The more I see, the more I like.  There is a contest each year entitled Wildlife Photographer of the year and jointly sponsored by the BBC Worldwide and The Natural History Museum.  This contest has received over 48,000 entries since its inception in 1965.  This years winners have just been announced and it’s one of those “Wow, amazing, %@$#*!!! Moments.

So the question is where to begin with personal favorites, and I’m going to confine myself to three.  I have to start with Paul Souders’ breathtaking photograph of a polar bear hunting just below the surface.  (Once the picture shows up, be sure to click on it to enlarge.)This photograph is winner of the “Animals in their Environment” category.  There is a subdued pastel quality to this image and, of course, that polar bear is certainly intent upon its dinner, which you feel certain could just as easily be you.  Hence there is a sense of fear create.  At the other end of the spectrum is remorse that these beautiful animals are quite likely to be extinct in the wild in another fifty years or so as their habitat melts away..

Next I’ll vote for Connor Stefanison’s photograph of an owl in British Columbia at night.  This is the winner of the “The Eric Hosking Portfolio Award.” This female barred owl had a territory near Stefanison’s home in Burnaby, British Columbia. He began the work by studying the owls flight path and behavior, doing that until he felt ready for the shot.,  He set up his camera near one of the owl’s favorite perches that was triggered and linked remotely three flashes: diffused and on low settings.  He used a dead mouse on a platform above and out of sight of the camera to induce swooping.  I just love the quality of the stop action and the sense of night, despite the vividness of the surrounding forest.

Finally, there is Joe McDonald photograph of two mating jaguars in Brazil. This image is winner of the “Behavior: Mammals” category.  There is a wonderful sense of intensity and raw visceral emotion as well as beautiful coloration caught in the picture .This is not what your online dating services would advertise. 

Be sure to check out all of the photographs.  There is a lot of wonderful work to be seen here.

Figure 1 – Edward Steichen, “Sailors Sleeping on the Deck of the USS Lexington,” 1943, from US NARA and in the public domain,

Today is Saint Crispin’s day and 598 years ago on October 25, 1415 there took place one of the great epic battles of the Middle Ages, the Battle of Agincourt.  This battle is highlighted in Shakespeare’s epic history “Henry V.”  I point this out because one of the great soliloquies of that drama is Henry bemoaning the fact that slaves may sleep while kings pace the night sleeplessly.

Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night
Sleeps in Elysium…

You may ask what is my point.  Well, reader Megan has shared with me a wonderful portfolio of images by Dutch photographer Paul Schneggenburger, which are night long exposures of couples sleeping.  They seem to be more like intricate dances – dances of sleep.   The couple sleeps in Schneggenburger’s studio apartment, obviously black sheets.  The room is lit with candles and the camera hangs over the bed and takes a six hour exposure.  There is something sweet and wonderful here, maybe an ounce of voyeurism, perhaps reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s five hour and twenty minute film entitled “Sleep,” showing his friend John Giorno sleeping.  But in the end, I think what strikes one the most is the sense of joyous peacefulness.  Henry V was right.  There are no kings here.

The BBC is featuring a gallery of readers images entitled “You Shoes.”  There are some interesting photographs, but I am particularly intrigued by a multiexposure stroboscopic photograph by Brandon Klein, showing someone’s basketball sneakers performing an aerial dance (You should be able to go from this image to the others in the series).  There is nothing else of the player save the shows and the background is perfect.  The image is quite whimsical and I am very much intrugued by how it was taken.  No details are given.  I suspect it is some kind of green screen with Photoshop layers subsequently reassembled.

Sometimes a good photograph is easy or at least straightforward to create.  AT other times there is a lot of technical setup and skill involved.  I think that Klein’s picture falls into the latter group. In any event it is a gorgeous image.

Figure 1 – The internet 1910, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

I received two interesting comments today.  The first was from my son pointing out that my wife and I had paid for information that we could have gotten free on the internet.  The second was from a reader in response to my post about the demise of the International Herald asking why anyone would want to shell out two euros for a twenty page newspaper, when the same information could be obtained for free on the internet.  See there’s a common thread here.

Let’s ignore that fact that nothings really free. I pay a lot for my Verizon FIOS internet service at home and for four smart phones.  The common theme is the belief that information both text and image should be free.  It’s part of the democratization of the internet that we have often spoken about.  And it goes way beyond newspapers.  In the dinosaur ages, when I was a boy, you had to send photo-prints to your family and friends, if you want to distribute them.  Now you create them, for free, send them to your friends, for free, and store them on The Cloud for free.

Anybody can write, opine, and post for free.  Indeed, a lot of the opinions that I see on social media I wish that I had to pay for, because I wouldn’t and, therefore, wouldn’t be subjected to.  This, I guess, is that old adage that you get what you pay for returning like reflux at a chili fest.

Efforts like those of the NY Times, as an example, to charge for content or webstorage services are, I suspect, doomed to failure.  I expect that they will be “gone with the wind.”  And don’t give me the old quality of information argument.  Ever read the NY Post?  These vendors need to invent new ways of making money from their content otherwise their consumers will retreat.

So then you’re probably going to point out that all this Cloud Cruisin’ leaves you oh so open and vulnerable to cyber attack – to tracking, to directed ads, and to even more evil acts like identity theft.  Of course it does all of that.  Remember that I said that ultimately nothing is free!

We’re paying a big price. So the perception of being free is a chimera.  The value that you are getting is accessibility, downloadability, and indexing.  Whenever I want to sound erudite and post a quote here, I just type a few remembered lines into Google and out it pops.  Or if I want to see a photograph, I can almost always find it somewhere on the web – more often than not having been posted with complete disregard for copyright – another price of civilization.  This kind of rapid accessibility is however, worth quite a lot – another old adage “time is money.”

I always seem to get to this point in a blog about the internet or social media which begs a pithy conclusion.  The conclusion is ultimately always the same.  You don’t need to embrace change.  It doesn’t care about you.  It will be happy to leave you behind.  Technology is progressing without retreat – always has been; it’s only faster now (psst,  because the singularity is approaching).

A while back in the office, we were working on a slide to illustrate one of our biomedical device concepts and our genius artist-in-residence came up with this wonderful drawing that featured the head of the “Average Woman” based on a composite of some thirty or so actual faces.  I like to refer to this as the “Jederfrau.”  As a result I was delighted this morning to come upon an article about the work of 3D artist Nickolay Lamm featuring computer simulations of the average nineteen year old man in the United States, Holland, France, and Japan that are based on CDC published figures for weight, height, and body Mass index (BMI).  The average American man has a BMI of 28.6; the average Japanese man has a BMI of 23.7; the average man from the Netherlands has a BMI of 25.2; and the average French man has a BMI of 25.5.  So the message is obvious “too many cookies, Corduroy,” and clearly fits in well with the recent Connecticut College study showing that Oreo cookies can be as addictive as cocaine to rats. 

Lamm recently featured similar 3D renderings of the average nineteen year old American teenage girls as Barbie.  The story there is pretty much the same.  Poor Barbie keeps getting slammed for creating unrealistic body image for teenage girls. 

A missing point in all of this is our growing ability to create realistic looking 3D avatars.  Indeed, until the advent of otherworld video games and the 2009 James Cameron movie “Avatar” the word avatar referred to the descent to the Earth of incarnations of the deity, predominately in Hinduism.  This fits in well with Joseph Campbell’s view of “Creative Mythology.” Photography, movies, television, and video games represent creations of fictional realities, and our massive computing power is opening up whole new vistas of creation.