Time-lapse of a night at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array site in Chile, from two vantage points.
Category Archives: photography
Leftovers Again?
Time-lapse Tuesday: Wild animals devour elephant
There are an estimated 6 million calories in an elephant – enough energy to keep a human sated for over eight years. But at the Tsavo West National Park in Kenya, it took wild animals just seven days to reduce a dead elephant to nothing more than a pile of bones
The More You FLIR The Better You Feel
Thermal imaging of a fart. Sorry, no smell-o-vision.
I have wondered what our social interactions would be like if we could see in that portion of the spectrum, or if methane were otherwise visible (like bromine). Fart denial would be a different animal. Not everyone produces methane, though. Would that be a source of discrimination or status?
Highlighting the Lowlights
Low light photo contest winners
For our latest competition, we asked you to turn down the lights and show us your best low light photos. Here are the winners of Macworld’s second photography contest.
The Year in Pixels
The Big Picture: The Year in Pictures . Part 1, part 2, part 3.
There are a few “what happens next is obvious” pictures in there, such as the (imminent) plane crash and bike crash (16 and 21, respectively, in part 2), or “just the right moment” pictures, which might be a little easier to capture in the digital age, because “film” is almost unlimited and free. You are able to take many pictures in rapid succession, and are more limited by battery capacity than how much film/storage you can carry, so grabbing just the right moment is a little easier. That doesn’t diminish the awesome nature of each shot, though. It just allows us to see more of them.
Why Don't You Glide?
“Pointless, action-free and totally mesmerising”
Both glides were filmed by sticking a – relatively cheap – digital camera out of the window of a train as it arrived at a station. The ‘trick’ is the camera collects images at a rate of 210 per second – but the film is played back at 30 frames per second. So, every seven seconds of footage that you watch corresponds to 1 real second. At least at the start, one real second is plenty of time for someone to move into, then out of, the camera’s field of view, but isn’t enough time for them to really do much: hence, the frozen effect. It breaks down towards the end not because I’m doing something clever with the frame rates (captured or replayed), but simply because the train was stopping! Thus, as it decelerated, any given person would be in view for longer, and have more time to point an arm, take a few steps along the platform, or maybe even notice me at the window. Any such action captured is still slowed down seven-fold during playback, just as with my usual static captures.
Neat effect. I will have to try this sometime.
Gaining an Edge(rton)
I recall seeing some stories recently, trumpeting investigations into how cats drink. Some of the data they could have used has been out there for 70 years.
National Geographic's Photography Contest 2010
National Geographic’s Photography Contest 2010
National Geographic is once again holding their annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30th. For the past eight weeks, they have been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to rate them as well. National Geographic was again kind enough to let me choose some of their entries from 2010 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected below are 47 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers.
Hidden No Longer
High-Speed Videos: The Hidden World of Insect Flight
Can’t get enough of high speed insect videos.
Let's Get Small
2010 winners of Nikon’s Small World photomicography competition