The winners of this year’s British Ecological Society Photography Competition captured animals interacting with the world around them in bold and breathtaking ways.The annual contest aims to showcase the wonder of ecology across six categories. The 2022 entrants focused on everything from prey-predator relationships and wildlife affected by human changes to the beauty of biology on a microscopic scale.

Overall Winner: A Light in the Shadows by Roberto García Roa

“Like two beacons in the dark, the striking eyes of a Helena’s treefrog seem to glow in the darkness of the night,” says García Roa, a conservation photographer and evolutionary biologist at Sweden’s Lund University.

“This image reveals the beauty of nature hidden in Tambopata, [Peru,] a region that is currently threatened by gold mining. It is paradoxical to see the eyes of this frog as small golden pearls, because in reality, the true treasure lies in ensuring the protection of this area and its inhabitants.”

Student Winner: Takeout by Sam Eberhard

Shot on the shores of Oregon’s Cannon Beach, this image depicts of a group of western gulls surrounding and squawking at a bald eagle trying to carry off its latest meal, a common murre.

“’Takeout’ is a frozen moment of intense action at Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach…,” says Sam Eberhard, an environmental studies and biology student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “While photographically documenting tufted puffins at Cannon Beach, I did not hesitate to capture a few shots of this bald eagle.”

Up Close and Personal Winner: Wild Pearls by Javier Lobon-Rovira

Javier Lobon-Rovira, a Ph.D student in biodiversity, genetics, and evolution at the University of Porto and CIBIO-InBIO, zoomed in on an endangered gold-striped salamander working its way through a nursery of eggs, their color and luminescence reminiscent of precious pearls.

Dynamic Ecosystems Winner: Invasive Battle-Fire Fierce by Javier Lobon-Rovira

Lobon-Rovira also took top honors in this category demonstrating interactions between different species within an ecosystem. “Isn’t it utopian that two invasive species cross paths in the race for survival?’ the photographer notes. “That is the case that crossed my lens when I found an army of fire ants immobilizing, killing, and causing the disappearance of a house gecko in my backyard in Florida…Eat or be eaten is the only mission in the struggle for survival.”

Individuals and Populations Student Winner: The Shrike Strikes Again! by Jennifer Holguin

“A round-tailed Horn Lizard impaled by a yucca stalk in the Chihuahuan Desert, New Mexico, USA. The culprit? A gray, medium-sized songbird known as the Loggerhead Shrike or Butcherbird,” says winner Jennifer Holguin, a student at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Ecology in Action Winner: Bruma by Roberto García Roa

García Roa picked up another award for his image of a dead female eagle lying face down after flying into overhead power lines. The GPS that Bruma the eagle was fitted with at birth helped scientists and authorities determine which power line caused her demise and allowed them to fix it to keep other birds from meeting the same fate.

People and Nature Winner: A New Plastic Home by Andreas Eich

The terrestrial hermit crab in this image shows its adaptability by claiming a discarded plastic bottle cap as its new shell. The scene contrasts with the idyllic beach scene in the background, according to winner Andreas Eich.

The Art of Ecology Student Winner: Diwali in the Forest by Naitik Patel

The light from a congregation of fireflies near India’s Kaziranga National Park reminded student winner Naitik Patel of the joyful feel of Diwali. He explains: “Diwali is a festival of lights. These adorable little fireflies were creating their own festival of lights by gently glowing green and creating undulating trails of light on the forest floor.”

The post A Look at the Spectacular Winning Shots from the 2022 British Ecological Society Photography Competition first appeared on Dornob.

Nazari is the son of Armenian immigrants who escaped the ethnic genocide taking place in their country after World War I. Although he grew up in Los Angeles, Nazari’s “ideals and growth are intertwined” in the unique mix of American and Armenian cultures. Taking a trip to his familial homeland has been a life-long goal.

On his first visit, Nazari was taken aback by the visible and emotional scars of Soviet domination. “After World War I, Armenia was taken under Soviet rule until the 90s,” he says. “The effects of cultural suppression and tumultuous wars in the region were evident upon arrival, and I understood these new surroundings would inform my work in a very different way.”

Even through the rough landscapes, he could see the beauty. “Regardless of the endless strife, it was an incredible place – in a way that has never been discussed or shown,” he adds.

It was then that Nazari began searching for the right angle for his Armenian photo series. “I was just led by my curiosity and tried to explain this world through my eyes, hoping to show the human experience in an unexpected and honest way,” he explains. “I was looking forward to making work that did not feel restricted and suffocated by modern photographic technology nor would make an inaccurate projection of Armenia and its people.”

He very quickly noticed that everyone in Armenia seemed to own a Lada automobile, a boxy, utilitarian model that has been in production since the early 1970s. “Unfamiliar to anyone who isn’t from a Soviet state, I was enamored by its significance to the society,” Nazari says. The photographer, who has previously collaborated with hip-hop stars like Travis Scott, Future, and 2 Chainz, started framing his shots around these ubiquitous icons of Soviet control.

