Category: Photos & Art

On Saturday, March 20, more than 180 photographers in 40 countries around the world celebrated the Equinox by creating QuickTime VR Panoramas. The World Wide Panorama web site lets you see the results.

A VR panorama (VR for virtual reality) is a specially created computer image that goes all the way around the viewer. It is a revolutionary way to document a particular place and — the next best thing to being there.

VR panoramas are interactive. Use the mouse to rotate the panorama, use Shift and Control to zoom in and out. Some VR panoramas are cylinders, 360° around but with limited vertical view. Others are cubic (or spherical), with a view that can go straight up and straight down, as well as all the way around. There are also VR objects, where the viewer circles around an object of interest.

To view the panoramas on this site you will need QuickTime. If QuickTime is not already installed on your computer you can obtain it (free, versions for both Windows and Macintosh) from Apple Computer.

Some pretty photos — 50 States.

Thanks to The Coyote’s Bark…. for the link. He has some nice photos of his own … remember his photos of White Sands?

Engaging Astronomy Picture of the Day.

13½ billion years ago.

Burpee has put the cover art for its annual seed catlogs online. They’ve been publishing these things since 1884!

The Mint Museums:

Photographer Julie Moos shoots portraits of couples who are either best friends or worst enemies and places them against a non-descript background. The viewer is left to draw his or her own conclusions about existing relationships. By evaluating body language, clothing and facial expressions one is given clues; but the stereotypical surface evidence can be misleading. In this series Moos brings to our attention how similarities and differences can affect our judgment about individuals and color our notion of who is considered a friend or foe.

Typographic Illustration

Click here for a view from the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft.

From The Coyote’s Bark….. Not the wedding ones. They’re nice enough, but scroll down the page to the photos from White Sands and others. Remarkable!

was born on this date in 1902.

NASA’s newly named Spitzer Space Telescope has captured dazzling images of a dusty, spiral galaxy; a planet-forming disc; a glowing, stellar nursery and a young, buried star, demonstrating the power of its infrared eyes to spy hidden objects.

Worthy of a click!

Astronomy Picture of the Day

HubbleSite

At the Space Telescope Science Institute, we’re working hard to study and explain the once-unimaginable celestial phenomena now made visible using Hubble’s cutting-edge technology. In the course of this exploration we will continue to share with you the grace and beauty of the universe… because the discoveries belong to all of us.

Check out the site if only to marvel at the beauty of space.

Astronomy Picture of the Day (November 13)

Featured Images 2003 from The Luminous Landscape. Take a look at the earlier years also, and follow some of the links. Remarkable.

The Luminous Landscape

From the Los Angeles Times

California fires from space

Fascinating profile of the designer of the Vietnam Memorial by Louis Menand in The New Yorker (July 2002). Ms. Lin received a B+ for the project, which was an undergraduate assignment at Yale.

These responses all miss the brilliance of what Lin did. The Vietnam Memorial is a piece about death for a culture in which people are constantly being told that life is the only thing that matters. It doesn’t say that death is noble, which is what supporters of the war might like it to say, and it doesn’t say that death is absurd, which is what critics of the war might like it to say. It only says that death is real, and that in a war, no matter what else it is about, people die. Lin has always said that she kept quiet about her politics while her work was being built, and she has kept quiet since. Maintaining that the memorial is apolitical is the civic thing to do: reconciliation is what we want memorials to promote. But the conservatives were not mistaken. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the great anti-war statements of all time.

This is a long but eminently rewarding article.