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kottke.org posts about photography

The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components

a cut-away photo of a jacked-in headphone plug

a cut-away photo of a circuit board

a cut-away photo of an HDMI cable

Open Circuits is a book that takes you inside the electronic components that power the modern world, with cross sections and close-up views of things like headphone jacks, chips, circuit boards, cables, etc. Lovely images — it’s like a whole little urban world down there. Buy it now at No Starch Press, Bookshop.org, or Amazon. (via clive thompson)


Unprecedented Infrared Photos of Nearby Galaxies

a top-down view of a galaxy

a top-down view of a galaxy

I don’t know how kottke.org isn’t going to turn into a JWST-only blog — it seems like there’s some never-before-seen imagery released every other week that just absolutely knocks my socks off. Like these unprecedented images of nearby galaxies that were taken to help study how individual stars affect galactic structure.

The saying goes, ‘From a tiny acorn grows the mighty oak.’ This is accurate not just here on Earth, but in our solar system and beyond. Even on a galactic scale, where individual stars and star clusters can sculpt a galaxy’s overall structure. Scientists say NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is perfectly primed to study these phenomena, and the first data is astounding astronomers.

New imagery from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument is revealing never-before-seen details into how young, newly forming stars influence the structure of the gas and dust of nearby galaxies, and therefore how they evolve over time. Areas of galaxies that once appeared dim and dark in visible light, now under Webb’s infrared eye, are glowing cavities and huge cavernous bubbles of gas and dust.


The Winners of the 2023 Underwater Photographer of the Year Competition

several rays swimming across waxy sand

closeup of a shark's eye

group of embryonic fish still attached to their egg sacs

The winners of the 2023 Underwater Photographer of the Year competition have been announced — you can check out all of the winners here. The photos above are by Gregory Sherman, Kat Zhou, and Shane Gross. Sherman’s photo of stingrays swimming near the Cayman Islands is just spectacular; I can’t stop looking at it. (via colossal & petapixel)


Muleskinning and the Art of Slowing Down

a man sitting on a wagon being pulled by two mules

When I saw a link to Lisa Whiteman’s photo essay on “muleskinning”, I was like oh dear god what am I getting myself into here. But it turns out that a muleskinner is a mule driver, particularly one who travels by mule in groups.

I met Ronald in 2009, when I attempted to make a shot-but-never-finished documentary about him and a group of his muleskinner friends who regularly take recreational road trips across North Carolina. A “muleskinner” is the term used for a mule driver, but it also refers to the microculture of the caravan. They pull over at night to sleep on farms and in the yards of churches and friends, their sleeping bags or old quilts laid out in the backs of their wagons. They open up a can of Beanee Weenee, or splurge on a “fish dinner” — what they affectionately call a tin of sardines. Sometimes they chase it down with a few sips of homemade moonshine they’ve brought in Mason jars, sitting around a campfire and telling stories they’ve shared a thousand times.

A lovely story and photos of a US subculture I knew nothing about until today. You can check out more of Whiteman’s work on her website or on Instagram.


New Massive Image of the Milky Way with 3.32 Billion Individual Objects

image of part of the Milky Way with 3.32 billion individually identifiable objects

small portion of an image of part of the Milky Way with 3.32 billion individually identifiable objects

Thanks to a planet-wide collaboration, scientists have released an image of the Milky Way that contains 3.32 billion individually identifiable objects, most of which are stars.

Gathering the data required to cover this much of the night sky was a Herculean task; the DECaPS2 survey identified 3.32 billion objects from over 21,400 individual exposures. Its two-year run, which involved about 260 hours of observations, produced more than 10 terabytes of data.

Most of the stars and dust in the Milky Way are located in its spiral disk — the bright band stretching across this image. While this profusion of stars and dust makes for beautiful images, it also makes the galactic plane challenging to observe. The dark tendrils of dust seen threading through this image absorb starlight and blot out fainter stars entirely, and the light from diffuse nebulae interferes with any attempts to measure the brightness of individual objects. Another challenge arises from the sheer number of stars, which can overlap in the image and make it difficult to disentangle individual stars from their neighbors.

It’s worth checking out the largest size of the image published on the web (which is actually much smaller than the image’s actual size) as well as a tiny portion of the full image (second image above) that shows just how much detail is there. A zoomable interface for the entire image is available here.


