Tags: photograph

Here’s one photo from each month in 2024

2004 was the first year of the future

I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…

Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!

First Impressions of the Pixel 9 Pro | Whatever

At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

Frostapalooza in photos and videos | Brad Frost

These are great!!!

Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse

A library of CC-licensed photos.

Next time you’re tempted to use a generative “AI” tool to make an image for a slide deck, use this instead.

Will Browar | Photographing Frostapalooza

Wow! The photos that Will took at Frostapalooza (and in the run-up) are absolutely fantastic!

He also shares the technical details for all you camera nerds.

AI Art is The New Stock Image

While some executives in Davos may get excited about its infinite possibilities this week, to a younger consumer AI Art is already ‘a bit cringe’.

border:none 2023 – florian.photo

I love these black and white photos from the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg!

TimeGuessr

Where and when were these photographs taken?

It’s like that Chronophoto game I linked to with an added dimension of location.

Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse

A search engine for images and audio that’s either under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.

Chronophoto - The Photographical History Game

This is a fun game—with the same kind of appeal as that Wiki History Game I linked to—where you have to locate photographs in time.

Aegir.org | Five Moons

In a way, I find these pictures—taken by someone from the ground with regular equipment—just as awe-inspiring as the images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Awesome astrophotography from the South Downs | Science | The Guardian

To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.

The Flickr Foundation

A non-profit foundation dedicated to long-term digital preservation.

Imagine if we could place ourselves 100 years into the future and still have access to the billions of photos shared by millions of people on Flickr, one of the best documented, broadest photographic archives on the planet.

The Flickr Foundation represents our commitment to stewarding this digital, cultural treasure to ensure its existence for future generations.

Its first act is the renewal of the Flickr Commons.

Earth Restored — Toby Ord

Beautifully restored high-resolution photographs of the Earth taken by Apollo astronauts.

Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski

This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.

At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.

Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.

Episode three of the Clearleft podcast is here!

This one is a bit different. Whereas previous episodes focused on specific topics—design systems, service design—this one is a case study. And, wow, what a case study! The whole time I was putting the episode together, I kept thinking “The team really did some excellent work here.”

I’m not sure what makes more sense: listen to the podcast episode first and then visit the site in question …or the other way around? Maybe the other way around. In which case, be sure to visit the website for Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.

That’s right—Clearleft got to work with London’s Natural History Museum! A real treat.

This episode of the podcast ended up being half an hour long. It should probably be shorter but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any of the insights that Helen, James, Chris, and Trys were sharing. I’m probably too close to the subject matter to be objective about it. I’m hoping that others will find it equally fascinating to hear about the process of the project. Research! Design! Dev! This has got it all.

I had a lot of fun with the opening of the episode. I wanted to create a montage effect like the scene-setting opening of a film that has overlapping news reports. I probably spent far too long doing it but I’m really happy with the final result.

And with this episode, we’re halfway through the first season of the podcast already! I figured a nice short run of six episodes is enough to cover a fair bit of ground and give a taste of what the podcast is aiming for, without it turning into an overwhelming number of episodes in a backlog for you to catch up with. Three down and three to go. Seems manageable, right?

Anyway, enough of the backstory. If you haven’t already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should do that. Then do these three things in whichever order you think works best:

• Visit the website for Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.
• Read the case study on the Clearleft website.
• Listen to episode three of the Clearleft podcast

Coldwater.Science

The World Ocean is as close as you can get to outer space without leaving Earth. It’s an entirely different universe, nothing like the life we have on land.

Just a Beautiful Photo of Earth Taken in 1967 from 18,000 km Away «TwistedSifter

A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph | Open Culture

I wrote a while back about one of my favourite photographs but this might just give it a run for its money.

It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway.