2009 and back on the wagon.

Happy New Years anyone who happens to still be visiting my blog. New years festivities were pretty bog standard as far as they go - good times with good friends, lotsa booze and happily no headaches the following morning! The London fireworks were frankly crap and quite possibly a sign of the times i.e. credit crunch.

My year as a photographer has gotten off to a fairly good start. One of the photos that I took in Devon, the one of everyone jumping on the beach, has won a photo competition with TNT Magazine. They run a weekly photo competition with a first prize of a 3 day budget tour around Wales. I'm quite looking forward to it as Wales is not really my first choice for a tourist destination so it's a pretty good opportunity.

This was the Photo: Taken at Saunton Sands, Devon

Christmas - Devon and Saunton Sands

Merry Christmas and all that - formalities aside it's always nice to get out of the big smoke and see some of the country you're living in and spend some quality time with friends. This year we headed out to Devon. It was a fantastic trip and the weather was spot on the whole time. I managed to get some shots off and since I haven't had time to update this I thought I'd put them up here.

Abandoned TV tower in Russia

Source: Abandoned Places and Victorprofessor.com


This photo set just gave me the willies. It an abandoned television tower in Russia.

The blurb from the blog states:
Highest abandoned television tower on Russia - 350 meters.
It's a little bit higher than Eiffel tower in Paris. Was bult in 1990s. Used by base-jumpers.
Some photos from bottom to top and then top to ground. Wind, clouds, ice. 2 hours for going up, and 1 hour to go down.

Kogan Agora Android Phone

Source: iTWire
The second Google Android phone has surfaced and it's in the classic Blackberry shape and it comes from Down Under from a company called Kogan. It's called the Agora Pro and is on sale now for $399 AUS or £175 without lock or contract. Great news for the masses that want to get their hands on the new OS and its, from personal experience, great applications.

SPECIFICATIONS

Operating System	Android™
Google Mobile Functions	Google Search™, Gmail™, YouTube™, Google Maps™, Google Talk™, Google Calendar™.
Display	2.5-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 262K QVGA (320 X 240 pixel) resolution
Device Control	5-Way Central Navigation Key
Keyboard	QWERTY keyboard Keyboard backlighting
GPS	GPS navigation capability with Google Maps™
Connectivity	Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11b/g
Camera	2.0 megapixel colour camera
Audio	Built-in microphone and speaker Headphone output Ring tone formats: MIDI, MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, PCM
Video	Video formats supported: MPEG2 H263, H264, MPEG4, AVI
Mail attachment support	Viewable document types: JPEG,GIF,WBMP,MIDI,AMR,MP3,WAV
Dimensions (HxWxD)	108 mm x 64 mm x 14.8 mm
Weight	130g
Battery	Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery Capacity: 1300 mAh
Talk Time	Up to approximately 400 minutes
Standby Time	Up to approximately 300 hours
Processor MHz	624 MHz
Memory	256 MB On-board + 128 MB Flash microSD™ card expansion slot
Network	UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz) GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)

Features Available:

• Handsfree
• FM radio
• JAVA 2.0
• SMS
• Email
• MMS 1.0
• WAP 2.0
• WAP Push
• Web Browser
• Bookmarks
• Video Recording
• Media Player
• Instant Messaging
• Phone Book
• Ring Silencer/Quick Silent
• Scheduler/Organiser
• Mini-USB Connectivity (charging, headset)
• Phone Book
• Integrated Antenna
• Fast Text Editor
• Lunar calendar, Calculator and Alarm Clock

Mammoth Stars

It's been a while since I have updated this blog due to being a bit too busy however this caught my eye. This is imagery is from the Hubble Space Telescope. Just beautiful.

Source: WIRED Science

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed two of the most massive stars in our galaxy as never before. Located 7,500 light years away from Earth in the Carina Nebula, these stars are rare ultra-hot, super-bright stars that emit primarily ultraviolet radiation, that gives them a blue hue.

WR25, the brightest of the stars near the center of the image, is actually a large star 50 times the size of our sun with another star half that size orbiting around it. To the upper left of WR25, the third brightest star in this image is really a triple star cluster. Two are so close together that telescopes with less resolution can't resolve them. The third star may take hundreds of thousands of years to orbit around them.

The second brightest star, to the left in the image, is actually a less massive star that appears bright because it is much closer to earth than the others.

Pulse Room

I love this kind of thing. Installation art can either be a lost cause of someones rather strange idea of art and in other cases be something so mesmerizing that you just have to see it again and again. The Pulse Room strikes me as one of these and is similar to some installations that have popped up on Southbank in London.

Source: Todayandtomorrow.net


Pulse Room by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, premiered at Plataforma exhibition in Puebla, 2006, and shown at the Venice Biennale 2007. A sensor records the pulse of the public and converts it into light flashes shown by incandescent light bulbs. At any given time the room shows the heartbeat of the 100 most recent participants.

Link to the Artist Page: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

1874 - Lunar Photography

Source: WIRED Magazine

The article in WIRED and also the video below intrigued me as much for the cleverness and ingenuity of astronomers and photographers around 1870 as the example of open mindedness and appreciation by other scientist and photographers.

Quoted from WIRED:

If you wanted close-up photos of the moon in the late 1800s, you were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them.

And that's exactly what an engineer and astronomer did in 1874 to tremendous acclaim.

James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review.

"The illustrations to this book are so admirable, so far beyond those one generally gets of any celestial phenomenon, that one is tempted to refer to them first of all," the reviewer wrote. "No more truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been laid before his readers by any student of Science; and I may add that, rarely if ever, have equal pains been taken to insure such truthfulness."