Archive for the 'Photo' category

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.

They need to be harvested by boat…

Nikon launches a Nikon D3000 (entry-level SLR), a Nikon D300s (enthusiast SLR). Sony reveals accidentally the future Sony Alpha 850 as a relatively inexpensive complément to the Sony Alpha 900 (Full Frame SLR).

Find all about it on YLovePhoto.

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.

Belgian Kimberley Vlaeminck, 18, went to a tattoo parlor and asked for 3 tattooed stars. But, she fell asleep and woke up with 56 black stars. In a sense, this is nice, but she seems pissed off.

PETER DECONINCK/AFP/Getty Images

Update on 24-June: It appears that after some time and media pressure, Kimberley admitted that this was not a mere issue of misunderstanding between the tattooist and her. Frightened by her father reaction to her stars, she tried to explain that it was not her fault. But she actually requested 56 stars from the beginning. So, she was lying…

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).

Peugeot 908 HDI team - Pit stop (Le Mans 2009)

Peugeot 908 HDI (Le Mans 2009)

The whole gallery and the mini-site to buy posters.

The Roomba autonomous and (nearly) intelligent vacuum cleaner runs around to clean the floor. Example of its convoluted path:

La danse du Roomba

Not bad for a vacuum cleaner which has a very limited and very artificial intelligence!

This is so nice: A Stop-motion video that is very well done, funny.

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.

True Marble - Earth at high resolution

True Marble GLCDâ„¢ by Unearthed Outdoors, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

You know it: JPEG image format allows to compress a photo picture without too much loss. But there is some loss. For real.

You want an evidence? Open an image, save it in JPEG; Start over 600 times. The image deterioration will cumulate:

Link love

Those are the best links I found recently. I could not write a full post about them, but they are worth visiting:

• Box.net launches a web-based free word processor (via Download Squad)
• Histoface: How to hide an image in the histogram of another image
• Safer Code – Secure Coding In C \ C++ is a blog about such issues as writing clean C/C++ code.

Most-read articles

The news as you make it:

• Download free Nero 8
• Sharks and other sea jaws
• Art Nouveau Design

Most visited categories

Your attention does not stop to 1 post only:

• Gorilla in Wildlife (digital photography)
• Nikon D300 (SLR photo camera) that can be complemented with the YLovePhoto.com similar category about the Nikon SLR family

We all love when things come free to us. Here I found a treasure trove of movies that are free to download. Legally.

Thanks to the Canadians of the National Film Board of Canada. They give us feature-length movies, documentaries, animated short movies. Everything, of the best quality, at the best price: Free.

Ten days ago, I went walking in the bois de Vincennes, near Paris, my photo camera in hand in the footsteps of Fabrice Hénon who accepted to share some of his informations. I’m back with pictures of Eurasian Jay and common kestrel.

Common kestrel

Eurasian Jay

All the photos are on www.YLovePhoto.com :

• Eurasian Jay
• Common kestrel

If you want to fish sardines, ask advice from a pro : The sailfish (Istiophorus platypterus). This slides diaporama from National Geographic shows sailfishes grouping themselves to hunt a big school of sardines. Really beautiful and utterly technical.

Photo by Paul Nicklen

You’d believe that our planet is in love. It can be read on its face (on its surface) merely under the form of pretty hearts nicely drawn.

Heart Reef, Australia

9 other cases. Superb!

David Bergman created a large superb image of more than a billion pixels during Barack Obama’s inaugural address in Washington, on January 20th.

Barack Obama

Source: YLovePhoto.