Japan’s Kaguya lunar orbiter is sending back some incredible photos, including this photo of an earthrise.

Here are many other photos (click the HDTV tab).  Here’s a post (by NASA) discussing the lunar missions of Japan and China.

This is a view on my way home from work tonight.   The 180-foot tall Compton Hill Water Tower is decorated, at its base, by traffic lights and the lighted traffic flowing by during this long exposure shot. 

Located near my home, in St. Louis, Missouri, the Compton Hill Water Tower:

is a remnant of another time. When it was built, William McKinley was president, and the population of St. Louis was just over half a million. The water tower was built on a 36 acre park, called Reservoir Park, where the wealthier families of German descent chose to make their homes. But the city was outgrowing the existing water delivery system. The pumps used to send water through the city created dangerous surges in pressure, making pipes rattle and shake. In an effort to equalize water pressure, a 5 feet wide, 100 feet tall standpipe was installed. For cosmetic appeal, the tower was built in 1898 to camouflage the standpipe. 

“There is no evidence whatsoever that flowering plants evolved.”  

Answers In Genesis

I can understand this resistance to believing that orchids evolved without the help of God-the-Artist.  I understood this resistance while strolling through an extraordinary display of orchids today at the Missouri Botanical Garden.   

It was like looking at fireworks.  Just when you thought you had seen it all, you would see yet another dazzling package of color and shape.  Why would “Nature” waste such time on crafting such masterpieces?  For those primed by a religious upbringning, the emotions would compel the thought that flowers of this type must be no less than “God’s” aesthetic gift to Humankind.

Such thinking, of course, is prevalent among creationists.  Prevalent and wrong.   Not that orchids sculpted by natural selection are any less stunning in appearance that those that might have been crafted by an omniscent deity.   They are what they are.  They are compelling beings, those orchids.  They are beautiful and they are alive.   And they can be appreciated by anyone, of any world view, who comes to view them.  I imagine that, today, many creationists lined up with those who are convinced by evolutionary theory, all of them appreciating the orchids. 

Viewing this orchid display reminded me of Darwin’s writings regarding the many versions of finches Darwin observed on his trip to the Galapagos.   Regarding those finches, Darwin concluded that, in geographical isolation, the various species of finches evolved from a small number of common ancestors so that each species was thus modified to suit “different ends.”  Darwin’s conclusion that the species of finches specialized due to geographical isolation was key to the development of his theory of natural selection.  

Darwin studied orchids carefully after publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859.  Darwin later published a book called On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects and the Good Effects of Intercrossing.  Rather than argue that the beauty of orchids was God’s effort to please humans, Darwin argued that the various species of flowers were honed by natural selection to attract specific types of insect cross-pollinators.   Incredibly, there are more than 22,000 known species of orchids.

The following excerpt, published by Nature (on the PBS site) notes the significance of orchids to Darwin:  (more…)

For its entire existence as a sport bodybuilding has struggled to gain acceptance with a mainstream audience. Some say it never will. They say that the freakishly exaggerated physiques of bodybuilders will never be applauded by the general public. And so, bodybuilding remains a cult sport. Looked down upon by many as a freak show.

As hard as it is for male bodybuilders to gain acceptance as legitimate athletes, it’s even harder for female bodybuilders. The male bodybuilder creates an exaggeration of the male form. They have taken the shape and the characteristics of male-ness and pushed it to its limits. They give the impression of being a “super-male”. Though freakish to some, at least it’s consistent with their gender.

The problem for very muscular women is that as they become more muscular the general public sees them as becoming less feminine and more manly. This has been a growing problem for women’s bodybuilding since the early nineties as advances in training and chemistry have enabled female bodybuilders to far exceed their natural muscle building capacity. Debates about “feminity vs masculinity” in female bodybuilding are an eternally hot topic on bodybuilding forums around the world and discussed with the same fervor that “God vs no God” is debated here on Dangerous Intersection.

Into this fray jumps celebrated photographer Martin Schoeller. Martin’s latest project is a series on female bodybuilders that is being exhibited at the Ace Gallery starting in March. Known for his stark brand of portraiture, Martin’s work has a frankness that is often controversial. Presidents, royalty and celebrities have all sat in the glare of his harsh lighting. The result has been described as honest or raw; real or unflattering, depending upon your point of view.

