Photography

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Photography

Smithsonian Magazine Announces 9th Annual Photo Contest Finalists

Sarah Jackson

Brian Day

Savannah Whitwam

Somnath Mukherjee

Bridget Bailey

Nimai Chandra Ghosh

Paula Durham

Smithsonian magazine has just announced the 50 finalists from their 9th Annual Photo Contest. Over 67,000 submissions from 109 countries were winnowed down to 10 finalists in five categories: Altered Images, Americana, The Natural World, People and Travel. The public is now invited to vote through March 31st for a special ‘Readers Choice’ award, so what are you waiting for go vote!

Photography

An Interactive 360° Aerial Panorama of the World's Highest Waterfall

Maybe I’m just a huge geek, but I found this vertigo-inducing aerial panorama of the world’s highest waterfall, Angel Falls, and nearby Dragon and Cortina Falls in Venezuela to be pretty incredible. This takes a few steps, but trust me it’s worth it. Head on over to AirPano and if you’re on a nice fast internet connection (or have a moment to wait) click the “High Resolution” viewer. You can turn off the music down on the bottom, click full-screen on top and then use the thumbnails on the right to switch views. Then click and drag anywhere on the screen to explore 360°. Unless you plan on traveling to Venezuela, renting a helicopter from a gold mine and flying perilously close to the 3,200 foot (979 meter) falls while dangling upside down from said helicopter, this is the next best thing. Angel Falls is so tall that the water never reaches the bottom, instead the flow turns into a dense fog during its half mile flight.

The panoramas linked above are actually from the first part of a 2-day trip in which the photographer, Dima Moiseenko, struggled with weather and other unexpected conditions to get the right shots. See a number of panoramas from his second day of shooting, and don’t miss AirPano’s full listing of close to 70 aerial projects.

Lastly, a contender for your new desktop background.

Update: For those of you who think this scenery looks uncannily like the backdrop of Pixar’s movie Up, you’re right.

Photography

Floral X-Rays by Brendan Fitzpatrick

Photographer Brendan Fitzpatrick has been shooting photos for over 20 years, and for the last seven has been living and working in Singapore. These colorful floral x-rays were the result of several radiology experiments that ended with help from a radiography lab in Singapore who assisted him with use of a digital x-ray system followed by a few rounds of image editing and color correction in Photoshop to reach the final results you see here. Several of the specimens are available as prints over on Society6. For a polar opposite project, also check out his Anonymous Aliens series, which confronts the dehumanization of transient workers and their often unrecognized contribution to modern society by capturing anonymous stormtroopers enduring the back-breaking labor often performed by migrants.

Photography

Skull Portraits by Carsten Witte

A number of decidedly unsettling portraits from Hamburg-based photographer Carsten Witte from his series Intuition (nsfw). Of the series he says: “One main idea behind my work is the belief that everything is constantly changing but photography can preserve the moment. Beauty is almost nothing without the knowledge of how fast it will fade…” (via behance)

Photography

Maddie On Things: A Project About Dogs & Physics

Maddie the Coonhound is an ongoing daily photo project by Atlanta-based photographer Theron Humphrey who’s traveling to all 50 states, dog in tow, over the next year. See Maddie deftly balance atop nation park signs, tractor trailers, tires, mailboxes and other roadside attractions on the Maddie the Coonhound Tumblr. Despite my best efforts my dog would be found on exactly none of these things. (via swiss miss)