Catalog Living

Photos from home furnishing catalogs.



Recaptioned.

San Francisco in Ruins (1906)

(Hat tip: @brainpicker)

Using kites, photographer George Lawrence snapped an aerial photo of San Francisco just six weeks after the 1906 earthquake. (Quite a feat, considering the handbuilt panoramic camera weighed 49 pounds!) The photo, “San Francisco in Ruins” is housed at the Library of Congress.



The USGS has a zoomable high resolution version here.

For comparison, here's a modern day photo of the SF skyline from close to the same location:
Scott Haefner's site.

East Bay snow

IMG_0482
Originally uploaded by EBRPD Public Affairs

I drove the kids past Lawrence Hall of Science on the way to school today... not our usual route. Much of the traffic coming down the hill the opposite direction had a dusting of white, frosty stuff on their roofs and sides of the windshield.

The snow level hit about one thousand feet last night-- LHS had a light dusting on its landscaping and parking lots, and the fairways at the golf course in Tilden park were covered, too.

East Bay Regional Park District's public affairs office has a whole bunch of photos in their Flickr stream showing a different look to their parks-- dusted with snow during last night.

And blogger Rebecca Bond captured some photos of this morning's "snow day" at Sibley Regional Preserve in Oakland: Flickr set link

Stunning San Francisco time-lapse

Photographer Ben Wiggins likes to shoot time-lapse videos of cloud formations with his digital SLR camera. He also likes to photograph the transition from day to night. After dark he likes to shoot the flow of traffic, the glint of moonlight off the fog, and the dance of airplanes landing on and leaving the runway--like tiny fireflies in rhythmic formation.

Here Wiggins stitches together several sequences he shot in and around San Francisco this summer. It's awesome.

Click the four-arrow icon in the lower right corner to watch this fullscreen.

Another Cloud Reel... from Delrious on Vimeo.

Wiggins has other videos from the Fourth of July, the San Mateo County Fair midway at night, and underwater.

[via Laughing Squid]

The Big Picture on the Inauguration.

So yeah, it took me a couple of weeks to get around to The Big Picture's roundup of notable news photos of Barack Obama's presidential inauguration. (Link)

And yes there are striking images of the pageantry, and of the crowd in Washington (including that overhead satellite shot of those millions on the Mall, clustered in front of the giant video screens).

But as with most posts from The Big Picture, some of the most revelatory photos are taken in the margins--images not deemed central enough to the story to be featured in national media outlets.

Here some of the most striking photos are of people watching televisions. At an army base in Baghdad. A bar in Montana. A hotel room in Boston. A taco stand in Mexico City. Outdoors at night in Kibera, Nairobi. The Best Buy at the Mall of America.

And my favorites include the sea of cell phone cameras raised by ball attendees hoping to capture a tiny glimpse the Obamas dancing together. The changing of official photographs at Guantanamo Naval Base. Bush inside the helicopter after takeoff looking out across Washington.

If you haven't been already you should go look now.

Photos from the (long) campaign trail

Photographer Callie Shell collects a series of her photos of Barack Obama taken for TIME magazine over a span of two years.

Some great stuff here: resting in a back stairwell, cleaning up after himself in an ice cream shop, a couple of spontaneous pull-ups.

Take a look.

(Via Kottke.)

Yes We Can (hold babies).

An entire blog devoted to photos of Obama (and Biden) with infants and children on the campaign trail. Seeing babies being crowd-surfed over to the candidate is both awesome and vaguely alarming.

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

Stunning Olympic Photos from The Big Picture

If you haven't yet been pointed to the Boston Globe's new photojournalism blog The Big Picture, then this wrapup of the Beijing Olympics is as good of a place as any to start.

One of the many casualties of the transition of newspapers from print to online has been the art of photojournalism; online news sites originally designed their template grids with a minimum of images to avoid alienating readers with slower internet connections. What photos do appear are too small to make much of a visual impression.

Enter The Big Picture, which assumes that a critical mass of Americans are now surfing the internet with fast connections and widescreen displays, and presents the work of some of the world's best photojournalists in gigantic, gorgeous, sometimes shocking color (since computer displays can present a wider range of sharpness and contrast than newsprint could ever muster).

Like a museum exhibit or a good coffee table book, The Big Picture reawakens viewers to photography's power to startle, move, and astonish, whether depicting the Iowa flooding, California's wildfires, or images of people from around the Northern Hemisphere merely trying to beat the summer heat,

It may sound like hyperbole, but I'd nominate this four-month-old site as one of the best uses to date of the world wide web.

Go there now.

No Photos on Flickr!

Yahoo's photo-sharing site Flickr added video this week, albeit in a limited fashion (90 seconds maximum, pro accounts only).

A vocal minority of Flickr users felt that the intrusion of video somehow violated the sanctity of their photos, and have begun posting a variety of images in apparent protest of this new (wholly optional) feature.

Designer Mike Monteiro mocked the mounting hysteria with his own poorly typeset text banner calling for the elimination of photos on Flickr.

But it's the comment thread (128 replies at last count) that now accompanies this image that's worth a lookthrough, a collective and increasingly surreal riff on internet commenting culture, complete with animated unicorn GIFs.

I compare the thread to that moment in The Simpsons "Homerpalooza" when one teen turns to the other and says "Are you being sarcastic, dude?" and he responds "I don't even know any more."

