Anna Franz, a researcher at the the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford, has won Nikon’s first annual Small World in Motion competition with an amazing video that shows the beating heart and blood vessels of a 72-hour-old chick embryo. Franz cut a window into an egg to expose the embryo, and then carefully injected ink into the yolk sac artery in order to visualize the beating heart and the vasculature of the embryo.
Swedish photographer Göran Strand created this amazing “little planet” photo (AKA a stereographic projection) that shows the Aurora Borealis overhead. He titled it “Planet Aurora”.
17-year-old filmmaking student Sacha Powell shot this powerful slow motion film using a $500 Canon 550D/T2i, 50mm f/1.8, 18-55mm kit lens, and Sigma 70-300mm. On the software side he utilized Premiere Pro CS5, After Effects CS5.5, and Twixtor for faux slow motion. Impressive.
Photographer Alicia Rius bases much of her work around searching for “hidden treasures”. One particular series is titled “From the back seat of my car”, and consists of unplanned photographs taken from the back of abandoned cars. She writes,
The first car I found was the red one. Then, another then day while I was driving, I saw another abandoned car. I never looked for them, actually, I think they found me. I was thinking in a way to immortalize their beauty and turn the tin in something romantic. So I decided to step in… and OMG, that was really tricky! But after fighting with the spiders, the bees, hurting myself to try to squeeze my body in such a small place… it was worth it.
NASA has released another Blue Marble photograph of Earth. It calls this one the “most amazing, highest resolution image of Earth ever”. The image is a composite created from a number of photos of Earth’s surface captured on January 4, 2012, and weighs in at a massive 64-megapixels (8000×8000). You can download the full-res version here. Be warned though — it might crash your browser.
Creating tiny planets by projecting panoramic photographs onto a sphere is something you’ve probably seen before, but Dutch photographer Wouter van Buuren creates his planets a bit differently. rather than shoot panoramas from the ground, van Buuren climbs to the top of towers, cranes, skyscrapers, and bridges and points his camera in every direction below. He then takes the resulting photographs and arranges them into compact worlds. Read the rest of this entry »
The Girl With 7 Horses is a creative project by photographer Ulrika Kestere that shows a girl traveling to various landscapes in search of her “invisible horses”:
Once upon a time there was a girl who had 7 invisible horses. People thought she was crazy and that she in fact had 7 imaginative horses, but this was not the case. When autumn came the girl spent a whole day washing all her clothes. She hung them on a string in her garden to let the gentle autumn sun dry them. Out of nowhere, a terrible storm came and its fierce winds grabbed a hold of all her clothes and all seven horses (authors note: since they are invisible they obviously didn’t weigh much). The girl was devastated and spent all autumn looking for each horse spread around the country, wrapped in her clothes.
Similar to the centenarian portraits we shared earlier today, here’s a beautiful video with moving portraits (both literally and figuratively) of elderly people by photographer Simon Biswas. The piece is titled “The Light of Day”.
dpreview has published an in-depth hands-on preview of the new Fujifilm X-Pro1. The image above shows the camera next to a Leica M9-P digital rangefinder, which costs about $8,000 — body only.
It’s not rocket science to work out who Fujifilm are really gunning for – the X-Pro1′s similarity to the Leica M9 demonstrates the company’s refound confidence, having already placed the X100 squarely up against the Leica X1. It’s pretty clear that Fujifilm very much sees the X-Pro1, with its hybrid viewfinder and infinitely-variable framelines, as the modern autofocus reincarnation of the classic rangefinder. Let’s not forget that the company is no stranger to the high-end professional market – it may have had a hiatus of several years, but made a wide range of medium format film cameras.
