Nice choices, Mike

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500px – the photo sharing site for proper photographers or “Grown Up Flickr” as I call it – has a new feature: a Guest Curators’ Choice page. This is where they get a top photographer, who acts a s a Guest Curator (who knew?) and picks his or her favourite photos from 500px. And first up is Michael Shainblum from San Diego in California. Here’s his 500px page, featuring amazing stuff like this:

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And here are his choices, including a couple of his shots and some from other photographers.
I particularly like this one:

11 which, as you can easily see, is by Erin Babnik. It’s called “Getting Close”, and it took some taking:

I must have gone through every position in the Kama Sutra with that tripod trying to get its feet secured around me, but to no avail. The solution involved lying prostrate on top of the boulder to get my face low enough to see the back of the camera, which was not the most elegant position I’ve assumed in the course of getting a shot, but it got the job done!

The softness of the flowing brook, against the sentinel peaks of the Dolomites  behind and the fresh, vernal light.
Beautiful.

Nice shot, Erin. And nice choices, Mike.

Yachts

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I missed out on going to see the yachts from the Volvo Ocean Race when they were in town this year. As you might have noticed from the lack of quality and quantity of blogging lately, I’m chaotically busy with trying to fit in experiments ahead of the the Christmas and summer break and trying to fit in everything else before we head up to the UK “soon”.

But the footage of the teams leaving Cape Town and heading the 8000 odd miles to Kochi in India was stunning:

That’s the corporate package – if you want the technical detail, you can watch the full, 85 minute version of the start here.

The stopover in Cape Town was supported the the tune of R750,000 by the city council, and while the maths still needs to be done, it looks like a sound investment, given the number of people going to see the yachts in port (not me) and seeing the city on TV and – increasingly – on the internet.

The event will be televised to an estimated 1.8 billion people, and the publicity will help position the city as a desirable investment and tourist choice.

Worth every cent then…

Holiday Snaps

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Not mine, you’ll be pleased to hear. No. These are from the Rosetta holiday mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about these photos, save for the fact that they were ever even taken at all.

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You can surf through a couple of hundred pics, all the while marvelling that you’re looking at images taken on a piece of space rock moving at thousands of kilometres an hour, some half a billion kilometres from Earth.

It’s all rather humbling.

Ken Block is back

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And this time, he’s in an 845hp, custom built 1965 Ford Mustang. It growls. And he’s taking it for a spin around LA.

Set to HD, turn it up loud and enjoy.

I’m no expert on cars, but I can appreciate the beauty of the machine and the skill and the sounds of this hyperbolic, crazy show.
Look past the endless sponsorships, enjoy the tyre smoke and the subtle nod to OJ Simpson. And the Jane’s Addiction track at the end.

Gymkhana Eight needs to be set in Cape Town – can you even imagine?

(h/t El Presidenté)