Nazari snapped pictures of women selling fruit out of their Lada’s trunk, men resting against their Lada outside a market, and a Lada’s bullet-riddled front end parked against a backdrop of an Oriental Rug. He took shots of shiny new Ladas as well as heaps of discarded versions ready for demolition. “It was fascinating to witness so many different people from so many walks of life still dependent on this automobile,” the artist explains.

One of Nazari’s favorite photo moments was his picture of a beat-up Lada sitting right in front of two Armenian flags. “Parked at the border between two ex-Soviet countries [Armenia and Azerbijian] in the exact region of disputed land and endless conflict since the fall of the Soviet Union. The symbolism was almost poetic,” he notes.

Nazari hopes that his visual exposures of Armenia will help the people still living there to start an open dialogue. He says that “30 years later, most left with a turbulent post-Soviet experience of political and economic turmoil, a destabilized region, and still dependent and at the mercy of the Soviet power, the hopes and expectations of these ex-Soviet states have failed to materialize. Maybe war with our neighbors isn’t the right answer.”

The post Alex Nazari Photographs Armenia Through the Lens of the Lada Car first appeared on Dornob.

Since launching in 2011, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has made more than 44 orbits of our solar system’s largest planet. The attached visible-light JunoCam has been capturing the gas giant in all its glory over the past six years and sending the images back to Earth.

Not only has NASA open-sourced all the files, but it has also requested the help of volunteer “citizen scientists” around the world to help process the data. In June of this year, it began the Jovian Vortex Hunter project, “aimed at studying the different types of clouds that form on Jupiter, in order to better understand how the atmosphere of the largest planet in the solar system works,” according to Ramanakumar Sankar, the project lead and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota.

“With your help,” Sankar added, “we could learn so much about the Jovian atmosphere and processes that form the amazing clouds that we see.”

Astronomers from all parts of the globe have since created incredible representations of Jupiter’s clouds and surfaces, ranging from the ultra-realistic to the overly artistic. Here are a few stand-outs from the almost 500 images submitted so far:

Frosting Clouds

At the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022 in Granada, Dr. Gerald Eichstädt used the JunoCam’s data on reflected light to create a 3D model with individual “needles” corresponding to the height of Jupiter’s clouds. The resulting picture looks like it could be the whipped frosting top of a cupcake.

“The Juno mission provides us with an opportunity to observe Jupiter in a way which is essentially inaccessible by Earth-based telescopic observations. We can look at the same cloud features from very different angles within only a few minutes,” says Dr. Eichstätdt. “This has opened up a new opportunity to derive 3D elevation models of Jupiter’s cloud-tops. The images of the wonderful chaotic storms on Jupiter seem to come to life, showing clouds rising at different altitudes.”

Saturated Hues

Using images taken from only 3,300 miles above Jupiter’s cloud tops, citizen scientist Björn Jónsson made a side-by-side picture of the planet’s colors as they would be interpreted by the human eye and the colors with deeper saturation to sharpen the smaller cloud features.

Blue South Pole

While most of Jupiter’s surface appears to be a reddish-brown color, footage from the JunoCam taken 11,747 miles above the planet’s clouds revealed that its North Pole is actually covered in icy swirls of blue. Dr. Eichstädt and fellow citizen scientist Seán Doran processed that data into an image of gorgeous denim-colored whirlpools, showing how the higher altitude clouds cast shadows on their surroundings.

Candy-Colored Moon

Calling it the “Fall Colors of Europa,” citizen scientist Fernando Garcia created a kaleidoscopic image of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Using data captured during the JunoCam’s close fly-by on September 29th, 2022, Garcia gave the moon (which is thought to have twice as much water as Earth does) a psychedelic makeover.

South Pole Cyclones

Citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko pulled data from the JunoCam to color-enhance an image of the storms and cyclones at Jupiter’s south pole in intricate and striking detail.

Jupiter — Van Gogh Style

Turning Jupiter’s Northern Jets into artistic whirls akin to those in Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, citizen scientist Brian Swift used digital paint to highlight an aerial view of Jet N5.

The Juno spacecraft is expected to continue orbiting Jupiter for another six years fir a total of 80 passes around the gas giant, collecting images the entire time. That leaves plenty of time for more scientists and artists to get in on the action to make their very own masterpieces.

The post Citizen Scientists Create Stunning Pictures of Jupiter with the Help of NASA’s JunoCam first appeared on Dornob.

“I would like to share with you the first collection of images of my AI-based project called ‘As if nothing happened,’” the Istanbul-based artist said in an Instagram post. “Behind this project lies the question of ‘how would people look photo-realistically if some great events had not happened to them.’”

Using cutting-edge technology, Yesiltas, who is also a lawyer by day, took old photographs of ten famous musicians, actors, and icons and gave them crow’s feet and gray hair to imagine their 2022 appearance.

“When I started tinkering with technology, I saw what I could do and thought about what would make me the happiest,” he told Bored Panda. “I wanted to see some of the people I missed again in front of me, and that’s how this project emerged.”

His version of an un-spectacled John Lennon features the singer with a tangle of windblown silver hair and a full white beard. Lennon would have been 82 this year; he was only 40 when a crazed fan shot and killed him in 1980.

