Archive for the 'Art' category

Some abstract images of sand. Shot in Lagoa do Peixe (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) in 2008. To me, they looked a little like some satellite photos of the planet Mars.

Click on the thumbnails if you want to access the 1280*1024 versions

Those photos can be used freely for your own wallpaper (on your own computer).

We do not often see the sceenplay of a movie we like. Maybe it’s fortunate because they are hardly exhilarating except when they come from Alfred Hitchcock (the man was a maniac of detailed preparation) or when they describe all about animation movies.

The Wall, the Alan Parker movie created with the eponymous music album from Pink Floyd stays a monument of moving images. But, now, you can look at the pages of Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe, the original screenplay (in PDF).

The most powerful super-computer in Europe (and the 13th in the World), MareNostrum, is located in Barcelona, Spain, and has been installed in an old chapel. This gives us the most beautiful supercomputer in the world (this is nearly computer soft-pron photo).

 

 

Photos by Simon Norfolk and Ronald Halbe. Barcelona, Centro Nacional de Supercomputación.

For those who did not notice, a disproportionately large majority of the titles to Woody Allen movies are written in one and only one font: Windsor.

Apparently, this comes from a conversation with Ed Benguiat, famous American typographer, where Allen wanted to know what a good typeface was.

Source: KitBlog.

Some musical scores are really out-of-this world:

• One musical score drawing up the map of the whole world:

Play Song

Buy Song: World Beat Music

• PI, the mathematical constant, can easily be transformed into a curious musical score may be honoring the memory of Bach and Pythagoras:

• But I really love the work of Atushi Ojisama:

One of the greatest minds and authors of the 20th Century just died. Arthur C. Clarke was very well known for some of his highly acclaimed books (think about 2001: A Space Odyssey and the collaboration with Stanley Kubrik on the movie with the same name). Some of them were only known to Science Fiction fans (Rendez-vous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise, for example).

But Sir Arthur C. Clarke was also the author of significant steps for science like the observation that geostationary satellites would be the practical solution to many telecommunication issues. I can vividly remember my reading of Interplanetary Flight; an introduction to astronautics, where in 1950 he stated very clearly concepts like the multi-stage rocket or the geostationary satellite and why they should be prefered to other technical solutions.

The old man (born on 16 December 1917) was living in Sri Lanka where he appreciated the leisure of all-year-long scuba diving.

Science Fiction can no longer be the same after he left us.

Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90 from respiratory complications linked to the post-polio syndrome that forced him into a wheelchair for his last years.

HDR photography (High Dynamic Range Photo) is a process where you take several photo pictures with very different exposures (different speeds or different apertures) and then use a software to pack them into one image packing the whole range of light. The result is often a little erie but allows to take images impossible to catch in any other circumstance.

Good examples come from the Japan HDR group on Flickr, like the following.

But if you want to test your capacity at this, I suggest you dig into the following links:

• How to Create Professional HDR Images in Photoshop
• HDR photos with the GIMP
• Using the GIMP exposure-blend plugin

Whatever your software package, you should find something to use.

If like me your a photographer who wouldn’t dare making a video, you still can think about doing a decent time-lapse sequence out of your photographs. However, this cannot happen just by taking images and loading them into a software.

You must start by studying the lessons from PhotoJojo.com’s Ultimate Guide to Time-Lapse Photography.

When you think that you’ve mastered the technique, you can think again and look at the following example created by Lucas Oleniuk, photographer of the Toronto Star. Taking 20,000 of his still photographs, he built a 20-days sequence re-hashing the issue of global warming for us.

Direct link to video

Boris Bendikov

In the center of Brussels (near Rogier metro station), Dexia, a French bank opened its new building. 38 levels, 100,000+ LEDs and you get one of the most colourful urban vista in the world. At night.

Source: CreativeReview.

A design of Lim Sun Liang that was worth a Red Dot Design Award 2006 for its innovative concept in which water flows magically from a ring cut inside the heart of the faucet.

As far as I know, you cannot buy this kind of faucet.