Martin’s art intrigues me as a documentary filmmaker. Martin attempts to get a photograph of the “real” person by removing all artifice and getting them to let down their guard. He does this by stripping away every crutch that photographers, the photographed, and we as viewers have come to expect. There are no costumes, no props, no scenery, no backdrop, sometimes no makeup, no sense of place or time or fashion. What is left is deceptively simple and leads people to think that it is cheap or easy. It is not, because the hard part comes when he then attempts to disarm his subject, relax them and catch them off guard. A tactic that I endeavor to employ every time I shoot footage for my films.

True to form Martin photographs the bodybuilders when they are at their most vulnerable. Spirited away in the midst of their contests before they know their placings, some of them literally right off the stage, the women are exhausted, insecure and dehydrated. He then strips them of their last crutch…he does not allow them to pose. Asking a bodybuilder not to pose is like asking a singer not to sing, a dancer not to dance or a politician to be silent. There is nothing left to do but be yourself. (more…)

We were just getting warmed up with the photos in the previous post.   You really must also view these incredible photos that are winners of the 2008 World Press Photos contest.  Truly spectacular work.

For reference, here are the results from the World Press 2007 photo contest.

Visit this site to view this years winning photos in the 2008 PDN travel photography contest.   You’ll find superb work in the categories of:

• Human Condition
• Extreme Exploration
• Urban Landscapes
• Snapshots
• Wilderness, and
• Open Series

You won’t be disappointed.  The contest is co-sponsored by National Geographic Traveler.

I have the privilege of working in an 15th floor office with a view.   Most people with offices downtown wouldn’t consider my view to be a great view (because I can’t see the Arch or the baseball stadium from my window), but it’s interesting enough that most people who come to my office look out the window and comment about what they can see.   Even though my window is north-facing, I get some sunlight (there’s no tall buildings butted right up to my building).

What’s interesting to me is that I actually took the time to notice my view today and I was reminded that it is a interesting and worthy view, in an urban downtown sort of way.  You can see lots of activity on the street.  People walking about.  You can see serious construction activity in the old buildings where new lofts are being carved out.   During the day, hundreds of people walk the streets of St. Louis downtown.  Due to the increasing number of lofts, we have a noticable increase in night-time foot traffic too.  You can now see lots of people walking dogs after work.  That was a rare site a few years ago.  More and more restaurants are now opening. 

Again, what is interesting to me today is that I had to make myself take the time to look.  I spend hundreds of hours in this office every month and I don’t think I’ve taken the time to consciously look out my window for many weeks, perhaps months.  

Many of us get so very busy that we get tunnel-vision.  And it almost gets crazy.  It gets to the point where, if you want to do something–anything at all, even something fun–you need to put it on your Outlook calendar.  Maybe I should put a recurring event on Outlook each month:  “Look out your window to see what there is to be seen.”  Sounds like good therapy. 

It makes me wonder what else I’m not paying attention to.  

(Click on the photo to enlarge image.) 

I enjoyed this image of geese in Forest Park (St. Louis, Missouri), so stopped the car and I took this photo.   We don’t seem to have much snow in St. Louis anymore, so picturesque winter scenes are especially fun when they do occur. 

Sifting through some of my photos from last year, I found a shot that tickled and confused me at the time that I took it, and still does now. I would like to share it with all of you.

But first some background: Last summer, I was watching my city’s Gay Pride Parade in my city’s token “gay area”. Amid the drag queens, Log Cabin Republicans, gay flag teams and buses full of lesbians, stood this curious man:

I still wonder about you, Gay Pride Confederate. Do you bear the flag as a sign of irony? If you do support what this flag represents, why do you live in the “gay” side of town? Do you brandish the flag as a symbol of your southern roots, as you drink wine topless at 10 in the morning? Do you represent life in a modern age full of contradictions? Mr. Gay-Pride-Confederate-Who-Also-Appears-To-Be-Black, you fascinate me.

I just finished with an intense period of work, including trying part of a jury case that ended in a mistrial when the opposing attorney was rushed to the hospital with internal bleeding.  

