Landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd spent four years looking to create a timelapse of the aurora borealis (AKA northern lights), then finally flew two hours north from Norway and spent a week capturing one of the biggest displays in recent years. The final result is absolutely jaw-dropping.
In case you’re wondering, the stills were shot with a Canon 5D Mark II along with the Canon 24mm 1.4, Canon 16-35mm 2.8, and Sigma 12-24mm lenses.
Lyrebirds are ground-dwelling Australian birds that have the remarkable ability to mimic sounds, both natural and artificial. In addition to copying the calls of other birds, they imitate whatever they hear around them, including the sound of cameras if photographers are working nearby.
This short BBC clip features a Lyrebird that makes realistic camera shutter sounds (including the motordrive sound). It only runs 3 minutes, but if you want to skip to the camera-related part it’s at around 1m50s.
If you were given the seemingly impossible task of photographing a giant 300-foot-tall Redwood tree, how would you go about doing so? National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols chose to use raise up a special rig of three Canon 1Ds Mark II DSLR cameras into the air, photographing dozens of photographs that he stitched into a beautiful panoramic tree photo. The photograph was used as the cover photo of the October 2009 edition of the National Geographic.
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It’s always fun listening to photographers recount once-in-a-lifetime experiences that lead to once-in-a-lifetime photographs. In this short National Geographic video, photographer Brian Skerry describes what it was like to get up close and personal with a 45-foot-long whale. We only wish there was a little video to go along with his wonderful storytelling!
Think it’s difficult to muster up enough courage for street photography? At least strangers don’t eat you! This wildlife photographer got quite a scare while shooting a pride of lions when a lioness decides to investigate him. Luckily, he escapes without a scratch and now has a great story to tell his buddies.
Can anyone identify the camera and lens he’s clutching in his hand?
James Mollison‘s project James & Other Apes features an interesting series of ape portraits shot in Cameroon.
While watching a nature program on primates I was struck by their facial similarity to our own. Humans are clearly different to animals, but the great apes inhabit that grey area between man and animal. I thought it would be interesting to try to photograph gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans using the aesthetic of the passport photograph- its ubiquitous style inferring the idea of identity.
I decided against photographing in zoos or using ‘animal actors’ but traveled to Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia to meet orphans of the bush meat trade and live pet trade. [#]
Check out the “passport photos” up close on Mollison’s website.
James & Other Apes (via Photojojo)
For the BBC documentary “Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice”, special hidden cameras were designed with unobtrusiveness and durability in mind. They didn’t succeed very well in either, as the polar bears quickly detected and destroyed the pesky cameras intruding on their privacy. What they did accomplish was capturing footage showing what it looks like to have polar bears perform CPR on you. Luckily they didn’t have real photographers crouching in those domes!
(via Gizmodo)
Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky made this crazy lightning photograph by stacking a large number of separate shots. He tells us,
It was past midnight when I heard from my home at Halandri, Athens an unusual rate of thunders (one every 7-8 seconds!) coming from the Olympic Stadium area 2-3 kilometers away from my home.
Without second thought, I grabbed the camera and the tripod drove quickly to the spot. I set the camera under a tent and I started taking continuous shots. I used an intervalometer so I didn’t have to be behind the camera all the time. I even took a chance by placing my self in the field of view in one of the shots. Fifteen minutes later, it started to rain and the storm was approaching, so I found shelter under the bridge at the right. Finally after 32 minutes, among the hundreds of shots taken, I captured 51 lighting strikes (9 shots where destroyed because of the excess brightness). The photo processing was fairly simple. I stacked the 42 lighting shots with Startrails software, and did some minor improvements with Photoshop.
We’re glad he took the risk of standing in his photo — it’s not often you see one of these shots with people in them. If you want to learn more about how to create this kind of photo yourself, check out this lightning shooting tutorial we posted a while back.
Atmospheric (via Gizmodo)
Image credit: Photograph by Chris Kotsiopoulos and used with permission
National Geographic cameraman Bob Poole was in Mali searching for elephants when he and his team were engulfed by a gigantic sandstorm that spanned the horizon. The sandstorm is so massive that it blocks out the sun for four hours. Like any good cameraman, Poole keeps his camera rolling during the whole ordeal, capturing amazing footage of what it’s like to be eaten by a dust storm.
This is an amazing 1.5 hour exposure taken at the Gippsland Lakes in Australia by Phil Hart, showing both star trails and the crazy blue light given off by a bioluminescent algae called Noctiluca scintillans, commonly known as the Sea Sparkle.
The algae glows blue whenever there’s movement in the water, which there is where the waves break onto the shore. Sea Sparkles is going under Northern Lights on my list of things I’d like to see with my own eyes someday.
You can also check out some of the other photos he shot, and read about the story behind the photograph on Hart’s blog.
(via Photojojo)
Image credits: Photograph by Phil Hart
