Here’s a photo titled “New Orleans Streetcar” by Bob Chamblee:
This is a streetcar in New Orleans traveling back towards The Quarter on St. Charles Ave. I held the camera against the window sill, making sure to divide the image equally between the inside and the outside.
I was in New Orleans a couple of months ago, and now I’m kind of wishing I’d thought of this.
This photo is part of The Big Picture’s selections from this year’s National Geographic Photo Contest.
Well would you look at that, it’s APOD time again.
In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism – a part of the sky identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts. The new star was visible for months and is thought to be the earliest recorded supernova. This multiwavelength composite image from orbiting telescopes of the 21st century, XMM-Newton and Chandra in X-rays, and Spitzer and WISE in infrared, shows RCW 86, understood to be the remnant of that stellar explosion. The false-color view traces interstellar gas heated by the expanding supernova shock wave at X-ray energies (blue and green) and interstellar dust radiating at cooler temperatures in infrared light (yellow and red).
Absolutely insane story and absolutely insane photos from No Promise of Safety:
This morning was a long time coming. The bridge had been at the tippy top of my to-do list for years; the mighty Golden Gate. It is the most photographed landmark in the country, was the longest suspension span from ’37 to ’64, and is the suicide capital of the world. […]
Though it was still early, a bit before dawn, the cars were coming by at decreasing intervals. After reaching the lowest point of the cable we eyed traffic and waited for a gap. After an unsuccessful attempt the previous morning my cohort and I had decided that if only one of us could get up we would not wait for the other. If spotted and called in we faced certain arrest and possible jail time. A slip of the foot could result in certain death. But We rolled the dice – flipped the coin.
Seeing no approaching lights we hit the rail and reached for the cable.
Neato photo of dewdrops on a spider’s web by Patrick Pieul for AFP / Getty Images. Via MSNBC’s PhotoBlog.
According to MSNBC’s PhotoBlog, this shot by AP photographer Keith Srakocic shows Pittsburgh Pirates players Casey McGehee (left) and Garrett Jones (right) nearly avoiding a collision while trying to cover a fly ball.
I maintain that this photo was taken in the middle of some elaborate high five routine.
Stunning photo on APOD yesterday:
Pictured, behind this darker cloud, is a pileus iridescent cloud, a group of water droplets that have a uniformly similar size and so together diffract different colors of sunlight by different amounts. The above image was taken just after the picturesque sightwas noticed by chance by a photographer in Ethiopia. A more detailed picture of the same cloud shows not only many colors, but unusual dark and wavy bands whose origins are thought related to wave disturbances in the cloud.
Justin L. Fowler, a staff photographer for Illinois’s The State-Journal Register, took some shots of this year’s Illinois State Fair. But he did so in an unusual way:
If you noticed the photographs from today’s Heartland have a different look to them, it’s because they were all taken with a lens made out of plastic. None of that fancy glass from Canon that we usually work with; these were taken with a $25 plastic lens called a Holga.
The original Holga was a plastic “toy” camera that shot 120mm medium format film. I first came to love the camera when I was college and my photojournalism professor gave us an assignment to shoot with toy cameras. The assignment was an exercise in concentrating on the image itself, all you could really do was compose and push the shutter button. You had no control, and that is what made it beautiful.
The cameras produced less-than-stellar photographs in a technical sense. It leaked light on the film causing inconsistent results and you had no control over exposure. Just a setting for cloudy or sunny and the shutter button. That was about it, and I loved it. It was just about you as a photographer — no messing around with camera settings or lenses. Just you, the light in front of you and your subject.
Only problem with that camera nowadays is that it shoots film and medium-format film at that. Neither is easy to find or get processed in Springfield. Thus, my Holga has been collecting dust on my shelf at home, retired like many film cameras. That is until I found that they were selling the Holga lenses with a Canon mount, which meant I could use it on my digital cameras.
This shot in particular, called “Butterflied Sunset,” is absolutely gorgeous.
Here’s a photo of a boy swimming in Islamabad, Pakistan, taken by Muhammed Muheisen of the AP.
UPDATE: I’m being told that this is in fact a picture of two boys. I regret the error.
(Via MSNBC’s PhotoBlog, which posted this photo with the unfortunate title “At swim, two boys.”
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This photograph of Nicki Minaj performing on Good Morning America, taken by Jemal Countess for Getty Images, is not explainable in this universe.
Seriously, the first time I saw this, I thought the Dots thing on the right side of the pic was a balloon, like the gold thing it’s on also appears to be.
I only realized just now that they’re SOCKS. ON ANOTHER PAIR OF LEGS. COMING FROM OUT OF THE FRAME. WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE
(Via MSNBC’s PhotoBlog, where for inscrutable reasons Jonathan Woods thought it would be classy to pair this shot with one of Minaj brandishing fried chicken.)
Stunning photo taken by Jaipal Singh for the European Pressphoto Agency and sent to my RSS reader by MSNBC’s PhotoBlog.
A worker prepares the kite thread on the road side in the northern Indian city of Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir on Tuesday, August 2. The kite string or the ‘dorr’ is made of crushed glass, glue, colors and egg on the thread to make it strong enough to hold the kite. Kite flying is a passion not only in India but all over the world.
Yes, if you look closely, you’ll see that those diffuse rays are strings.
