TimeGuessr
Where and when were these photographs taken?
It’s like that Chronophoto game I linked to with an added dimension of location.
Where and when were these photographs taken?
It’s like that Chronophoto game I linked to with an added dimension of location.
A search engine for images and audio that’s either under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.
This is a fun game—with the same kind of appeal as that Wiki History Game I linked to—where you have to locate photographs in time.
In a way, I find these pictures—taken by someone from the ground with regular equipment—just as awe-inspiring as the images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.
A non-profit foundation dedicated to long-term digital preservation.
Imagine if we could place ourselves 100 years into the future and still have access to the billions of photos shared by millions of people on Flickr, one of the best documented, broadest photographic archives on the planet.
The Flickr Foundation represents our commitment to stewarding this digital, cultural treasure to ensure its existence for future generations.
Its first act is the renewal of the Flickr Commons.
Beautifully restored high-resolution photographs of the Earth taken by Apollo astronauts.
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.
Episode three of the Clearleft podcast is here!
This one is a bit different. Whereas previous episodes focused on specific topics—design systems, service design—this one is a case study. And, wow, what a case study! The whole time I was putting the episode together, I kept thinking “The team really did some excellent work here.”
I’m not sure what makes more sense: listen to the podcast episode first and then visit the site in question …or the other way around? Maybe the other way around. In which case, be sure to visit the website for Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.
That’s right—Clearleft got to work with London’s Natural History Museum! A real treat.
This episode of the podcast ended up being half an hour long. It should probably be shorter but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any of the insights that Helen, James, Chris, and Trys were sharing. I’m probably too close to the subject matter to be objective about it. I’m hoping that others will find it equally fascinating to hear about the process of the project. Research! Design! Dev! This has got it all.
I had a lot of fun with the opening of the episode. I wanted to create a montage effect like the scene-setting opening of a film that has overlapping news reports. I probably spent far too long doing it but I’m really happy with the final result.
And with this episode, we’re halfway through the first season of the podcast already! I figured a nice short run of six episodes is enough to cover a fair bit of ground and give a taste of what the podcast is aiming for, without it turning into an overwhelming number of episodes in a backlog for you to catch up with. Three down and three to go. Seems manageable, right?
Anyway, enough of the backstory. If you haven’t already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should do that. Then do these three things in whichever order you think works best:
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.
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.
Do you have a favourite non-personal photograph?
By non-personal, I mean one that isn’t directly related to your life; photographs of family members, friends, travel (remember travel?).
Even discounting those photographs, there’s still a vast pool of candidates. There are all the amazing pictures taken by photojournalists like Lee Miller. There’s all the awe-inspiring wildlife photography out there. Then there are the kind of posters that end up on bedroom walls, like Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss.
One of my favourite photographs of all time has music as its subject matter. No, not Johnny Cash flipping the bird, although I believe this picture to be just as rock’n’roll.
This is a photograph of Séamus Ennis and Jean Ritchie. It was probably taken around 1952 or 1953 by Ritchie’s husband, George Pickow, when Jean Ritchie and Alan Lomax were in Ireland to do field recordings.
I love everything about it.
Séamus Ennis looks genuinely larger than life (which, by all accounts, he was). And just look at the length of those fingers! Meanwhile Jean Ritchie is equally indominatable, just as much as part of the story as the musician she’s there to record.
Both of them have expressions that convey how intent they are on their machines—Ennis’s uilleann pipes and Ritchie’s tape recorder. It’s positively steampunk!
What a perfect snapshot of tradition and technology meeting slap bang in the middle of the twentieth century.
Maybe that’s why I love it so much. One single photograph is filled with so much that’s dear to me—traditional Irish music meets long-term archival preservation.
These are great photos of the speakers at Beyond Tellerrand—great captures of Sharon, Cassie, and Charlotte.
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.
A nice standalone tool for picking colours out of photos, and generating a colour palette from the same photo.
A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.
An interesting way of navigating through a massive amount of archival imagery from NASA.
Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders describe the overview effect they experienced on the Apollo 8 mission …and that photo.
PIctures of computers (of the human and machine varieties).