In automobile racing, if you start from the last position, it is difficult to come back to the 1st position. But if you have the same car as the other drivers, this is even worse.
Dean Evans, in 1985 did much better than this in an Australian car race where all the competing cars were Lotus Elise: He went from the 16th and last position to the pole position within a single lap.
Watch this demonstration from a hell of a race driver:
No! This is not the title of Hollywood next horror flick. This is a sad reality around Japan. According to National Geographic, for reasons that are not entirely understood giant jellyfish like the ones photographed below are observed in great quantities.
I’m just out of eBay where I bought a second-hand Minolta 1.4x lens converter to extend a little my tele-lenses when I put them on my Sony Alpha 700 and the old faithful Konica-Minolta Dynax Maxxum 7D.
I think it is going to support me when I go to Nepal (Bardia National Park) in next October. With Alain Pons and Amawanda.
A friend of mine recently bought a copy of a Japanese wood engraving. While reading this article from BibliOdyssey, about the wood engravings of Kitagawa Utamaro, I thought I should share some of the pictures of this artist.
I consider that the most useful and often the most interesting wallpapers for your computer desktop are images that are relatively feature-less. A picture full of little details continuously grabbing your attention is a major nuisance. It’s much better to have either a very smooth image or a photo containing a lot of continuous tones.
Windows 7 official wallpapers
Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.
Fresh Impact Crater Formed between February 2005 and July 2005 Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.
Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:
800×600
1024×768
1152×864
1280×960
1440×1080
1600×1200
1920×1440
2048×1536
2560×1600
You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).
And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.
The Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin is a museum presenting a large mount of technology history. Quite naturally, they are biased toward presenting a lot of German achievements and this country is known for hosting some of the very best optical engineers and being rightfully proud of brands like Carl Zeiss, Leitz/Leica.
Charlie Sorrel wrote a piece of article for Wired.com, titled “Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras” that I intensely recommend reading.
And now, you and me can fly, really fly. Breath-taking! Boarding a plane became so down-to-Earth. I now want to have wings, I want to fly like an eagle…
I have been publishing some photos from my travel to Kenya last October, but it became apparent to me that I had forgotten to present the photos I took during a short encounter with a serval (Leptailurus serval, previously Felis serval, pronounced /ˈsÉœrvÉ™l/) which is a relatively large-size African wild cat. Amazingly beautiful, it is quite difficult to observe by day. Actually, it’s Alain Pons (our guide and famous wildlife photographer) who called “Stop!” after seeing a pair of ears just a couple of inches above the grass of the Masai Mara. Even, after braking hard, it took us some time to find it again.
Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles
Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles
Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles
Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles
Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles
Click on the image to enlarge thumbnails
On the last picture, you can notice the black and white pattern of the back of the serval ears. They are considered as a beacon to help kittens follow their mother, giving them very visible indicators that stay invisible from the point of view of their preys.
I was at Le Mans 2009 endurance car race during the official test runs of last week. I brought back a few photos (despite the considerable problem of shooting pictures under the rain).
True Marbleâ„¢ is a true color, photo-realistic, high resolution, 3 terabyte image of the earth. All data is provided at a base 15 meter resolution. Even if this was not shot in a single time (sattelite imagery is a bit more complex than Gigapan panoramas), this is really stupendous. But even more, you can download your own reduced subset for free. Keep cool, this is a lot of downloads of big files (they are even available on BitTorrent – much more practical than FTP downloads, and faster too). But it’s definitely there.
An advanced civilisation if there was one, Aztecs lived in Central America from IXth Century to XVth Century (when their decline was essentially precipitated by their encounter with the Spanish conquistadores). Many facets of this civilisation stay unknown principally because they were wiped out wy the first European colonizers.
Generally, religious reasons (”gods are asking for peace brought to them through human bloodshed in their honor”) are shown as the main driving factor. I found a group of articles quite intersting because they discuss the vertus and weaknesses of another theory: That Aztecs needed to enrich their meals with meat that could only be obtained from cannibalism.
I can’t guarantee the quality of the scientific arguments by myself, but -for the reader with a strong heart- the LatinAmericanStudies.org web site contains historical data about the Aztecs grouped in a quite enthralling scientific package.
Are you looking for information and news about digital
photogaphy and digital SLR cameras?
They are now grouped again in my new web site YLovePhoto.com.