Trying lawsuits can be exhausing work.  Really exhausting.  My wife (Anne) saw that look in my eyes, and insisted that I could really use a day or two to recover.  She suggested that I spend a night at a cabin at nearby Pere Marquette State Park (in Grafton Illinois).  This was really tempting, but I thought twice about doing that when I called the park and I was reminded of the cost of $125 for one night.   Did I really earn that sort of retreat? Did I want to travel that far to “get away?”

I considered plan B:  stay at home.  This would offer me the advantage of being with my wife and children, and I’ve really been craving time with them during the many evenings I’ve recently spent at work.  But Anne insisted, “You really need to get away and do nothing for a day.”

Then I considered plan C.   I visited Priceline for the first time last night.  This site gives you a chance to bid what you think a hotel is worth.   I got the idea of doing something I’d never done before:  taking a vacation in my hometown, in downtown St. Louis.  But I didn’t want to spend much.   Therefore, I placed a bid of only $40 for one night at a three star downtown hotel (you know some things about the hotel, such as the rating, but you don’t know the exact hotel you might end up staying at).  To my surprise, my bid was accepted.  Therefore, I’m now at my “retreat” in downtown St. Louis, right on the riverfront, at the Millenium Hotel.   I suppose that hotels are much happier to make something for a room rather than nothing (but I now wonder whether I could have gotten this 26th Floor river view room for even cheaper). 

How close to the riverfront am I?  This close.

As you can see, it’s snowing today, which has brought a winter mood to the arch and the riverfront.  I found myself taking dozens of photos from my window.  [BTW, I’m using a consumer grade digital camera, the Canon S1IS). In this photo, you are looking northeast, through the arch.  Just beyond the arch is the Eads Bridge.  Just across the Mississippi River is Illinois.   In the foreground, you can barely see the top of the steeple of The Old Cathedral, the oldest Catholic Cathedral west of the Mississippi.  Here’s the entire church (this building was constructed in 1834).

It occurred to me that this “retreat” was too wonderful not to share.  Further, my wife Anne has been working hard on her MFA in writing back at home and she needs some solitude too.   Wouldn’t it be better to share this “retreat” with my children?  That made sense to Anne and me, so I drove all the way home (about 5 miles) and picked up my two daughters (aged 7 and 9) and brought them here to see this spectacular view.  Plus, there was more snow in the forecast and a snow day appeared imminent tomorrow (Friday).  So we bundled up the children and I took them to my “retreat.”  We grabbed some take-out food on the way.  My kiddos liked the view, though they loved the cable TV (we don’t subscribe at home).  We watched a few delightful cartoons on the Cartoon Network, including “Courage the Cowardly Dog”).  Then it was time to capture some night time photos of the arch.  We turned off all of the room lights and I got out a tripod.  Here’s what happened:

You can see the many spotlights underneath, shooting up to the top as the snow falls from the sky.   I love looking at the arch.  I never get tired of it.  Many people don’t realize that the arch is an optical illusion.   It looks taller than it is wide, but its height (630 feet) is equal to its width.  The arch is also designed to to have the configuration that is the upside down version of what you’d get if you let a rope dangle in your two hands, spread apart.  One whimsical artist, Sigfried Reinhardt, created a cross-section of the arch grounds, showing that the visible portion of the arch is actually the visible part of a huge coat hanger buried in the ground.  I haven’t ruled out that possibility yet.

It’s turning out to be a wonderful vacation.   I’m getting what I actually needed: a mix of quiet time and time with my daughters.  My wife got a chance to focus on her writing.  I’m not too far from home; it’s nice to not burn gasoline.  The school called a little while ago and announced that there would be a snow day tomorrow.  We’ve got our winter coats and gloves down here, so we’ll play on the snowy arch grounds tomorrow.  I had a chance to see many moods of the arch, all in a period of less than one day.  In fact, the spotlights are now out and the snow is falling so heavily that it’s not even apparent any more that there is an arch.

My little “adventure” is only one step removed from the ultimate vacation at home, where you simply tell the world that you are gone away, but you stay at home, away from all distractions, enjoying your own pillow, food, garden, scrapbooks and music.   I’ve sometimes joked that I should become a travel agent that charges people money to arrange a vacation at their own homes–helping to remind them to truly enjoy that place they’ve spent so much time creating to be their home. 