Heath Ledger, who would have been 43 this year, has a slightly pushed-back hairline and a few more creases around his mouth and eyes. The actor, who posthumously won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his twisted portrayal of The Joker in the 2008 film The Dark Knight, died in 2008 at the age of 28 from what was deemed an accidental overdose.

Yesiltas’ iteration of Freddie Mercury adds streaks of gray to his bushy mustache. The lead singer of Queen would have been 76 this year; he died at age 45 from complications of AIDS.

His likeness of Michael Jackson not only envisions what the musical legend would have looked like at age 64 (he died in 2009 from being overmedicated), but also how he would have appeared without any plastic surgeries or the vitiligo that changed his skin coloring.

“The hardest part of the creative process for me is making the image feel ‘real’ to me,” Yesiltas explains. “The moment I like the most is when I think the image in front of me looks very realistic as if it was taken by a photographer.”

Other celebrities in his first series of photos included Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Bruce Lee, Elvis Presley, and Tupac Shakur.

Far and above the rest of the portraits, the photographer garnered the most online criticism for his depiction of Princess Diana. Although still beautiful, reviewers thought Yesiltas gave her too many wrinkles for what would have been her current age of 61. “This could had been Princess Diana when she turned 70,” or “If Diana was hitting the meth pipe, maybe…” were among the comments on Instagram.

After asking for viewer feedback and suggestions, Yesiltas also responded to pleas for an aged Selena, Amy Winehouse, and Paul Walker.

As an artist, Yesiltas has been “imagining scenes and capturing memories for 19 years.” His photos have made it into many books, magazines, exhibitions, and websites over that time, earning him several awards in the process. More of his work can be found on his Instagram account.

The post Photographer Uses AI to Imagine What Dead Celebrities Would Look Like Today first appeared on Dornob.

Starting with an idea to produce images that made the sky look “broken,” the artist discovered that something which is normally considered an eyesore became the perfect grid for the project: utility wires and poles.

“A week or two later,” Hyner said in an interview with My Modern Met, “I took a photo of an electrical pole in my neighborhood and knew instantly that I could fill the spaces with sky photos to achieve a stained glass look.” Hyner filled each cross section of sky between wires with its own image, making a collage of the heavens containing morning and evening light, wildlife, and various clouds.

“In the end, I might use anywhere between 15 to 30 different photos,” he explains. “That includes photos of moons, suns, birds, and jet streams that I later use to accent the piece. Some smaller sections of these images aren’t even skies at all, but rather textured gradients I make to fit the image.” His process includes intensive selection and hours working with photo editing software.

“New sky selection tools in Adobe Photoshop help, but they don’t get me all the way there,” Hyner explained in an interview with PetaPixel. “Once that step is completed, I comb through thousands of photos… and pull the images that might go together. Then it takes maybe a week or two of trial and error, testing various skies, moving shots around, deleting the whole thing, starting again, going outside for a walk, and then finally finishing. It can be a brain-scramble, but I love seeing the puzzle come together.”

Fortunately, Hyner had plenty of his own material to draw on for his stained-glass creations, having taken sky shots around the world for almost a decade in his movie-making work. Since getting his first Canon camera in 2014, he’s amassed thousands of atmospheric photos.

“I spent a few months in New Zealand and Fiji working on a film I wrote, so I had a lot of time to shoot the most stunning skies imaginable. They pop up in a lot of my work,” he said.

Hyner’s new series also helped him escape the stagnation of the COVID-19 shutdowns. “When I start pulling in photos, I try to have some foundation to build upon,” he adds. “For instance, with ‘Party Skies,’ which was made during the height of the pandemic, I was daydreaming about tropical climates, so I knew I wanted to bridge three island photos of mine at the bottom and work my way up to the sky.”

While his art has earned him a decent following on social media, Hyner tries not to take his work too seriously. “Ultimately, I just make images that I want to see. I tend not to ascribe meaning to any of them,” he says.

His stained-glass sky art (as well as his other work) is available on his website and Instagram profile.

The post Photographer Splits the Sky into Stained-Glass Masterpieces first appeared on Dornob.

Calling the space photos “really gorgeous,” Jane Rigby, NASA’s Operations Project Scientist for the telescope, said: “that’s something that has been true for every image we’ve gotten with Webb. We can’t take blank sky [images]. Everywhere we look, there’s galaxies everywhere.”

The Webb telescope got its start back in 1996 under the name Next Generation Space Telescope. As an international program, NASA combined forces with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency during the following two decades of research and development. It was finally launched on Christmas Day 2021 with the goal of being the premier observatory of this decade. It’s also the largest infrared telescope currently in space.

For the first six months, the telescope’s equipment calibrated as the device glided into its halo orbit, a spot between the sun and the moon where the gravitational forces from both keep it on a specific path. Once the calibration was complete, Webb was able to send its first set of data. These are some of its biggest discoveries:

Deep Field

The first deep field captured by Webb is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, itself a collection of thousands of galaxies. “This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours — achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks,” NASA explains. Those 12.5 hours allowed Webb to pinpoint light from one galaxy that had traveled 13.1 billion years before reaching the giant telescope’s mirrors.

