Mojave 2010

I was out in the Mojave last week, and it was spectacular.  I'm not sure how long the green lasts, but if it's anything like Eastern Washington's desert, not too long.  The temperature was in the 80's and I drove around with the windows down, completely alone on the roads.

Snow in Old Town

The DC area, along with much of the East Coast, got blanketed by a goodly amount of snow today, and I went out with my new Canon S90 camera and took a few photos.  FWIW, this is the best camera I have ever owned, including my old Nikon SLR and its bagful of prime lenses.  The S90's optics and sensor are superb (well, for a point and shoot.  Actually, for a lot of DSLR's too.), but what sets it apart is its wonderful controls.  It's even better than my old-school Yashica T4 Super, and for those in the know, that should be enough said. Go and get one before they stop making it, because it's a classic.  But don't just take my word for it...

blow up

Nikon's Small World Photo Contest

Coolography

See The Curvature of the Earth edition

Sunrise, Sunset

A six-month pin-hole camera exposure, showing the sun's track from summer to winter solstice.

Somewhat more... insanely, the same guy has a book of photos taken from inside his mouth. Can't imagine that one is flying off the shelves.

To infinity and beyond

Pentagon City Metro station in motion by Flickr user M.V. Jantzen

DCist posts a very nice photo of the day

London from above at night

Here are some very nice photos of London at night by Jason Hawkes.

very cool

Some very cool photographs: Lightmark

Lovely

Kathleen Connally's photoblog A Walk Through Durham Township has always been a favorite of mine. She really hit one out of the park with Early Snow #1.

Nifty Photos

Rodney Smith Photographs

Photoshop Color Tweaking

How to use photoshop to match the colors in your digital photos to the color schemes in classical paintings.

Bridges

I agree with Brit that bridges are wonderful. Here are some of my favorite images:


The Golden Gate Bridge is awesome(e.g.), but above is a fantastic shot by Thomas Hawk of it's child of a lessor god neighbor.

The Sydney Harbor bridge at night

The Tallest Bridge in the World

I'm dizzy

The Escheresque Pictures of Seb Przd.

Pictures of the Day

Wikipedia has a nice picture of the day archive. From April 27:

Boulevard du Temple, the first photograph of a person, taken by Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839 in Paris, France. The scene is of a busy street, but the city traffic does not appear due to the ten-minute long exposure time. The exception is a man in the lower left corner, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show.

Photo credit: Louis Daguerre

And from April 28,

False-color detail of Jupiter's atmosphere, imaged by Voyager 1, showing the Great Red Spot and a passing white oval. The wavy cloud pattern to the left of the Red Spot is a region of extraordinarily complex and variable wave motion. To give a sense of Jupiter's scale, the white oval storm directly below the Great Red Spot is approximately the same diameter as Earth.

Photo credit: Voyager 1

What a great bunch of blogs

And I mean that sincerely. In a moment of weakness, I have let my crusty, ironic-hipster guard down and a single tear has issued forth from my jaundiced eye. Why now? An act of kindness from Duck, no less. No good deed etc., so go read the Daily Duck too and stick your thumb into their 37,200 comment-old Darwin debate.

Via Yahoo!'s picks, here is The Criterion Contraption, in which Mathew Dessem sets out to watch every DVD in the Criterion Collection, the hallmark of film auteurs. I like high-concept blogs (previously, The Hunt for the Best Taco in LA and the guys who went to every bar with a liquor license within Seattle's city limits) and I've always been searching for the perfect conceit to pull off on my own (something where you put # in the title of every post). No such luck yet (although I've tried before), but just like Mrs. Right and the last unicorn, I'm sure it's out there somewhere.

And not only does Mr. Dessem have a great concept, but he delivers the goods. What more would you have to say after reading his review of Rushmore?

Rushmore plays out as most love triangles do, at least when one of the men is a teenager and the other is in the middle of a midlife crisis. Which is to say: unpredictably. I defy even confirmed Wes Anderson haters not to enjoy Max and Herman's revenge montage, which begins with Max letting live bees into Herman's hotel room and ends with prison. At three minutes long, it's a model of economy. Usually, montages elide scenes that would be dull if seen in full (imagine watching one of Rocky's full training sessions). In this case, however, Anderson takes scenes that would be much longer in any normal film and compresses the hell out of them. And it's not just plot that happens here; we learn a lot about Blume from his that sonovabitch smile when he realizes Max is responsible for his bee stings:

Seeing Murray's face slide from the above expression into one that says, roughly, "Max Fischer is gonna pay," is one of the film's great moments. Particularly when it's set to the music of The Who, it seems, revenge can be a terrific amount of fun.

Nothing, that's what.

PS, for what it's worth, A Quick One While He's Away is one of my favorite Who songs, and it is the second best song in Rushmore's excellent soundtrack after The Kinks's Nothing in This World Will Stop Me from Worrying About That Girl. Also, here's my only proof that Anderson doesn't always remake the same movie over again. Oh wait...

Moving along, I've been wading through the wonderful archives of if charlie parker was a gunslinger, there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats, the neplusultra of # in a series blogs. Try out tricky: scenes from a life, the art of jazz, or they were collaborators.

Rarely Seen Shuttle Photos

Dark Roasted has a nice post of rarely seen shuttle photos. The one above is of the external fuel tank arriving via a special barge from Missouri.

Nice Photos

Pictures from the sky.

Souvenirs

Michael Hughes's Souvenirs.

'Mericans'n'Guns

Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes:

Fleming: I was born and raised 12 miles down the road from where Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were ambushed and killed -- this was in 1935. As a result of that incident, Northern Louisiana gained a reputation for being a very violent part of the world. And indeed, everybody -- that I knew anyway -- had at least two guns; a shotgun, and a .22 rifle. But these weapons were looked upon mostly as implements for harvesting food, mutch like you do with hoes, rakes, shovels, and things like that. Because they were used to take wild game. And in a country at that time where there was no electricity, no trains to speak of, you couldn't buy anything. If you didn't grow it or kill it yourself, you didn't eat. So everybody that I new of, went out to hunt for food and shells were expensive -- it was on the edge of the depression, shortly before World War II and people learned to practice gun economy, i guess you would say. People took care of guns, guns were cherished ... and you didn't mess with somebody's gun. They were used as something to acquire food. That was all they were used for. This business about people shooting each other -- that has come about, I think, as a result of money being introduced into our culture. Some people didn't have any, and some people wanted some, so they went out an "liberated" it.

For me, it's a sport. I don't go very often, but when I do, I enjoy walking in the woods. I never take more animals than we can eat. I think, in a way, a gun, if it's used properly, can be a tool to teach good citizenship. Because it teaches people to be frugal, to not be wasteful, and above all, it teaches people not to waste our heritage; take what you need, but don't take any more. I like to see kids, out in the woods, doing what they do, in a way that is responsible. The more contentious among us all take their children out to the woods at a very early age and let them practice woodsmanship.

Jean: I hate guns. Don't get me started.

I always liked portraiture, and I always wanted to do a project whose thesis would be that due to American's high mobility (or at least mine) and diverse ethnicities, our common interests are more identifying than where we grew up. That's only part true, but still, it seems like the mean difference between the regions I have lived in is smaller than the distribution of differences within each region. Anyway, this book seems like a good example of that trend, using the American trait of largely superfluous gun ownership.

This is what happens when God drops acid

Bacchanalia of colors that can be lethal.

Dark Roasted Blend points to a lot of spiffy photos/images.