You probably heard about, or seen, images were the sense of motion is captured by letting the moving object blur out against a stationary background.  I came across a really wonderful example of this today.  It is an image by David Munoz of Reuters that shows a runner stopping to photograph himself while everyone runs past him in exquisite blurs. This picture was taken on August 11 at the “City2surf” footrace in Sidney Australia.  There were 80,000 participants.

A number of associations come to mind: the comic book “The Flash” and a Star Trek episode called “Wink of an Eye,” where there is a parallel universe where everyone moves at incredible speed relative to “normal” life on the Enterprise.

The picture is brilliantly executed.  I love the way the image axis lies along the diagonal.  The pastels are marvelous.  And a really nice element is the way that the photographer has captured the runners’ shoes.  The contrast between the still runner and everyone else adds a perfect sense of contrast.  This is beautifully executed!

Yes, you read that right.  I want to speak today about toilet paper roll dioramas.  A diorama is a small scene created in a small place, like a ship in a bottle.  Small is actually not a requirement of the genre.  When I was a little boy – sorry more tales from the cretaceous – I loved to go the the American Museum of Natural History and when I got home I would use little wooden cheese boxes and plastic animal figures to create my own natural history scenes, or I would invert small plastic strawberry or blueberry containers from our local Pioneer Market to create little zoos.  A more complex contrivance was to take a cereal box, cut a square hole at one end, and an eye hole at the opposite end, and to string a comic strip between two pencils that would stretch across the square hole.  Hold it up to the light and you slowly wind the comic strip in succession and create a kind of miniature movie.

Carrying all these memories, I was delighted this week to come across the simply magical worlds of French Artist Anastassia Elias.  These are magnificent and complex dioramas each contained within the telescopic universe of a toilet paper roll.  Click on one of the images and then click on the right arrow to see a slide show.  I’ve decided that the photos are just as wonderful as the dioramas themselves, which makes it all fair game for Hati and Skoll.  Enjoy these little marvels that ultimately take us back to childhood, when anything was possible and all possibilities were magical.

Figure 1 – Tasseled wobbegong shark, from the Wikimedia Commons, original image by Jon Hanson and reproduced under creative commons license.

Well, it’s early August.  The great white sharks are following the seals to Cape Cod, and a day barely goes by without a reported sighting.  The official Shark Week is a tradition started in 1987 by the Discovery Channel.  Other TV stations seem to follow suit with all the great viscerally terrifying movies like: “Jaws”, “Jaws 2,” “Jaws 3,” “Deep Blue Sea“ (my personal favorite shark movie), and “Open Water.”   Just stay out of the water people!

Anyway, and following up on yesterday’s blog about the Whale Shark, I’d like to deviate just a tad from the purely photographic and talk about the Wobbegong (Orectolobae) (see Figure 1).  I am inspired in this by a reader who posted Figure 1 on her Facebook page. Wobbegongs are bottom-dwelling sharks, mostly to be found in the pacific just cruising around and resting on the sea floor. Most wobbegongs have a maximum length of 1.25 metres (4.1 ft) or less.  However, the spotted wobbegong (see Figure 2), Orectolobus maculatus, can grow to lengths approaching ten feet.

The fellow shown in Figure 1 is a tassled wobbegong (Eucrossorhinus dasypogon).  It is a species of carpet shark and kind of does look like a carpet.  It can be found in shallow coral reefs off northern Australia, New Guinea, and adjacent islands and can grow to about six feet.  It’s fringed dermal flaps and coloration provide camouflage that enables it to trap and ensare small fishes that take it for a pile of seaweed.

While tasseled wobbegongs will bite the foot that steps on them, the fate of wobbegongs is similar that of many other shark species.  They are eaten by humans.  Their flesh is called flake and consumed by humans in Australia, and their skin is prized as a source of leather.

And you thought that this post was going to be about a fictional lake in Minnesota.

Figure 2 – The spotted wobbegong, image from the Wikimedia Commons, original image (c) 2005 Richard Ling and reproduced under creative commons license.

Figure 1 Male whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium, photo by Zac Wolf, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain under creative commons license.

I was intrigued yesterday to come across this photoshoot project by Kristian Schmidt and Shawn Heinrichs showing fashion models swimming with whale sharks.  I am actually a bit ambiguous about these images.  So I thought that I would post it to see how readers feel.

So, first the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), it is the largest living non-mammalian vertebrate by a long shot.  Living about seventy years these a slow-moving filter feeders can reach lengths of ~13 meters or 42 feet and can weigh as much as 66,000 pounds. As filter feeders they dine mostly on plankton, but also will suck in schools of small fish.

The images in the photo-essay were shot off the village of Oslob, a remote corner of the Philippines. Fishermen there have developed a touching interspecies relationship with these giants by feeding them handfuls of shrimp.

Unfortunately, the whale shark is targeted by commercial fishermen in several locations, where they seasonally aggregate.  The species is considered to be vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, although their population size is unknown. In the Philippines, itself, harvesting whale sharks was banned in 1998.

Arguably, these images fall to the criticism that we have discussed before, in respect to Sports Illustrated’s use of indigenous peoples as props for a fashion shoot.  Here the whale sharks become props, in as sense.  What’s more significant to me is that it just doesn’t quite work!  The whale sharks are just so awesome and beautiful that they utterly eclipse the bathing beauties, sorry ladies.  Who’s the prop here?  Or as the sharks would probably put it: who are these people and what are they doing here?

When we discussed dancers caught in midair, I commented how they seemed to be defying gravity and floating in midair.  Well the sharks and the models do seem to be floating.  But in fact they really are floating.  The bottom line is that whale sharks are truly magnificent, but I don’t really need the models.  These images just aren’t speaking to me.

Well I came upon this image today on the Huffington Post by Ohio photographer Debbie DiCarlo that shows a mother coyote teaching her pubs to howl. Can it get any better than this?  This image is right on theme, coyotes being kissin’ cousins of wolves, and well, 100% Hati and Skoll approved.  As is so often the case, it is well worth going beyond the Huffington Post’s page and visiting DiCarlo’s website, where she has a pretty extensive portfolio of photographs.

Nature photography takes a lot of patience, skill, and luck.  It’s not just about big lenses.  It has to begin with a real sensitivity to the subject!  When this photograph was posted last week, it went viral on the web, and also was highly criticized by many skeptics for being “set up” in a museum diorama.  Well, nothing of the sort.  The image was taken at a workshop in Hinckley, Minnesota, and DiCarlo takes the “too perfect” criticism as a compliment.