Baby Stars

Webb also captured a chunk of a “stellar nursery” roughly 7,600 lightyears from Earth. Called NGC 3324, it is situated at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula. The image shows an amazing mountain of space dust as stars begin to form. “The blistering ultraviolet radiation from the young stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away,” NASA said in a statement. “Dramatic pillars tower above the glowing wall of gas, resisting this radiation. The ‘steam’ that appears to rise from the celestial ‘mountains’ is actually hot, ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to the relentless radiation.”

Star Deathbed

Webb was also able to immortalize the death of a star in the Southern Ring Nebula, with exquisite detail thanks to the mid-infrared technology.

Five Galaxies in One Image

Webb also shined its lens on a cluster of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, a great celestial laboratory for studying the effects galaxies have on each other. The returned picture of this area is the largest of the telescope’s images to date, with over 120 million pixels and a conglomeration of almost 1,000 separate image files. The photo is actually about one-fifth the size of the Moon’s diameter.

Puffy Giants

The telescope also took in data on WASP-96 b, a giant gas planet outside our solar system. While NASA didn’t release any pictures of this one, they did put out a spectrum analysis of the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists also found the “chemical fingerprint” of water in the swirling gas, itself an epic discovery.

The James Webb Space Telescope developers designed it to pull in images for at least five years, but they are hopeful it will last at least ten. The longevity will most likely be limited by how much fuel it takes to maintain the halo orbit around the sun. No matter how long it lasts, it’s clear the cutting-edge device is already providing us with incredible new insights into our universe.

The post NASA’s James Webb Telescope Glimpses Galaxies More Than 13 Billion Years Old first appeared on Dornob.

These designs are now almost as much of a tourist draw as Miami’s white sand beaches, and when photographer Tommy Kwak saw them in 2019, he decided they deserved to get even more attention. Preserving the towers forever in their prime, Kwak’s series “Lifeguard Towers: Miami” captures the unique personalities of each one. Kwak wanted to catalog the structures as a means of inviting viewers to appreciate and compare their similarities and differences.

The series has been exhibited at Clic Gallery locations across the United States, and collectors have sought out limited-edition prints. Now, Kwak is offering it in the form of a fun photo book of the same name, published by Brooklyn-based specialty publishing house Blurring Books. A June crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter made it possible for Kwak to bring the project to life, and pre-orders are now available at booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with a release date of November 1st, 2022.

If you’re interested in seeing Miami Beach’s lifeguard towers in person, you can expect to get a fair bit of exercise in the process. Kwak says the towers stretch across 8.5 miles of shoreline — and that he burned 13,000 calories in the process of trudging through all that sand. They begin with a striped red and white tower at South Pointe, the most southerly tip of Miami Beach. Along the way, you’ll see fun combos of green, pink, and orange; a funky lime green swirl; an orange one with spiky “hair” reminiscent of Lisa Simpson; a patriotic paint job of Stars and Stripes; and more.

Kwak himself was drawn to Miami Beach by his love of water, which led him to look for unique lifeguard towers first in Miami, then Southern California, and finally in Montauk, New York. Next, he plans to photograph unique lifeguard towers in New England, and says he’s even gotten tips on unusual towers of interest in South Korea and Argentina.

About Tommy Kwak

Kwak’s website explains that his “work explores the transience of landscapes and natural forms through ethereal large-format color photographs. His work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in commissions for Louis Vuitton at their locations in New York, Seattle, and Cologne, Germany. He earned a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts in 2002 and completed photography courses at International Center of Photography from 2006 to 2008.”

“In 2010 and 2016, Tommy participated in the SIM Residency program in Reykjavík, Iceland as well as the international arts festival, Villa Reykjavík. Tommy grew up outside of Chicago, lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY for 13 years, and now resides in Montclair, NJ. He has been a member of Fowler Arts Collective in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and SONYA (South of Navy Yard Artists).”

The post Tommy Kwak Captures the Candy-Colored Lifeguard Towers of Miami Beach in a New Photo Book first appeared on Dornob.

Artist Jeanne Simmons reminds us of this simple truth with her stunning works of art rooted in nature. Based in Port Townsend, a picturesque town full of Victorian architecture on the northeast tip of Washington state’s wild Olympic Peninsula, Simmons takes inspiration from her locale and makes the most of the raw materials she’s able to find there. She (sometimes literally) weaves her human subjects together with their natural settings and composes photographs that capture this relationship in all its startling beauty.

“My goal is to express, as beautifully and as compellingly as I can, the contents of my inner world and imagination, as well as my preoccupation with the relationship between humans and nature,” Simmons explains. “With my work, I attempt to describe a connectedness between us and our environment that seems to have been all but forsaken. I hope to nurture this dynamic relationship, which is our birthright and obligation, and to perhaps even rekindle and reawaken a yearning for it in others. Simultaneously, I hope to satisfy my own need to embed myself in nature.”