In the meantime, I’m signing off.  The children have been asleep for three hours–they got a head start on their sleeping compared to me.  There’s no guarantee that they’ll sleep in late, as I would be inclined to do.   I do look forward to waking up, eventually, and checking out the view . . .

Epilogue (more…)

I glanced up through my city home office window at dusk, and saw a big bird in the tree.

Click to enlarge

So I grabbed my camera and took a few snapshots before she flew. I’m guessing at the gender. At the low light, the shot of her departure is too blurry to share. Am I wasting a post here rather than just putting this as a comment to my previous hawk spotting here?

Or am I just acting out because I have just gotten over the rhino virus that I picked up in Jury Duty on Jan 2, and have today (Quarterly Tax Day for us self-employees) received the Federal Court Jury questionnaire (indicating an imminent Federal Jury Summons)?

This set of stark and sometimes unnerving photos was recently published by Wired. The photograper is Taryn Simon, whose work is displayed by Gagosian Gallery.

The “Unicef Photo of the Year 2007” is this picture by American photographer Stephanie Sinclair of an 11-year old Afghan girl sitting next to her 40-year old soon-to-be-husband.

Photo caption:

Portrait of soon to be wed Faiz Mohammed, 40, and Ghulam Haider, 11, at her home in a rural village of Damarda in Ghor province. Ghulam said she is sad to be getting engaged as she wanted to be a teacher. Her favorite class was Dari, the local language, before she was made to drop out of school. Married girls are seldom found in school, limiting their economic and social opportunities. Parents sometimes remove their daughters from school to protect them from the possibility of sexual activity outside of wedlock. It is hard to say exactly how many young marriages take place, but according to the Afghan women’s ministry and women’s NGOs, approximately 57 percent of Afghan girls get married before the legal age of 16. In addition, once the girl’s father has agreed to the engagement, she is pulled out of school immediately. Early pregnancies also result in an increase in complications during child birth.

From the Unicef website:

He’s forty, she’s eleven. And they are a couple – the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. “We needed the money”, Ghulam’s parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan’s Ghor province know better: “Our men don’t want educated women.” They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

To download a zipfile with the images of the award winning photographers from the UNICEF website click here. The other entries are also worth taking a look at.

In such marriages, the man is likely to view the age difference as a fair bargain, his years of experience in exchange for her years of fecundity. At the same time, the girl’s wishes are customarily disregarded. Her marriage will end her opportunities for schooling and independent work.

On the day she witnessed the engagement party of 11-year-old Ghulam Haider to 40-year-old Faiz Mohammed, Sinclair discreetly took the girl aside. “What are you feeling today?” the photographer asked. “Nothing,” the bewildered girl answered. “I do not know this man. What am I supposed to feel?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/magazine/09BRI.html

This is a beautiful picture, it’s good photography, but the girl in the picture is a kid and she’s going to marry this man who will rape her and make her have babies although her body is not ready, although she hardly understands what is going on, although she is hoping for something else in her life. Something is wrong here.

Whenever I hear people talk “politically correct” and claim to respect cultural differences even in the face of barbaric traditions like these I don’t think they are liberals, I think they are stupid and cowards. I remember a case here where a Turkish man poured gasoline over his wife and set her on fire. The judge’s opinion was that this was a cultural thing and an extenuating cause. I don’t know what would have happened in a Turkish court, but marital rape is a crime in Turkey (it took a while, but still):

Also praiseworthy was the enactment of new legislation, including the law on the protection of the family, by which domestic violence had been legally defined for the first time, and the anticipated entry into force this year of the new Penal Code, which, for the first time, criminalized marital rape and sexual harassment in the workplace.

http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2005/wom1480.html

I wonder where people get the notion that “different culture” (or maybe I should say, “Islamic culture”) means living like animals and that people have no sense of wrong doing.