James Webb Telescope’s Incredibly Deep View of the Universe

an image of thousands of galaxies taken by the James Webb Space Telescope

The European Space Agency has released a gobsmacking deep field image of thousands of galaxies taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

A crowded field of galaxies throngs this Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, along with bright stars crowned with Webb’s signature six-pointed diffraction spikes. The large spiral galaxy at the base of this image is accompanied by a profusion of smaller, more distant galaxies which range from fully-fledged spirals to mere bright smudges. Named LEDA 2046648, it is situated a little over a billion light-years from Earth, in the constellation Hercules.

I know we’ve seen deep field images from the Hubble, but I don’t know how you can tire of looking at actual images created by human technology that shows thousands of galaxies, billions of years, trillions of stars, quadrillions of planets, untold numbers of potential intelligences & civilizations, and who really knows what else. It boggles the mind, every time.

You can download/view a massive high-res copy of this image right here.

Update: Here’s a video that zooms in from a wide view of the Milky Way all the way into galaxy LEDA 2046648 pictured above.

Wow. (via @cparnot)


Sunburn Photographic Printing

an arm with a photo 'sunburnt' onto it with a UV light

a person's back with a photo 'sunburnt' onto it with a UV light

a person's stomach with a photo 'sunburnt' onto it with a UV light

For his project Illustrated People, Thomas Mailaender imprinted photographic images onto people’s skin by shining a UV light through negatives. The visual effect created is not unlike that of a sunburn but it goes away as soon as the skin is exposed to light. I wonder…does it hurt like a sunburn?


The Minimalist Photography Awards for 2022

a murmuration of starlings

a red and gray building with a cloud

two sets of footprints come together in the sand and then diverge again

a dark road disappears into a cloud in the distance

Some really nice work amongst the winners and runners up of the Minimalist Photography Awards for 2022. I’ve included a few favorites of mine above (from top to bottom: Daniel Dencescu, Gleici Rufatto, Julie Kenny, and Alexandre Caetano).


Light Painted Landscapes

a bright circle of light over a rocky desert landscape

bright diagonal lines of light over a rocky desert landscape

It’s been a bit since we’ve checked in on artist Reuben Wu, who uses drones to paint (sculpt?) with light in the sky over dark landscapes. Most of his recent stuff seems to be video on his Instagram account but I pulled a couple of photos of his that I haven’t featured before. Always inspiring stuff worth exploring.


How to Find the Rare Green Comet in the Night Skies

photo of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

A comet called Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is currently visible in northern skies with the naked eye and here’s how you can catch a glimpse for yourself.

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is currently making its way through the northern skies and should reach its brightest magnitude in early February, according to In-The-Sky.org as it approaches perigee on Feb. 1. To see the comet for yourself, look to the north just after sunset and look for a faint greenish glow. Under the right dark sky conditions, the comet could be visible to the unaided eye, but binoculars will certainly make the job easier.

The comet last visited the Earth about 50,000 years ago and this may be its last visit before it leaves the solar system for good. The unusual green color results from a rare chemical reaction:

The comet itself isn’t green, but its head does appear to glow green thanks to a somewhat rare chemical reaction. The glow likely comes from diatomic carbon (C2) — a simple molecule made of two carbon atoms bonded together. When ultraviolet light from the sun breaks this molecule down, it emits a greenish glow that can last for several days, according to a 2021 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This eerie light disappears before making its way to the comet’s tail, or coma, which is made of gas. That gas is once again a result of solar radiation - in this case, sunlight causes part of the comet to sublimate, or transition from a solid into a gas without entering a liquid state. That gas streaks behind the comet, often glowing blue from the ultraviolet light.

The best, brightest views of the comet will be right around Feb 1, when it will be near the constellation Camelopardalis (almost due north, in the general vicinity of the Big and Little Dippers) right after sunset — use an app like Sky Guide to help find it. It’s cloudy here in Vermont until Friday…I’m going to try to catch a glimpse of it then.

Amazing photo of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) above by Dan Bartlett.


Magnificent Black & White Photos of the Earth Rising Over the Moon

black and white photo of the Earth rising over the surface of the Moon

black and white photo of the Earth rising over the surface of the Moon

South Korea currently has a probe called Danuri orbiting the Moon at an altitude of about 62 miles above the surface. It’s just begun its mission but has already sent back some black & white photos of the Moon and the Earth, including the two above. Over at EarthSky, Dave Adalian says these shots “rival the work of legendary nature photographer Ansel Adams” and it’s difficult to disagree.