“Women, for me, express the feeling of connectedness to nature in a way that I find poetic. And, since my models are, in a sense, my surrogates (as I wish that I could braid myself to the ground and document myself in that state, but cannot), it only makes sense that they should be women.”

The piece Simmons refers to here is entitled “Grass Cocoon,” in which her model, naturalist and bakes-maker Nicole Larson, is seen tucked into a french-braided cocoon of long grasses, her own braided hair weaving its way into the surrounding field. Another, “Lace Skirt,” shows the artist herself adorned in a skirt made of Queen Anne’s lace flowers.

“Womanscape” depicts a model laying at the base of a tree covered in English Ivy, wearing nothing more than a little moss and lichen. The piece came about when Simmons wondered “what would happen if I planted a seed in my belly button.”

Set on a famous hillside in Port Townsend, “Womanfall” reinterprets the natural phenomenon of the waterfall by cascading ribbons of a pale blue garment over 20 feet to the rocky shore below. “Katrina” sees a model of the same name dressed in a gown of kelp, which billows out all around her in the waters of the Puget Sound.

You can keep up with Simmons’ work on Instagram @jeanneksimmons, where she posts her latest projects. High-quality limited edition prints are available on her website.

The post Beautiful Land Art by Jeanne Simmons Celebrates our Connection to Nature first appeared on Dornob.

Using a helium balloon, a Styrofoam cooler, an extendable rod, and an Insta360 ONE X2 action camera, the students assembled a device that could reach into the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere. During that week of work, educational specialists from Hi-Impact, whose mission is to bring technology and media into the school curriculum, taught the children about how the helium in the balloon expands as the altitude increases (with most reaching a height between 60,000 and 100,000 feet above Earth). They learned how the atmospheric pressure decreases the higher it rises, finally forcing the balloon to burst. They also studied how to predict the flight path of the balloon based on wind forecasts and the size of the payload.

Based in Northern England, Hi-Impact has been visiting schools around the UK for over a decade now, teaching students to construct their own weather balloons and getting them excited about science. Their materials list has adapted over the years to provide better space flights and images of Earth. In particular, the addition of the Insta360 camera has been key to capturing awe-inspiring photos from the planet’s outer atmosphere.

“The 360-degree camera gives Hi-Impact the ability to see everything that goes on during the flight — from the excited faces at takeoff, through the rain as it passes into the clouds, and eventually the blackness of the sky and the burst of the balloon before drifting back down aided by a parachute,” explains Simon Sloan, the company’s Innovation Manager.

After the students launched this year’s balloon, it rose over 80,000 feet high over the course of two hours before popping and falling back to Earth roughly 125 miles from the launch site. The multiple trackers placed on the payload (and monitored by the students) allowed Hi-Impact to easily find the device and collect plenty of data. Thanks to its camera footage, students were even able to watch the balloon explode at the pinnacle of its climb.

While the balloon was certainly short of the 327,000 feet it takes to technically reach space, the St. Bridget’s floating camera was still able to produce professional quality photos of the full curvature of the Earth, complete with a layer of puffy clouds draped over the deep blue oceans. Plus, the Insta360 was able to withstand the extreme temperatures, which fell as low as -49 degrees Fahrenheit on this flight.

This isn’t the first year of weather balloons for St. Bridget’s, either. They began their relationship with Hi-Impact several years ago, and the students have looked forward to the annual event where Years 5 and 6 take control of the launch and run mission control. “This is always an exciting few days for the school,” St. Bridget’s administration says.

The post Elementary Students’ Weather Balloon Camera Captures Stunning Images Near Space first appeared on Dornob.

“We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” says EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.”

The Event Horizon Telescope previously made headlines in 2019 when it produced the first ever image of the event horizon of a black hole, this one at the center of the active elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (referred to as M87*). They were also seeking proof of the mysterious Sagittarius A* at the time, but were repeatedly frustrated. The Earth’s atmosphere tends to absorb the submillimeter radio waves the telescope uses to capture its images, and all the gas and dust in between our planet and Sagittarius A* can blur any results.

Even more challenging is the fact that as black holes go, Sagittarius A* is weak. Black holes feed from material around them, like gas clouds, asteroids, and stars, but just a trickle of material is seen making it all the way into Sagittarius A*.

“The gas in the vicinity of the black holes moves at the same speed—nearly as fast as light—around both Sgr A* and M87*,” says EHT scientist Chi-kwan Chan, from Steward Observatory and Department of Astronomy and the Data Science Institute of the University of Arizona, USA. “But where gas takes days to weeks to orbit the larger M87*, in the much smaller Sgr A* it completes an orbit in mere minutes. This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT Collaboration was observing it—a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail.”

Exactly why Sagittarius A* is taking in gas so slowly is still a mystery, but take its “weakness” relative to other black holes with a grain of salt. It still has a mass approximately 4.3 million times the mass of our sun, according to Nobel Prize-winning research led by Andrea Ghez, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Event Horizon Telescope team is made up of more than 300 researchers across 80 institutions. Their images are made possible by a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, which allows astronomers to combine data from radio telescopes across the world as if they were one big telescope. When the images of Messier 87* and Sagittarius A* were captured, the network consisted of eight telescopes, but three more have since been added.