I often heard men complain about feminism (especially American men, by the way), even women make statements like “I’m not a feminist by nature” (meaning: unlike you I’m so supersuccessful with men - *yawn*) or “I’m not a feminist. I’m supersexual and feminine, I’m self-confident and well-educated with a college degree” (then take a good look at countries like Afghanistan and see where you might be without feminism), but when you see a picture like this you know they should shut up and that feminism is still a worthy cause.

Check out this video.

Isn’t this exciting? This new technique is called seam carving.

Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or adding pixels to) the image that carry little importance.

The importance of a pixel is generally measured by its contrast when compared with its neighbor pixels, but other measures may be used. Additionally, it’s possible to define (or autodetect) areas of high importance (faces, buildings, etc.) in which pixels may not be deleted, and conversely, areas of zero importance which should be removed first. From this information, the algorithm detects seams (continuous lines of pixels joining opposite edges of the image) which have the lowest importance, and deletes those. This shrinks the image by one horizontal or vertical line, depending on which direction the seam ran.

Seam carving can also be run in reverse by adding (interpolated) pixels along the lowest energy seam.

With this technique, it’s now possible to scale pictures by a large amount, while still retaining details. In normal Image scaling, scale factors greater than 2 or less than 0.5 usually result in visible image quality degradation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving

For more scientific details go to Shamir’s website and take a look at the paper. And if you just can’t get enough, there’s also a larger version of the video on the website for downloading (I recommend this, the quality is much better and you can see more details).

I’m in Chicago with my nine-year old daughter and Shedd Aquarium was an important destination for us.  We spent much of our Aquarium time at the Wild Reef exhibit. 

The coral reefs of the world support about a quarter of our sea life, so they are immensely important, yet humans are destroying them in a wide variety of ways. 

As important as the reefs are to world ecology, reef life is also stunningly beautiful.  You can see these communities up close at Shedd.  The irony is hard to ignore whenever you can view warm water life in Chicago while it’s bitterly cold outside. 

Shedd Aquarium does a wonderful job displaying its marine life.  It’s difficult to stop taking photos, if you have a digital camera. I took more than 100 photos, then deleted many of them, leaving about a dozen photos I liked.  The challenge is not finding beautiful scenes to photograph.  The Aquarium is full of such opportunities.  The challenges are the low light conditions (no flash photography allowed, for the protection of the animals), combined with the quick movements of some of the creatures.  Note:  I took all of these photos with a Canon A700, a modest consumer-grade digital camera that is about 2-years old.  Also, these photos are only minimally retouched.  Comparable scenes await anyone interested in traveling to Chicago to visit Shedd Aquarium.

Many of the organisms living at a reef look like underwater plants, but they are actually animals.  Those animals include the corals themselves, as well as sea anemones, sea urchins. crinoids and sponges (for more on our sponge cousins, see here–actually all living things our the cousins of humans).  Some of the reef animals simply sound like plants, such as sea cucumbers.  To learn more about the lives of corals, wonderful footage and explanations are included in David Attenborough’s Blue Planet series, which costs $43 at Amazon.  As an aside, I can’t believe the large number of people who consider $43 to be too much to spend on a educational documentary of breath-taking beauty, yet they will spend more than $100 many times each year to take their families to watch their favorite sports team play games.

Without further ado, here are some more of the incredible (and incredibly beautiful) things you can see at an ocean reef (or at the Shedd Aquarium):

This display includes several jelly fish pushing up against the glass and against the bottom of the display (the jellies are about 5 inches in diameter).  Members of this species of jelly fish hold their tentacles out (rather than dangle them down) to capture prey.

My daughter viewing one of the elaborate displays of coral at Shedd Aquarium.

Garden eels stick up out of the sea floor.   

My favorite animal counsin, the sponge. (more…)

I’m in Chicago with my 9-year old daughter this weekend. It’s a wonderful city to walk, even in the cold. You just bundle up and start walking. And when you do, you’ll feel the energy on the streets and you’ll see some incredible architecture. I never get tired of it.

I took these two photos with a Canon A700, a consumer grade digital camera that is about 2-years old.  It’s amazing what can happen when you go out and just point and shoot, even in the evening, as long as you brace your camera against something solid to accommodate the slowed shutter speed.  This first shot is from the Shedd Aquarium, lookng north toward downtown.

This second shot is looking southwest from a location near Michigan and Wacker. 

I decided to add one more.  My daughter and I are staying in the Club Quarters Hotel (really reasonable, great location in downtown Chicago).  We went up to the 38th floor and shot this photo through a tiny window–(some of the shadows are reflections from the inside).  But you can sense the cold temperature outside, right?

Many of them eat much the same food as you, but there are many differences too. This is a wonderful photo-essay published by Time.  The Photographs, by Peter Menzel, are from the book Hungry Planet.

The unvarnished facts speak loudly while you click through the series of photos. I found that viewing these photos was emotionally intense, sometimes celebratory and other times guilt-provoking.

The cost of the families’ weekly food added an interesting dimension to the experience.  The German family downs $500 of food (including lots of meat and dairy) per week.  One of the American families eats $341 per week (including lots of pre-prepared foods), while the other American family (from California), spends only half that much and eats much healthier food.  The family from Chad somehow gets by on $1.23 per week, largely on grains, with just a smattering of fruit. 

The essay is allegedly about food, but the houses and neighborhoods are incredibly interesting.  Many of the world’s families featured here live in comfort comparable to the American families.  But not all of them, to be sure.

The essay is ostensibly about different types of food consumed by different types of families.  But it is also about healthy eating versus unhealthy eating.  It’s about prepared food versus prepare-it-yourself food.  It’s also about the way family members relate to each other.  There are a lot of clues in these photos.

To flip through the whole series only takes a few minutes. I highly recommend it.

I was thinking of turning this guy in, to Homeland Security.

I’m in Washington DC for a conference this week. During a break, I took some photos, though I was hesitant to take any photos that included security (and Washington DC security is everywhere). Based on a blog called War on Photography, my paranoia might have been justified.

The behavior reported in War on Photography reminds me of parts of China, where I travelled in 1999 and 2001.   There, police officers brazenly told people that they couldn’ take some sorts of photos, for instance photos of the protesting Fulang Gong.  Though we didn’t see this behavior ourselves, we heard this from our Chinese-based translators.

The title means what it says. These expressions remind me of watching people’s faces as they turn their cars around corners–their driving expressions. Just take a look next time you’re at an intersection. Many of them have their tongues hanging out or they are grimacing. Yet driving a car is nothing compared to amazing things these divers are doing.

How do you organize, display and work with thousands of photos when you’re on a budget (or not)? 

My wife and I are raising two children.   When they were 0 and 2 years old (in the year 2000), we bought a digital camera and we started taking lots of photos of them.   How many photos?  An enormous number, given that we delete about 50% of our photos and that we still have 15,000 photos.  How does that happen? You take 20 here and 10 there.  You do it several times per week as your children grow up.  Then, when they get to be five or six, you let them take their own photos.  There’s no expensive film involved anymore, so you can let them go crazy.  Sure, you might find that they took 50 photos of the parakeet, but that’s how they learn.   In the meantime, you need to find a way to organize all of those photos (even after deleting 45 photos of the parakeet).

Until recently, I was using purchased software to organize and work with all of these photos.  For the past four years, for example, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Digital Image Library 9.  It’s a solid program with powerful yet easy-to-use editing.  If you want complete control over your photo-editing, however, you might want to use a more powerful program like Photoshop (or the consumer version, Photoshop Elements).   I was relatively happy with MS Digital Image until it refused to load new photos.  It became utterly obstinate and I couldn’t find any solution for the problem.  I tried many (MANY) things, and nothing worked.  Also, Digital Image had another glitch: the photos wouldn’t go to the folders where I told them to download.  Out of frustration, I started looking around for a photo-organizing program that would work.  I’m delighted with what I found:  Picasa 2.7

Doubtless, there will be professionals out there (and demanding amateurs) who will want some features beyond those offered by Picasa.  For those guys, expensive specialized software awaits.  For the rest of us, there is Picasa.

Picasa is a free program published by Google.  It sets up quickly and allows me to do everything I want to do with my photos.   You can organize them in many ways (by folder, by tags, by rating or by a custom album).  You can view your photos as slide shows.  You can import them from your camera (and they really go to the folder where you assign them).  You can burn the photos to a CD.   You can print them in a variety of ways.  You can view them in a really elegant “Timeline” feature.   Picasa organizes all of your videos along with your photos too.  Basic editing features are provided as well.

