Pretty good, from space. Benjamin Grant, who runs the Daily Overview feed, has put together a "greatest hits" collection in book form, which will be available October 25th:
The best images appear inOverview: A New Perspective of Earth. The book reveals the many ways humans shape the world. Groves of bright green olive trees stand ready for harvest. Deep blue and purple caverns cut into the earth at a uranium mine. Iron tailings turn a pond bright pink. Grant uses juxtaposition to underscore the point, placing, say, a deforested rain forest alongside a paper mill. “You’re able to make comparisons within the chapters, in a way that you can’t if it’s one image per day on the Instagram feed,” he says. The last chapter celebrates remote places, like the reptilian ridges of Rub’ al Khali, the world’s largest contiguous sand desert.
Many of the images are aesthetically beautiful in the abstract, but troubling in context: the aligned grids on a rust-red landscape of the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya, or the yellow stripe and black ridges of a coal shipping terminal in Qinhuangdao, China. Grant hopes to show that tension. “You have an overwhelming sense of the time that would be required to create these staggering landscapes—erosion, build up of mountains—compared to what we’ve developed in the past 100 years,” says Grant.
I pre-ordered the book as soon as Grant posted he was publishing it.
This has been my computer's lock screen image for a very long time. It's hard to believe I took this photo that long ago:
Details: Canon EOS 20D, f/6.3 at 1/250, ISO 800, 18mm.
My friend Molly's newborn has become world-famous. Last week, Daniel made the cover of Bored Panda, which got picked up by Huffington Post, and now the Daily Mail has followed.
I've met the kid. He really is this cute.
One of the first photos I took with my poor, now-deceased G5:
I've been meaning to post this photo from July. No story behind it; I just think it's cool.
On my trip home from Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, I came across this lovely girl at the MSP airport:
Didn't get to say hi, but ain't she sweet?
Today is the 10th anniversary of Parker and me adopting each other.
I can scarcely believe he's lived with me for that long. I mean, this was just yesterday:
And this afternoon, when he was a total brat and refused to sit still, so we went through about 45 frames just to get this one:
That's actually the only one completely in focus without any extraneous dog movements. This was second-best, though at this resolution you can't see that he's not sitting still:
I tell him this often: he's my favorite dog ever. (I think he knows.) But ten years, dog. Ten years. That's more than two lifetimes for most of your species. And I'm glad you've spent it with me.
The Cubs actually won, and it was a great night for a ballgame:
Also, I'm digging my new LG G5. That kind of photo is not what I'd expect from a mobile phone.
Every day that I'm in my office (about 3-4 times per week), I take a photo out the window. Here's today's:
We're on the 35th floor of Willis Tower. But we have access to the 66th floor lobby, so on really clear days I'll sometimes post something like this:
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time:
A new site called OldNYC delivers a Street View-like view of what the city looked like in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The site includes a map of New York City and a slew of dots that can be clicked on to see different images of that particular location.
According to Business Insider, which earlier reported on the site, it was developed by Dan Vanderkam in collaboration with the New York Public Library, which has acollection of more than 80,000 photographs of New York City shot from the 1870s to the 1970s.
While OldNYC is not a Street View clone—users will not be able to "drive" their way through the streets like they would on Google's service—it's somewhat similar. Indeed, users can zoom in and out on a particular location, pick their favorite crossing, and click on the small red dot. Upon doing so, images related to that location are displayed.
I'll be playing with this for a few minutes...