The post See the First-Ever Images of “Our Own Personal Black Hole” at the Heart of the Milky Way first appeared on Dornob.

Oprisco’s career began when he got a job at a photo lab at age 16, where he mastered the stages of printing both film and digital photography. As a lab operator, he got to fine-tune his ability to adjust the colors in thousands of images a day, taking a particular interest in identifying the types of images and poses his customers loved most. This inspired him to pick up a medium format camera called the Kiev 6C in 2009. Medium format photography is captured on wide, square-shaped film with four times the resolution of 35mm images and naturally occurring out-of-focus areas called bokeh. That’s what helps produce the dreamy effect.

Oprisco doesn’t plan his photo series too far ahead, preferring to do whatever inspires him most in the moment. A prevailing theme in his portfolio is simply seeking out beauty in everyday places. Preferring to keep post-production to a minimum, the photographer makes his own real props and uses Photoshop only for minor things like dust, scratches, and color-correction. Every picture is a unique story told through perspective, angles, props, the color palette, and the models’ poses. To get everything just right, he uses notes, sketches, and a whole lot of preparation. It’s worthwhile to wait for everything to align — even the weather — to get the best possible images.

“There is inspiration all around us,” Oprisco told 500px. “Everything that happens in our lives is a unique source of inspiration. There’s no sense in stealing someone else’s. Only the original is a unique creation. Be sure any artist of the 18th century, the 19th century is very jealous of us. We can live anywhere and create anything and show it around the world. Everything is in our hands.”

Many of Oprisco’s photographs are uniquely compelling, but they’ve all gained a little bit of extra fascination this year. The viewer can’t help but wonder whether the scenes and buildings depicted still exist as they look in these otherworldly images. Like all photographs, Oprisco’s work freezes tiny moments in time, infused with a broader sense of the contemporary cultural and social context, even if the photos seem to exist outside of time and place. The Ukrainian national identity is present in the models, the clothing, the settings, and even modern updates on the traditional flower crown known as the vinok.

“Like every Ukrainian, I love freedom,” says Oprisco. “I like the ability to stop time and create my version of reality.”

If you love Oprisco’s work, be sure to keep up with it on Instagram @olegoprisko.

The post Oleg Oprisco’s Dreamy Photography Captures the Wistful Beauty of Ukraine first appeared on Dornob.

With a goal of establishing a “platform for continuous development of photographic culture,” judges look for both striking images and new talent.

“Creativity and originality were very important in choosing a winning image, and it was terrific to see the excitement and joy of the photographers when they captured the moment,” says Hideko Kataoka, who spearheaded the judging for this year’s Open competition. “The photographs in this competition each make a coherent visual statement about a situation or particular circumstance in an elegant visual way.”

While the overall winners will be announced April 12th, the victors of the National Awards, a category that highlights regional photography, were announced in February, with entrants from over 61 countries.

One standout from the National Awards was “Bike with Flowers” by Thanh Nguyen Phuc from Vietnam, which features a woman cycling past a street mural where the flowers in her basket appear to whimsically float up and onto the wall behind her.

Wonyoung Choi from the Republic of Korea won for “A City Among the Clouds.” Set in the Bukhansan Mountain in Seoul, South Korea, Choi says, “Lots of people climb the mountain to view the sunrise, but it’s a rare sight to see the city covered in clouds as the sun rises. I’ve gone there many times and was lucky to finally see it. I feel gratitude towards Mother Nature for changing Seoul’s architecture from monotonous to colorful.”

In the portraiture category, Hungary’s Edina Csoboth won for her use of light and shadows across a woman’s face, framed with foliage for extra drama.

It’s important to note that finalists don’t necessarily have to present photos of their home region. Mazin Alhassan from Saudi Arabia won for his astrophotography landscape “Stars over Yellowstone,” which shows a glittering night sky reflected on the hottest geyser in the park. And Turkey’s winner Cigdem Ayyildiz captured “Le Mont Saint-Michel at Sunset,” calling it the “eighth wonder of the world.”

Filip Hrebenda, the winner from Slovakia, took an incredible shot of an erupting volcano in Fagradalsfiall, Iceland, complete with a spewing top in the distance and a glowing lava river in the foreground. Entitled “Born of Fire,” the scene could be something out of a J.R.R. Tolkien epic, giving viewers a glimpse into the forces that shape our world.

The Sony team also introduced a new prize this year: the Latin American National Award, which highlights the best work from Mexico, Central America, and South America. The top honor in this new category went to Bernardo del Cristo Hernandez Sierra of Colombia for his black and white motion shot of a diver fighting for perfect form mid-flight.

The National contest winners all receive Sony imaging equipment plus the honor of having their work displayed at the Sony World Photography Award exhibition at London’s Somerset House from April 13th to May 2nd, 2022. The overall winners will receive the title of “Open Photographer of the Year,” as well as a $5,000 prize.