Also worth a look: Danuri’s shot of the Earth and Moon from a distance, hanging in the blackness of space like a pair of pearls. (via petapixel)


Tiny Seawater Worlds

tiny plankton in a drop of seawater

tiny plankton in a drop of seawater

Smithsonian Magazine is featuring some incredible photos from Angel Fitor’s SeaDrops project: microphotography of tiny plankton-populated worlds contained in drops of seawater.

It took Fitor three years of surgically precise work to get the jewel-like images you see here. First, he would take a boat out on the Mediterranean Sea and dive in to collect water samples, usually 30 to 50 feet below the surface. He’d bring the samples straight back to his home studio in the coastal village of Alicante, south of Valencia on Spain’s eastern coast. Then he’d get straight to work: When copepods die, they quickly lose their color and look like dull brown beetles. Fitor wanted to capture the vivid blues and golds of the living organisms, and he wanted to show them in action just as he does when he photographs any other marine animal.

You can check out more of Fitor’s work on Instagram and his website.


Glendalis: The Life and World of a Youngest Daughter

a young girl in a white hat poses next to a car with flames painted on the hood

For 10 years beginning in the late 90s, photographer Angela Cappetta captured the goings-on of a multi-generational Puerto Rican family living on NYC’s Lower East Side, focusing particularly on the youngest daughter, Glendalis. From a recent piece in the New Yorker by Ana Karina Zatarain:

The neighborhood was different then. During those years, just before a fierce wave of gentrification hit the area, the photographer Angela Cappetta often rose at dawn to roam the streets, a Fuji 6x9 camera in hand. (“I still use it,” she told me. “It looks fake, like a toy.”) It was on one of those mornings that Cappetta encountered a clan that reminded her of her own upbringing, within a multigenerational family of Italian immigrants, in Connecticut. As a child, Cappetta was shepherded among various homes by aunts, uncles, and older cousins-a constant and frenetic flow of relatives. The family she met that day, Puerto Rican New Yorkers living on multiple floors of a tenement building on Stanton Street, had a similar dynamic. Instinctively, she began placing each member in their role. “I looked at this beatific, beautiful family, and I thought, Yeah, I relate to this,” she recalled.


A Bonkers Highway Interchange

Well, would you look at this great photo by Rob Antill of the amazing Takaosan Interchange located in Sagamihara, Japan. It’s like Bézier curves meets highway engineering meets Euler’s Seven Bridges of Königsberg meets Mr. Messy.

See also Aerial Photos Reveal the Sculptural Beauty of Japanese Highway Interchanges, Crazy Whirlpool Traffic Interchange in Dubai, and The Flipper Bridge.


A Collection of Sidewalk Stamps

a sidewalk stamps that reads 'Jeffrey & Bufton 1910'

a sidewalk stamps that reads 'The Hinchman Renton Co. Denver'

a sidewalk stamps that reads 'Carelli Concrete Const. Co. 1957'

Written in Stone is a collection of photos of stamps and seals imprinted in sidewalks by the people and companies who made them. Great examples of vernacular design.

Update: See also Easy Bay Sidewalk Stamps. (via @presentcorrect)


The Winners of the 2022 Close-Up Photographer of the Year Awards

an insect eats holes in a leaf

a white bird stares straight into the camera

three tiny fungi perch on a thorn

a spider rests on top of water below some trees

The results of the 4th annual Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition have been announced and you can take a look at the top 100 images right here. I’ve included a few of my favorites above from photographers Minghui Yuan, Alex Pansier, Andy Sands, and Szűcs Boldizsár. (thx, jodi)


Winners of the 2022 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition

a ball of bumble bees

a mud-covered crocodile sits nearly unseen in the mud

a white stoat leaps in the snow

surrounded by trees, a back-lit bat flies in the night sky

an abstract and colorful swirl of algae

The annual BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition put on by the California Academy of Sciences has announced the winners of the 2022 competition. As usual, I have selected a few of my favorites and included them above; photos by Karine Aigner, Jens Cullmann, Jose Grandio, Sitaram Raul, and Sergio Tapia.


