet urging others to abandon outdated and elitist ways.
If, on the other hand, you believe iPhone photography — and the Hipstamatic app, in particular — are the work of the Devil, then you can think of Mr. Lowy as his messenger.
Ben has a blog devoted to his iPhone work: iSee. You can also scan through the iPhone images easily with your keyboard arrow keys here.
The amazing thing about Alana’s story is that she just keeps moving forward, even with a large setback in her life (a broken back). No doubt the years right after she broke her back were tough but her spirit kept her moving.
It’s an inspiring story, beautifully produced by WGBH, the PBS affiliate in Boston.
Reminds me of the excellent documentary on wheelchair basketball: Murderball.
On the Appalachian Trail north of Sheffield, Massachusetts. Crossing a small bridge over a stream I noticed another nice reflection so I took my gloves off and took a picture which I’m quite pleased with. However, I then…
…dropped my gloves in the stream and took another picture with the ripples from the fallen gloves nicely distorting the trees.
Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and created by Plebian Design for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.
10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.
The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.
An eight channel soundtrack accompanies the animations on the ribbon, giving visitors clues to the identity of the pixelated movements. In addition, two screens show high resolution imagery and text revealing the content on the ribbon at any moment.
The Aizhai Extra Large Suspension Bridge is located on the G65 Baotou–Maoming Expressway near Jishou, Hunan, China. It links together two tunnels 1,176m apart, and 355m above Hunan’s Dehang Canyon. A key section of the 64km-long Jishou-Chadong Expressway, the bridge features a standard two-way, four-lane motorway. The expressway runs through 18 tunnels in total, which cover about half of its length.
It is the sixth-highest bridge in the world and the world’s twelfth-longest suspension bridge. Of the world’s 400 or so highest bridges, none has a main span as long as Aizhai. It is also the world’s highest and longest tunnel-to-tunnel bridge.
Wow. Now that would be a fun bridge to walk across.
This is a useful article for anyone to read who travels with an iPad or iPhone (or any electronic device). The last section on tips for easier recovery is quite useful.
On the Appalachian Trail north of Sheffield, Massachusetts. A little breeze can change a reflection from an interesting upside down landscape into a dreamy, wavy mirage.
My long time flickr contact karaku* has posted a wonderful image of daisies from below in Tokyo, Japan. This kind of image is unusual for her, she’s mostly into patterns and design.
Ken Auletta has written yet another amazing piece for The New Yorker on the history of Stanford University and how it’s President, John Hennessy has built important relationships with the technology industry in the surrounding Silicon Valley. This is worth reading by anyone interested in the tech industry and one possible future of education.
David H. Freeman at Inc. wrote a fascinating history of Phil Lubin and how he built Evernote. This is from 2011 but it remains a great read in this age of Facebook buying Instagram for a billion dollars.
Excellent All Things Considered segment by Tasnim Shamma on problems with TSA screening Sikhs and other groups who wear turbans and head coverings and a new app called Fly Rights that aims to make it easier to report profiling abuse.
In this Intel Visual Life short documentary, Michael Wolff, co-founder of Wolff Olins Agency and considered one of the preeminent visionaries and perhaps the father of 20th century brand expression and identity, talks about his approach to looking at the world, including the muscles of curiosity, appreciation, and imagination.
Dave shooting a reflection on the Appalachian Trail north of Sheffield, Massachusetts. The light and sky were perfect for shooting reflections on streams and swamps yesterday and we spent a lot of time doing it. Sometimes still water makes interesting images, sometimes a bit of wind rippling the water and distorting the reflection makes interesting images but either way we saw and shot a lot of them yesterday and it made a great hike even better.
This is the same image Dave was shooting (shot by me with my camera). I used to think a sun hot spot was something to be avoided but I’m liking what a “sun ball” does to a brooding sky. Mostly I position the sun behind trees but sometimes I let it shine through repeating the shot with each of the S100′s three light meters to make sure I get it.