With more than 100 followup responses to that.

Link

Lookingglass Theatre: 20 Years

Cool interactive photo (requires Flash) of the lookingglass theatre ensemble in Chicago, which includes not only the actors but their award-winning costume, lighting, and set designer and resident MacArthur fellow. Everyone appears in a costume from one of their productions from the last two decades.



Click through and Zoom in to find R. Michael Fox (nearly unrecognizable in a wig), Tracy Walsh, Laura Eason, Phil Smith, Mary Zimmerman, David Schwimmer and the rest. Clicking on a person brings you to their bio page.

Favorite pose is Tracy, costumed from the ensemble's production of "Hillbilly Antigone."

Trainset Ghetto

Yale architecture Peter Feigenbaum has built his model train set as an urban setting--variously evocative of the South Bronx, Jersey City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Graffiti, row houses, trash, and weeds accentuate his amazing attention to detail in this gallery of his photos.

Link

(Via Vestal Design.)

Jason de Caires Taylor, Underwater Sculptor

Photo gallery and video highlighting the work of Jason de Caires Taylor, whose sculptures live on the ocean floor.

I don't have a diving credential, and won't be visiting Grenada anytime soon, so I'm thankful Taylor is willing to share these snippets online.

Fantastically beautiful.

[Via Coudal Partners]

Spherical Panoramas

Photographer Carel Struycken creates beautiful QuicktimeVR panoramic images, mostly from sites around California.

Link

Faces in Places

Blog cataloguing favorite images from the "Faces in Places" Flickr group.

How To Hide An Airplane Factory

Think or Thwim posts a collection of WWII-era photos showing how the Army Core of Engineers disguised a Lockheed airplane factory from the air using camouflage netting, fake houses, and trompe l'oeil.

Of course, the Japanese air force never did quite make it to Burbank. But if they HAD, they would so have been fooled.

Link

Endangered Machinery

Missed this when BoingBoing originally posted it in late August.

Photographer Haiko Hebig captures incredible images of industrial decay. Aging equipment, outmoded machinery, abandoned sites.

Take a few minutes with this one. It's a big archive.

No prices, but supposedly prints and posters are available for sale...

Link

International VR Photography Association Comes to Berkeley

Remember QTVR? Quick Time Virtual Reality... where you stitch together photos to make not just panoramic photos, but 360 degree photos, plus up and down views.

Well the hotshots of this field of digital photography just held their annual conference in Berkeley. And they took some wild pictures of the Berkeley campus, San Francisco, Yosemite, and of course, the Super Shuttle from the airport and various conference receptions.

Requires QuickTime.

Faded Building Advertisements

A treasure trove of photos cataloguing the ghosts of advertisements past from the sides of buildings in and around New York City.


From Forgotten NY, a site dedicated to the lost and decaying.

Picturetown

Here's a stunningly elegant and simple microsite from McCann Erickson for Nikon's new entry-level Single Lens Reflex, the D40.

They gave 200 people in Georgetown, South Carolina, Nikon D40s to play with. It's a picturesque town, to be sure, so there's plenty to shoot. And then they put them all on this web site, portraits, action shots, landscapes, everything. And they let each of the featured photographers tell their story of how much they enjoyed the camera.

And the photos look really, really good.



I know it's a commercial site, but I spent a full hour the other night exploring it.

Here's the twist: it's really hard to find any details about lenses, or what megapixels, or any technical stuff. The pitch is really about: anyone can take a great picture with the camera. About as technical as they get is to say that there's less shutter lag and really good autofocus so "you'll never miss the moment."

Adweek likes it too.

I'm almost ready to buy one.



You had me at pelicans.

If you dig around on other photo sites, and look at the reviews, you realize that McCann Erickson probably got thirty thousand photos for the project and could show off the best two hundred or so. And, if you dig around Picturetown, you realize that the flash still does weird things to pictures. And there are tradeoffs involved in buying the low end of the SLR market.

But ooooh. Picturetown.

The Tree of Life and Me

The Tree of Life project is an online database (funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of Arizona) which compiles information about biodiversity and the evolutionary relationships of all organisms. Both professional and amateurs can contribute to it... which makes some entries more accesible than others. It's nonprofit, intended to help scientists and teachers, but surprisingly middle and high school students are finding it a great resource.

I only stumbled across it while vanity Googling (to check on publicity for my Tell It on Tuesday gig this past week)... because their using some of my photos!

Click here, search for "Ereneta"

They are using my pictures of the slender salamanders I found living under our green waste bin on the side of our house last Spring.

The pictures have been on Flickr since March. I posted them under a Creative Commons license, spelling out that anyone could use them for noncommerical purposes as long as they credit me. Oh, and I suppose it helps that the labelled the photos with the Latin name for the genus, instead of just saying "salamander."

Side note: I was hoping to catch Taricha torosa, the California newt, with my camera this rainy season, since they are plentiful in Berkeley and Oakland, if you know where to look. Although Googling around the web I discovered that its skin is coated with an acute neurotoxin (Only harmful if ingested, or introduced via a mucus membrane (like the eye)... one pet site helpfully suggested: "Don't place any newt in your mouth")). Washing your hands is supposed to be enough of a precaution, but an adult California newt has enough tetrodotoxin to kill 2500-7500 mice!

Note to self: don't let the boys pet one.