Marketa drawings

Drawings made from photo I took myself near Prague, of Marketa. (Find her on Domai as Jenny.)
Software: Sketchguru for Android.

The 12-inch reader/tablet is here at last

The 12-inch reader/tablet is here at last, article.

For graphics-rich reading, it makes a heck of a difference.

Man Burning fast in desert

Wow. Burning Man is no longer so easily dismissed. And this kind of photography is a hot new medium.
I recommend watching it full screen.


Lake of Dreams from roy two thousand on Vimeo.

The new web look

Isn't it amazing how the "in" look of many web pages has changed suddenly in a year or so? In such a short time.
At least among the sites I generally see, an astoundingly great number of them have changed from a text-based design with images and many text links, to a heavily image, large-image, many-image based design, with the most important links being embedded and usually written on, images in the prime space.

I think it was the theVerge.com who pioneered it, although their images usually are a compromise between an actual photo and a colored background for the text, making them semi-abstract. (I think it's a good look, and good for them, it was not easy, I'm sure, to actually come up with a fresh design for home pages.)

When others took it over, they usually went with pure photos, I would guess simply because that abstracting thing is much harder to do right than one would think.

David Pogue's site tech.yahoo.com

[Updated] Images of Smoke Took Three Months and 100,000 Photos to Capture

[Thanks to Bert]

Images of Smoke Took Three Months and 100,000 Photos to Capture, article/photos
I was very surprised by how extremely quickly smoke move. It’s easier to photograph a racing car!
The rising of cigarette-smoke is actually so quick that conventional flash equipment is too slow, as is the photographer – only a few milliseconds pass between recognition of the subject and the taking of the shot, a length of time in which the smoke has already changed again.

Hard to believe, but it would explain why this apparently obvious and attractive subject has not been done to death long ago (like others, say, reflections and shadows).

Update:
FarShore said:
Photographing smoke is not difficult, does not require a really fast camera, nor a really fast photographer. These I did seem to be very popular, particularly as prints.

Canon 1200mm ‘Mother of All Telephoto Lenses’

Price: About $140,000. Used.

Article one, article two.

Downside (well, aside from price and bulk): no Image Stabilization. (May be why it's discontinued.) Canon's 800mm is far more portable, also has great reach, and has excellent IS. And costs about 1/10th, too.

Ma Yan Yan, ballet magician