Figure 1 – Southern Rockhopper Penguins on Saunders Island in the Falklands. Image from the Wikimedia Commons and by Ben Tubby under creative commons attribution license.

It is Saturday morning, and I am eating steel-cut oatmeal and trying for a few moments to ignore the constant news bombardment of this week’s toll of human misery.  You could really spend all of your time crying.  But I have to mention it because it truly cannot be ignored and treated as if it is not there.

So I am looking for some balance – something of quiet beauty. And in my weekly sojourn through “This Week in Photos,” I came  across, on the BBC, a wonderful collection of images now on display in London at the Mall Galleries. It is an exhibition of photographs by residents of the Falkland Islands from a competition run by the  Falkland Islands Government to find the “best photographs” by island photographers.  Judging from this there is a high proportion of the 3000 some inhabitants of the island with great photographic talent.  The two that are giving me the greatest peace this troubling Saturday morning are Aniket Sardana’s dynamic photograph of a smiling (if I am allowed to anthropomorphize) seal swimming upside down underwater.  This is really a beautiful and exciting image.  And then there is a spectacular, I assume HDR, image, also by Aniket Sardana of the Cape Meredith Coast. I have truly found inner peace. And just as a bonus, I include, not from the exhibition but from the Wikimedia Commons a gorgeous photograph of windblown Sothern Rockhopper penguins on Saunders Island in the Falklands.  I think that I am loading up my camera gear and taking the next boat!

Here’s one, sent in by a reader in response to yesterday’s post about “La Rapa das Bestas, that I cannot resist. It seems that on Wednesday Bill Hillman coauthor of “Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona” was badly gored in the leg this past Wednesday during this year’s running.  And yes, as one might expect in this highly digital and connected world, it was all recorded in a photograph. It is a case, I suppose, of not following one’s own directions, since the book does point out that:

“My own final introductory words of advice are simple: if you want to guarantee you’ll survive running the bulls, stay off the street and watch it from a balcony.”

While the bulls are certainly dangerous enough, the event has been made all the more perilous by people who combine the event with a lot of heavy drinking, and co-author Alexander Fiske-Harrison blamed Mr. Hillman’s accident on another runner who pushed him.

I am, however, reminded of a statement attributed to the 19^th Century British magazine “Puck.”  “What’s better than presence of mind in a train wreck? Absence of body.”  So you’ll definitely find me sipping coffee on the balcony.  

Hmm! The world is mesmerized by the World Cup Competition in Brazil. And if that’s not your cup of tea, then perhaps you are thrilled by The Annual Scottish Highland games. Still no? Don’t worry! There is always the World Championship Wife Carrying Competition that just ended in Helsinki, Finland.

So what about a photograph of someone doing the laundry. The thought brings to my mind the image of someone beating the dirt out of clothes with a rock in a river, ever wary of crocodiles, I guess. Or it brings to mind a street scene with colorful laundry billowing in the breeze across clotheslines. Well today we have neither. Instead we have this intriguing image by Alexander Zemlianichenko of the AP showing an employee at the the Russian space training center air drying on a clothes line the spacesuits of cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin and flight engineers Kathleen Rubins and Takuya Onishi after a training session. Those babies do not look like beach wear to be sure!  And it really isn’t the high tech solution to the problem that one might expect. Is it?

But to the significant point that like everyone else, astronauts certainly have laundry too. No beating your space suit on a meteorite or stray piece of space debris for them. Indeed, it has always struck me that to hang out on the International Space Station you need to be able to set aside any OCD tendencies towards super cleanliness that you might harbour. Of course, the views are amazing!

Well here’s something pretty amazing. This photograph by Wang Zhao for AP-Getty Images shows Chinese honor guards lining up with the help of a string as they await the arrival of Myanmar President U Thein Sein and Chinese President Xi Jinping, during a welcoming ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday, June 27.

At a technical level there are a number of fascinating features. First of all, of course, the rule of thirds – both horizontally and along the diagonal. Second, is the string itself leading your eye.  The way in which the focus moves along the line of soldiers left to right, leaves no question about where your eye should go.  The squinting commander is really wonderful. And it all goes to show that a photograph is all about perspective and composition.  Here the perspective was perfectly chosen, and the composition excellently executed.

Friday is time to scan the various “Week in Pictures” features, and today I was taken by this beautiful image by  Bogdan Cristel  for Reuters shot on June 22 at this year’s Bucharest International Air Show at Baneasa airport on June 22.  It really takes your breath away, which is real praise for a photograph.  I love the spirals and the graininess of the sky.  And I love the blue.  Will you allow me to call it cerulean blue? I love cerulean blue.  It has such a lovely vaporous sense of humidity and water – this not to mention that the word is really cool. It rolls off the tongue and makes you sound really erudite. 8<)

The image shows the Aerobatic Yakkers flying YAK-52’s.  The YAK-52 (Як-52) was first introduced in 1976 The Yakovlev Yak-52  was the primary Soviet training aircraft. It is still produced in Romania by Aerostar and worldwide is a popular aerobatic plane.

I am going to end hear without uttering the obvious pun.  I do love the photograph.

That’s pretty much the bottom line.  I was reading my blog of yesterday and started studying the Mars Rover selfie in greater detail.  And I realized that there was an important aspect to point out – hence today’s addendum.  Remember that this image was done by stitching and what that means is that an object that is not in both images is omitted or blurred out – here I think omitted.  It’s kinda a bit of image processing mumbo jumbo, or abracadabra to use the cabalistic term!  The point is that there is an intense shadow in the center right that comes from what? Nothing else is casting a shadow.  It is the shadow of the robot arm.  But the arm itself is not there.  How is that for incongruous?

It is a lot like the Invisible Man leaving footprints in the snow and is very reminiscent of our discussion of the now infamous Apple Map image of the Loch Ness Monster.  For these Earth images you have to mosaic, in that case in time, so that you can correct for bad weather.  That is done by an averaging method and something that was there yesterday but gone today becomes just a bot ghost-like.