Awesome astrophotography from the South Downs | Science | The Guardian
To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.
Link tags: photography
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Earth Restored — Toby Ord
Beautifully restored high-resolution photographs of the Earth taken by Apollo astronauts.
Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski
This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.
At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.
Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.
Coldwater.Science
The World Ocean is as close as you can get to outer space without leaving Earth. It’s an entirely different universe, nothing like the life we have on land.
A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph | Open Culture
I wrote a while back about one of my favourite photographs but this might just give it a run for its money.
It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway.
2019-11-17 – florian.photo
These are great photos of the speakers at Beyond Tellerrand—great captures of Sharon, Cassie, and Charlotte.
The Department of Useless Images - Gerry McGovern
The Web is smothering in useless images. These clichéd, stock images communicate absolutely nothing of value, interest or use. They are one of the worst forms of digital pollution because they take up space on the page, forcing more useful content out of sight. They also slow down the site’s ability to download quickly.
NASA’s Visual Universe
An interesting way of navigating through a massive amount of archival imagery from NASA.
1969 & 70 - Bell Labs
PIctures of computers (of the human and machine varieties).
Oh Hello Ana - Colours of 2018
I love this idea of comparing human colour choices to those of a computer:
I decided to do two things: the top three most used colours of the photo decided by “a computer” and my hand picked choices. This method ended up revealing a couple of things about me.
I also love that this was the biggest obstacle to finding representative imagery:
I wanted this to be an exciting task but instead I only found repeated photos of my cat.
Nature takes over – ROMAIN THIERY | Photographe professionnel
Ballardian spaces.
Seeing Earth from Outer Space
A lovely interactive photo essay charting the results of what happens when evolution produces a life form that allows a planet to take selfies.
To Make a Book, Walk on a Book — Craig Mod
The ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.
Craig gives us a walkthrough—literally—of the process behind the beautiful Koya Bound book.
Deciding to make any book is an act of creative faith (and ego and hubris, but these aren’t all exclusionary). But before Dan and I sold any copies of Koya Bound, we walked atop the pages that would become the book, not really knowing if there existed an audience for the book.
Control Panel | Flickr
Photos of analogue interfaces: switches, knobs, levers, dials, buttons, so many buttons.
Functional Minimalism for Web Design
According to this, the forthcoming Clearleft redesign will be totally on fleek.
Saving you bandwidth on Google+ through machine learning
This is an interesting use of voodoo magic (or “machine learning” as we call it now) by Google to interpolate data in a small image to create a larger version. A win for performance.
NASA – Past and Present Dreams of the Future | Benedict Redgrove
A selection from an ongoing photography project—seven years and counting—leading up to the launch of the Orion project.
Psiu Puxa Wallpapers
Yummy wallpapers for your desktop, tablet, and phone, from NASA and ESA.
Beyond Work
An ongoing photography project from Curtis:
Beyond Work tells stories about humans at work, with no judgement or glorification. It’s an attempt at unearthing the social, cultural and functional world of work, that’s become invisible in everyday life.