I really can’t think of anything more that I need in a photo organizing program.   I can’t imagine having a more user-friendly program. 

It’s difficult to believe that Picasa is free.   It’s really too good to be true.  Here’s where you can download your copy.

Visit this site and enjoy a lush minute of sites and sounds from BBC Motion Gallery.

In an article recently published on BldgBlog (HT: Boing Boing), there’s an absolutely fascinating interview with Michael Cook, a Canadian writer and photographer who devotes himself to exploring the subterranean infrastructure - that is to say, the storm sewers, spillways, abandoned hydroelectric complexes, dams, and all manner of tunnels and drains - that lie unseen beneath our cities like a vast, hidden world under the world.

The interview includes many truly stunning pictures. Many of these places are quite beautiful - often in a sort of noir, industrial sense, granted, but there are also concrete spillways running through wilderness and forest, storm drains that form spectacular waterfalls, and vast, soaring tunnels where light pours down as if in a cathedral. (There are more pictures on Cook’s own site, Vanishing Point.)

But even the less beautiful tunnels give me a feeling of obscure fascination. All my life, I’ve been enthralled by the idea of hidden places - those secret, forgotten realms, lost in the interstices of society and accessible only to the privileged few who have knowledge of their existence. There are, as Cook notes, whole interconnected layers of human history down in the dark that cry out to be studied and recorded.

As well, these explorations can give one an entirely new perspective on our society and the vast, complex infrastructure that maintains it - an infrastructure that most people never even know exists, much less see. It may well be that many people dismiss the notion of environmental protection only because they are unaware of just how much effort goes into sustaining our civilization, and what a fragile balance exists between humanity and nature.

I was drilling titanium in my basement when my wife called me up to see what the grackles in our sycamore were complaining about. I barely had time to grab my camera and get a snapshot before he gave up on his latest kill, a pigeon lying in the street. After he flew the proverbial coop, I bagged and disposed of the abandoned meal. Hopefully the hawk (my snapshot below) has learned not to drop his kills in the street.

Since the hawk population down here in the city has risen, I see fewer pigeons, and more doves and gold-finches.

I’m a big believer in benign environmental management. Our lily pond is clear because I leave it alone to reach a balance, not because I use a dozen products to try to match some particular theoretical water quality profile. My way, we have dragonflies. Their ravenous larvae greatly reduce our mosquito population, before they take wing. The bats help with the adult mosquitoes, and are fun to watch at night.

We also have a yard cat that largely keeps the squirrels away from our produce, and teaches the birds caution. He generally eats what he kills. There is some collateral damage. Sometimes he gets a koi snack. But the surviving fish are that much harder to catch.

I just hope that the bird flu doesn’t preferentially decimate the raptors, when (not if) it sweeps this way. Hawks and eagles are nice to have around.

I’ve always been fascinated by the moon. Perhaps it was my father’s work with NASA from the 1960’s through the 1990’s, or maybe just a fascination with shiny things.

I was sitting in my back yard watching the fireflies and bats at dusk, when I was inspired to grab my camera and take a snapshot of the moon and Venus over the neighbor’s roof.

Okay, I used a tripod for the 2 second exposure, and my camera is a decent super-zoom digital (35-500mm equiv). I wanted to show the Earthlight, so the light side is seriously washed out. The detail would have been better had I used a telescope, but that wasn’t really my objective (so to speak). You can make out the major “seas” in the light reflected from the Earth to the moon and back, again.

As the bats flitted and feasted and dusk drew its curtain, I noticed that I’d watched long enough to see Venus gain on the moon! When I started watching, Venus was halfway down the moon (measured against the neighbor’s roof). By the time I thought to take this picture, Venus was half a moon’s breadth closer to the sun. In the time it takes to watch a prime-time show, I saw direct proof that the moon moves to the east relative to the sun. Well, at least relative to leisurely Venus.

I think that more people should take the time to observe simple things like this for themselves. If they did, my teenage peers might not have saddled me with the nickname “Moonbeam” when I was seen patiently watching the moon move across the sky one summer evening.