Category: Photos & Art

100 days in Glacier National Park

This summer, Glacier Park Magazine editor Chris Peterson undertook a photographic project to take photos of Montana’s Glacier National Park over 100 consecutive days, starting on May 1, 2009, for a traveling photo show in 2010 to commemorate Glacier’s Centennial. He used a mix of film and digital cameras, including an 8 by 10 field camera, a Kodak Pocket Vest camera, circa 1909, and a Speed Graphic, among others. His idea was to use the cameras that would have been used over the course of the Park’s 100 years. While Chris was kind enough to share some of his photos below, you really should check out his whole set of 100. All photos and captions are from Chris Peterson. (24 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009

National Geographic’s International Photography Contest attracts thousands of entries from photographers of all skill levels around the world every year. While this year’s entry deadline has passed, there is still time to view and vote for your favorites in the Viewer’s Choice competition. National Geographic was kind enough to let me choose a few of their entries from 2009 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected below are 25 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers. (25 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Wow!

On the Beach

We humans are drawn to the shore, with some 40% of the world’s population living within 100 kilometers of a coast. Coastal areas have made recent news with the arrival of several storms, concerns about rising sea levels and other environmental and conservation efforts. Collected here are a handful of photographs from around the world of people and animals at the shoreline, playing, working, struggling or relaxing on the border between land and sea. (36 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Autumn

It’s that time of year again, the Earth’s northern hemisphere is tipping away from the warmth of the Sun. Days in the north are getting cooler and shorter, leaves are changing, animals migrating and many harvests are underway. The wet summer in New England this year should make 2009 a banner year for brightly-colored fall foliage in the area. Collected here are a group of photographs of recent Autumn scenes around the northern hemisphere. (32 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Lovely.

Your photo could win!

America’s Federal Recreation Lands are special places that bring people together and leave visitors enriched. From scenic vistas to diverse wildlife to historic landmarks, these lands offer a myriad of picture perfect moments to capture. We invite you to get out and explore these places and share your experience by entering up to three photos into the Share the Experience Photo Contest. This year in celebration of these special places, we’ve included two exciting categories and you can enter your 3 images in only one category or both.

You can enter your photos in the Federal Recreation Lands Pass Category for a chance to have your winning photo adorn the 2011 Federal Recreation Lands Pass, earn you an Olympus E-3 DSLR Camera Kit and a trip to a Federal Recreation Area of your choice. There are fourteen chances to win national recognition and many great prizes.

You can also enter the America at Its Best Category. This special category is being included to acknowledge the PBS special by Ken Burns entitled, “National Parks — America’s Best Idea.” … Take a photo in any of the federal recreation lands that you believe showcases “America at Its Best.” The winning photo will be featured in an issue of Parks magazine and the winner of this one time category will receive an Olympus E-30 DSLR camera kit and the Ken Burns “National Parks – America’s Best Idea” DVD and companion book.

Share the Experience

Tango

On September 30th, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added 76 new items to its “List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”, for safeguarding and preservation. The “Intangible” list is a companion to UNESCO’s World Heritage list, which focuses on physical sites worldwide. Submitted jointly by member states Argentina and Uruguay, the “symbolic universe” of tango was among the traditions added to the list. Tango is a deep-rooted tradition of dance, poetry and song, tied closely to the Rio de la Plata region of the two countries, and remains popular in competition, for pleasure, and for health – doctors worldwide are experimenting with tango as dance therapy to treat problems ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to phobias and marital breakdowns. (29 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

The Big Picture is one of those web sites — and this feature on the Tango especially — when you just think: How did we live before the internet?

100 photographs that changed the world

NewMexiKen posts this every September 12, so no need to be different this — the seventh — year. Here’s what I wrote three years ago:

View 28 of the 100 Photographs that Changed the World, originally from Life magazine. NewMexiKen has posted this link each year on this date and I hesitated this morning. I mean, why repeat it for the fourth time?

I then went and looked at the 28 photos and said to myself, “Oh, that’s why.”

Hiroshima, 64 years ago

Tomorrow, August 6th, marks 64 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan by the United States at the end of World War II. Targeted for military reasons and for its terrain (flat for easier assessment of the aftermath), Hiroshima was home to approximately 250,000 people at the time of the bombing. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 4,000 kg (8,900 lb) uranium bomb codenamed “Little Boy”. At 8:15 am, Little Boy was dropped from 9,400 m (31,000 ft) above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 600 m (2,000 ft) above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 64 kg (141 lbs) of uranium. Of that 64 kg, only .7 kg (1.5 lbs) underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was converted into energy – an explosive energy that seared everything within a few miles, flattened the city below with a massive shockwave, set off a raging firestorm and bathed every living thing in deadly radiation. Nearly 70,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 70,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950. Today, Hiroshima houses a Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum near ground zero, promoting a hope to end the existence of all nuclear weapons. (34 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Lightning

A weather front rolls in from the horizon, storm clouds darken the sky, and (at least 1.3 billion times a year) lightning strikes. Last month, the National Weather Service promoted their Lightning Safety Week, with information designed to call attention to safe practices, helping people avoid lightning strikes which kill an average of 100 people every year. While the exact nature of the initial formation of lightning remains a subject of debate, what is known is that lightning strikes are caused by electrical imbalances present in the clouds. Those imbalances correct themselves suddenly, with an often spectacular light show – which I’ve tried to show here, with a handful of recent photographs of lightning from around the world. (26 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com