Winners of the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

a raccoon, waving

one penguin gesturing to another, as if to say 'talk to the hand'

a salmon hitting a bear upside the head

a bird chasing a bull from behind so that it looks like Pegasus

The annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are always a good time and 2022’s competition is no exception. You can peruse the winners and the finalists here. My favorites above are by (from top to bottom) Miroslav Srb, Jennifer Hadley, John Chaney, and Jagdeep Rajput, whose photo captures the wingspan of the sarus crane, the tallest flying bird in the world (up to 5’11”, which is almost as tall as I am!)


A Tour of Legendary Club CBGBs by Photographer David Godlis

A short animated film about photographer David Godlis, who documented the glory days of CBGB, ground zero for the punk & new wave scene in the late 1970s.

Between 1976 and 1980, young Manhattan photographer David Godlis documented the nightly goings-on at the Bowery’s legendary CBGB, “the undisputed birthplace of punk rock,” with a vividly distinctive style of night photography.

You can check out some of Godlis’s photos on his website. (via open culture)


Some of the Best Moon & Earth Photos from NASA’s Artemis I Mission

photo of the Moon and Earth with the Artemis I spacecraft in the foreground

photo of the Moon and Earth with the Artemis I spacecraft in the foreground

close-up of the lunar surface

photo of the Earth with the Artemis I spacecraft in the foreground

close-up of the lunar surface

photo of the Moon with the Artemis I spacecraft in the foreground

photo of the Moon and Earth with the Artemis I spacecraft in the foreground

Over the weekend, NASA’s Artemis I mission returned from a 25-day trip to the Moon. The mission was a test-run of the rockets, systems, and spacecraft that will return humans to the surface of the Moon. Visual imaging has been an integral part of even the earliest space missions — strap a camera to a spacecraft, let the people see what space looks like, and they will be inspired. Well, the photographs returned by Artemis I’s Orion spacecraft have certainly been inspirational. Working from NASA’s archive of images (on Flickr too), I’ve selected some of the most interesting and dramatic photos from the mission. The one at the top, showing a crescent Earth rising over the Moon’s surface, might be one of my favorite space photos ever (and that’s really saying something) — you can see a bigger version of it here.


Genetic Portraits: Split Multi-Generational Portraits of Family Members

Genetic Portraits

Genetic Portraits

Genetic Portraits

I’m not going to actually look, but I’ve probably featured Ulric Collette’s series Genetic Portraits here before. Collette photographed family members in the same pose and then digitally stitched them together. The resemblances and differences between family members are fascinating. (via jenni leder)

Update: A similar series by Bobby Neel Adams. (via @geedix)

Update: See also these similar paintings by Daevid Anderson.


Flamingos From Above

a flock of flamingos from overhead

a flock of flamingos from overhead

The flamingo’s vibrant color makes it a particularly striking bird to take photographs of, especially from the air — the pink really pops against the dark background of the water. Photographer Raj Mohan showcases this in his beautiful photos of flamingos at Pulicat Lake in India.

The annual flamingo festival is held in the month of January, and it is said that about 18 to 20 flamingo groups are distributed across the lake with each group having 700 to 800 birds. This pink flock congregation makes lake Pulicat a pink heaven.

You might remember that flamingos get their pink color from eating halophile dunaliella salina algae and shrimp that feel on algae. (via colossal)


The Northern Lights Photographer of the Year for 2022

a photo of the northern lights

a photo of the northern lights

Science fiction and fantasy artists could labor for a thousand years and never come up with something as beautiful and unbelievable as the aurora borealis. Nature: still undefeated. Those two shots are from the 2022 Northern Lights Photographer of the Year awards — the top one was captured by Tor-Ivar Næss in Norway and the bottom one was taken in Denmark by Ruslan Merzlyakov.


20 Iconic Photos of the Climate Crisis

a massive icreberg threatens a Greenland village

golfer play in front of massive wildfires in the Pacific Northwest

sled dogs pull a sled through water in Greenland

Gabrielle Schwarz at The Guardian has gathered 20 of the most iconic and meaningful photographs of the effects of the climate crisis. Metaphors abound. I think often of Kristi McCluer’s photograph of the golfers casually playing a round in proximity to 2017 Eagle Creek fire in the Pacific Northwest. As David Simon said at the time, “In the pantheon of visual metaphors for America today, this is the money shot.” (Iceberg photo by Magnus Kristensen and sled dog photo by Steffen Olsen.)


How Postwar Italy Created The Paparazzi

From film fan Benito Mussolini and the postwar explosion of Italian filmmaking to a financial rule with big effects and Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Evan Puschak tells the story of how the paparazzi was created.