The post These Stunning 2022 Sony World Photography Award Winners Elevate Life to Art first appeared on Dornob.

In a 17-year-long collection he calls “Hubble? No! Satellite? No!,” the 62-year-old Juha Tanhua turns interesting-looking gasoline puddles into an array of shimmering comets, nebulas, and galaxies that look very much like the real things. It all started in 2005, when on assignment as a photo journalist, he noticed a pretty pattern pooling beneath his feet.

“When I was parking my car in Fellman Park in Lahti City (southern Finland) to take some photos to the newspaper, I noticed that next to my car there was an oil spill on the asphalt and it looked a little bit like northern lights,” Tanhua told My Modern Met. “I took a couple of photos and forgot the whole thing. Months later, I found that photo again and began walking in parking lots after rain to take pictures of these oil spills.”

“I named them oil paintings,” he adds, “because it looked like artworks under cars.”

At first, Tanhua wanted to faithfully represent each puddle he found with minimal editing, but over the years he has experimented with adjustments to the contrast, shadows, and highlights to bring his celestial doppelgangers to life. He notes that “when I shoot against black asphalt and underexpose the image, the rocks on the asphalt turn into stars.” Tanhua’s editing work is so convincing that the viewer immediately sees interstellar clouds and red quasars instead of gasoline and tire marks.

The natural elements also play their part in creating these beautiful galactic scenes. Rain acts as a brush that “paints the artwork,” creating intriguing organic streaks and designs.

While the photographer notes that “Lapland is the perfect place to take photos of galaxies, nebulas, and other space objects because there is really not much light pollution,” he prefers the view below to a telescopic vista. “I don’t look up, but down,” he says. “It’s not space above us; it’s space under our feet. You can find subjects to photograph even in dull places like parking lots. Expect nothing, get everything.”

Tanhua’s work is a testament to the wealth of artistic inspiration in even the most commonplace settings. “I found a microcosm under parked cars,” he says.

Tanhua got his start in photography at age 15, when his father returned from a trip to Japan and gifted him an Olympus 35 DC compact model camera. After beginning an apprenticeship in 1979 at a local photography studio, Tanhua began a career in journalism. Today he works as a freelance photographer, having created 10 solo exhibitions over the past few decades. His works are on permanent display at the Finnish National Gallery and Lahti Art Museum. He currently resides in the small village of Vuolenkoski, in the south of Finland.

His full collection of “space” photos is available to view on his website.

The post Juha Tanhua’s Oil Spill Photos Reveal Hidden Galaxies first appeared on Dornob.

Having already employed his infrared camera skills in places like New York, Peru, and the Alps to create fantastical versions of well-known scenery, Pettigiani recently took a road trip through France, painting the surrounding geography with a watermelon-colored brush everywhere he went.

“Infraland transforms ordinary places into surreal landscapes unbound by human perception and space that renew the spectators’ idea of the world in order to question reality as we see it,” the artist says on his website. “An invitation to further explore knowledge and human relationships with new points of view and new eyes.”

Pettigiani’s rosy images were inspired by the work of photographer Richard Mosse and his famous Kodak Aeorchrome infrared pictures of soldiers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo a decade ago. In those photos, the soldiers’ uniforms and the African grasses behind them were shifted into various shades of red and pink, mutating “the real” into absurdity and making familiar things seem strange.

Using a digital camera and a filter that blocks light wavelengths less than 590 nanometers, Pettigiani creates a similar effect with landscapes. Through that lens, greens are converted to bubblegum and candy-apple hues, producing a fanciful version of real life.

“Infraland is a long-term project started in 2015 that explores the themes of seeing the unseen, driven by a desire to explore familiar places, breaking the doors of perception through a graphic and visual exploration of the territory. These images are shot using a converted full spectrum camera for infrared photography: a fusion of science and creativity that captures the electromagnetic radiation of light…not visible to the human eye,” Pettigiani explains.

His photos of France help viewers “see” an alternate universe where the leaves of a heart-shaped tree in Provence are actually ruby red and the encompassing lavender fields scream out in fuscia notes. Pettigiani’s travels also took him to Sisteron in the French Alps, where he gave the mountainside and trees a crimson makeover. Similarly, his treatment of the coast of Brittany turns the northern beach into a tropical island with wide wine-colored fronds.

Pettigiani’s take on Versailles is truly show-stopping. The contrast of cotton-candy foliage against the blue of the sky and ponds is striking and enchanting all at the same time. Even the palace doors get done up in flamingo-feather pink.

The artist is currently based in Italy, acting as the art director at No Panic, a creative agency he co-founded. After graduating from Turin’s Politecnico in 2014 with a degree in Design and Visual Communication, he started using his photographic skills to delve into the beauty of light’s unobserved wavelengths. His work, including his ongoing “Infraland” project, has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Paris, Milan, Turin, and New York City.

Pettigiani has posted many of his French infrared photos on his Instagram.

The post Infrared Photos Turn France into a Cotton Candy Wonderland first appeared on Dornob.

