A Slice of Earth by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

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A slice of heart, amazing pictures by Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

Dead Flies Art

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Magnus Muhr is a Swedish photographer who presents a funny and creative gallery containing collected dead flies. A few strokes of a pencil brought the dead insects back to life.

The Sun in the Backyard by Alan Friedman

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My photographs comprise a solar diary, portraits of a moment in the life of our local star. Most are captured from my backyard in Buffalo, NY. Using a small telescope and narrow band filters I can capture details in high resolution and record movements in the solar atmosphere that change over hours and sometimes minutes. The raw material for my work is black and white and often blurry. As I prepare the pictures, color is applied and tonality is adjusted to better render the features. It is photojournalism of a sort. The portraits are real, not painted. Aesthetic decisions are made with respect for accuracy as well as for the power of the image. Alan Friedman

To record my images, I use a filter that passes only a narrow slice of the deep red end of the visible spectrum. Called a Hydrogen Alpha filter, it is attached to the front end of a small (3 ½” aperture) telescope. Think of it as a 450mm f5 telephoto lens. The camera used is an industrial webcam. It can stream images at a speed of 15 to 120 frames a second. Our atmosphere is a formidable obstacle to capturing sharp photos of a distant object. Streaming many frames in a short period of time allows me to temper the blurring effects of air turbulence. Each photo is made from many thousands of frames. Most frames are unusable, distorted by the heat currents rising from rooftops and asphalt driveways. But a few will be sharp. I review the video frame by frame for these moments of “good seeing.” The high quality frames are selected and then averaged to form the raw material for my photographs.

Speed Graphic Photos of the London 2012 Olympics by David Burnett

davidburnett_londonolympics-11Last August, photojournalist David Burnett was spotted using a large format camera at the London Olympics.

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As you can imagine, shooting sports (you only get ONE frame… there is no such thing as “FPS”… its more like “FPM”) with a Speed Graphic is challenging in and of itself. Focus is always an issue. Loading the film in a timely manner and getting yourself where you need to be, while schlepping around two different systems is a constant challenge.That said, what I hoped to do was to create a set of pictures which kind of lets the viewer know what it was like being there, more so than necessarily getting any strictly “amazing action” pictures. It’s about trying to set the tone of what it’s like, and just how you “see” the events with a fairly “normal” lens (7″ on 4×5).

I have included the 4×5 work in my repertoire since 2004, when I started shooting on the political campaigns for President. After 35 years of following politics, the “look” which I was getting with the big camera was what appealed to me. In the early digital days, we were all shooting with more or less the same camera body, the same couple of zoom lenses, and the chance to come up with a different “look” was something I found worth the extra work.

More of Burnett’s great photography.

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