The history of celebrity paparazzi disrupted the highly manicured image movie stars had enjoyed since the golden age of Hollywood. They brought these gods of our culture down to the messy earth. Interestingly though, this didn’t dampen our obsession with fame, as you might expect. No, it turbo charged it. Something about seeing our celebrities brought low — catching a glimpse of their flaws and pains — it didn’t push the famous off these weird pedestals we put them on. It only intensified our fixation with them.


Mars Helicopter Spots Perseverance Rover’s Landing Debris

wreckage from the landing of NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars

wreckage from the landing of NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars

On the 26th flight of Ingenuity, NASA’s helicopter on Mars, it spotted and photographed the wreckage of the Perseverance rover’s landing gear, protective shell, and parachute. From a NY Times article on the photos:

“There’s definitely a sci-fi element to it,” Ian Clark, an engineer who worked on Perseverance’s parachute system, said of photographs released on Wednesday. “It exudes otherworldly, doesn’t it?”

Part of the reason NASA had Ingenuity go take a look is to see how all of that equipment held up during the landing process. Data from the photos will inform future missions.

“Perseverance had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown,” said JPL’s Ian Clark, former Perseverance systems engineer and now Mars Sample Return ascent phase lead. “But Ingenuity’s images offer a different vantage point. If they either reinforce that our systems worked as we think they worked or provide even one dataset of engineering information we can use for Mars Sample Return planning, it will be amazing. And if not, the pictures are still phenomenal and inspiring.”

In the images of the upright backshell and the debris field that resulted from it impacting the surface at about 78 mph (126 kph), the backshell’s protective coating appears to have remained intact during Mars atmospheric entry. Many of the 80 high-strength suspension lines connecting the backshell to the parachute are visible and also appear intact. Spread out and covered in dust, only about a third of the orange-and-white parachute — at 70.5 feet (21.5 meters) wide, it was the biggest ever deployed on Mars — can be seen, but the canopy shows no signs of damage from the supersonic airflow during inflation. Several weeks of analysis will be needed for a more final verdict.

It is really remarkable, the images we’re seeing from Mars, taken by a robotic helicopter.


Clever Cutout Portraits

Rudy Willingham holds up paper cutouts of people (and Muppets!) against carefully chosen backgrounds and photographs the results, resulting in these witty portraits.

cutout portrait of Big Bird

cutout portrait of Beyonce

cutout portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

cutout portrait of Prince

You can find more of Willingham’s work across his various social media platforms: website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.


The Bagworm Caterpillar’s DIY Mobile Log Cabin

The bagworm caterpillar is quite the animal architect. In preparation for its transformation into a moth, the caterpillar builds itself a house that it carries around on its back out of materials it finds in its habitat, like sticks or leaves. When it enters the pupa stage, the caterpillar fastens the house to something solid and hunkers down inside.

a little house a bagworm caterpillar has built on its back out of twigs

a little house a bagworm caterpillar has built on its back out of twigs

a little house a bagworm caterpillar has built on its back out of twigs

I couldn’t source the top photo but the bottom two were taken by John Horstman, who has a bunch of incredible photos of bagworm caterpillar houses on Flickr. Nicky Bay has also taken many photos of bagworm caterpillar architecture.


The Best Photos From the Shot on iPhone Macro Challenge

dewdrops on a delicate spider web

closeup shot of the structure of a plant leaf

Apple recently announced the winners of a competition to highlight the best macro photos shot on the newest iPhones. Amazing photos from a phone. The camera is really the only reason I upgrade my iPhone every year…it just gets better and better.


Black Sun: Starling Murmurations

a large flock of starlings form a pattern in the sky

a large flock of starlings form a pattern in the sky

For his project Black Sun, Danish photographer Søren Solkær travelled all over Europe to capture the murmurations of migrating starlings.

The starlings move as one unified organism that vigorously opposes any outside threat. A strong visual expression is created — like that of an ink drawing or a calligraphic brush stroke — asserting itself against the sky. Shapes and black lines of condensation form within the swarm, resembling waves of interference or mathematical abstractions written across the horizon. At times the flock seems to possess the cohesive power of super fluids, changing shape in an endless flux: From geometric to organic, from solid to fluid, from matter to ethereal, from reality to dream — an exchange in which real time ceases to exist and mythical time pervades.

These photographs are also available on Instagram and in book form from Solkær’s website. (via ny times)