Using special probe lenses and high-resolution cameras, the artist peers into the cavities of a Steinway and Fazioli piano, a 14-karat gold flute, a 240-year-old flute, and even an Australian didgeridoo. But what makes this collection so breathtaking isn’t just the fact that it offers a view into typically unseeable spaces, but that it has been manipulated into brilliant, eye-dazzling art.

“I use a special technique called focus stacking, which has the effect of making these small spaces seem vast,” Brooks, a New Zealand native, says on his website. “This is a simple optical illusion. Our brains are wired to expect close-up macro shots to have a shallow depth of field. By combining dozens, sometimes hundreds, of shots, I ensure that the photo is sharp from front to back. This tricks the mind into believing that the image is of something much larger than reality.”

Indeed, his photos of the insides of a 1780 Lockey Hill cello look “vast and cavernous,” with the instrument’s f-holes casting light and shadows around what appears to be an underground chamber.

Brooks’ picture of the “sublime action” inside a Fazioli grand piano, considered by many to be the finest piano ever made, feels like it could be in the hallway of some glorious manufacturing plant with its gleaming, larger-than-life metal tubes and rivets. He revels in exposing a part of the instrument that is usually “familiar only to technicians.” With such an up-close view, even the smallest markings and imperfections are visible.

In other photos, the interior of a golden flute creates a seemingly infinite corridor of reflective circles, while the hollow of a saxophone bell gives the illusion of hidden moonlit caves.

The project turned up some surprises for Brooks. For instance, when examining the innards of a didgeridoo, he was amazed to find that “these ancient instruments are not carved by hand but are hollowed out by termites. The resulting grooves and channels give each instrument a unique sound.”

One photo even pays homage to the humble dust bunny. Introducing the viewer to “Fritz the dust mouse,” a cluster of microscopic dirt found inside a century-old Hopf violin, Brooks says such creatures exist in most string instruments. “When they are cleaned or restored, many musicians will ask for the dust bunny to be left in place for luck!”

Brooks spent 20 years as a preeminent orchestral cellist, playing principal positions in places like China, Australia, Brazil, and Chile. During his musical career, he took advantage of his world travels to hone his photography skills, getting noticed by National Geographic in 2011. His nature shots and portraits of famous musicians later earned him an affiliation with Panasonic Lumix in 2018.

More of Brook’s “Architecture in Music” photos, as well as his other works, can be found on his online shop and Instagram profile.

The post Photos Reveal the Inner Architecture of Musical Instruments first appeared on Dornob.

Muriu captures this feeling with an ongoing fine art photography series called “Camo,” in which African women adorned in vivid, eye-popping patterns stand against backdrops of the same pattern. They might be blending in a little bit, but they certainly don’t disappear. Their personalities, architectural hairstyles, and fun accessories demand attention even in the busiest of compositions.

Highlighting the Unique Beauty of Modern Kenya

The Camo series bucks assumptions about modern Kenyan culture while celebrating its history, vibrancy, and uniqueness. It also puts dark-skinned black women front and center, defying a preference for lighter skin that has taken root even in Muriu’s own country. The portraits examine how we can lose our individual identities to the expectations our cultures place on us, yet each of us has own own beautiful qualities that make us stand out.

Camo first began in 2015 when Muriu became fascinated with complex, hypnotic textile patterns, each one chosen for its uniqueness and visual magnetism. The prints themselves almost seem alive. Muriu spends hours sifting through fabric shops in Nairobi looking for the most confusing, loud, and bold fabrics she can find. She realized that placing “camouflaged” models in front of these backdrops drew the eye right to each woman’s face, hair, and hands.

Tradition and Experimentation Come Together

Muriu researches traditional Kenyan hairstyles (the bigger and wilder the better) and finds ways to amplify and exaggerate them. Deliberately pushing back on Western beauty standards that call for sleeker, more “professional” hairstyles, the artist lovingly focuses upon cultural standards of beauty that she worries are being lost.

Upcycled accessories made of “junk” like bottle caps and discarded wire highlight Kenyans’ enterprising nature. Every small detail of each portrait reflects the way young Africans reimagine and reinvent cultural traditions for the modern world.

The full Camo series went on display at the 193 Gallery in Paris in 2021. Muriu sees it as a milestone achievement in her artistic career, and says she’ll continue adding to it forever if she can. “I will always do more,” she says. “A lifetime challenge would be to try and catalogue all of them and become the first modern archive of our hair and our fabric. Why not?”

About Artist Thandiwe Muriu

Muriu first became interested in photography as a 14-year-old growing up in a family full of creatives. One sister was a fashion designer, another a virtuoso pianist. After graduating from business school, she returned to her love of art, and signed her first contract for an international adverting campaign at the age of 23. While her day job keeps her traveling around the world on assignments, her personal work focuses on issues of identity, self-perception, and her African heritage.

Muriu lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya where she teaches photography workshops. She received the 2020 People’s Choice Award for Emerging Photographer of the Year at Photo London.

The post Thandiwe Muriu’s “Camo” Portraits Bring Kenyan Women to the Fore first appeared on Dornob.