The above video chronicles the growth of a tree over the course of 5 years.  Something I’ve always wanted to do to be honest.

The below video chronicles the growth of the same tree, from a different angle, for an additional year.

{PetaPixel}

Jurassic Park Car

It must be because of the 20th anniversary of Jurassic Park, but I’ve been seeing lots of Jurassic Park themed photos, and posts, and stuff lately.  This project takes the raptor shaped cake.

These 2 people turned a 33 year old Suburu into an ace looking Jurassic Park Jeep replica, Here’s what the car looked like when they started:

ugly car

Nothing to stare at, certainly ain’t gonna get any looks.

cleaning, and painting

It’s getting better, gotta scrub all the grime off it, and start with the base coat.

Marking the sides

Getting the Red accent marks along the sides.

Outlining the Logo

Hand outlining the logo, cause it’s just easier that way.  They also hand drew the Dino skeleton logo on the hood, and sides of the car, it’s just too detailed to do it otherwise.

All in all they did a pretty amazing job on it.

I’d like to say that they spared no expense, but It looks like they used spray paint, could have gone for electro-coating that shit, but hey, it’s a 33 year old car, it probably wouldn’t last long enough.

Take alook at the rest of their album, 43 photos in all, they really went all out on the process.

{reddit}

Yes, it’s all optical illusions, but it’s still fun to watch.  In order to keep the air of mystery about it, I will not tell you how it works, you are free to figure that out for yourself.  (It’s not that hard, trust me).

{thisiscolossal}

Sure, this might be from New Years, and it might be from Australia, but it’s still very cool.  Unfortunately, it being from Australia makes it ineligible to be the annual 4th of July Post.  And, in order to not have two fireworks posts right next to each other in July, I’m gonna post this one today.

Deal with it.

{PetaPixel}

You might not know it, but I love Infrared photography   It really sheds some light on an otherwise invisible area.  And yes, I did just write that.

Anyway, watch the video above and see how some of these shots look absolutely gorgeous. IR brings out the clouds, and turns the sky black.  And when the IR is converted to Black & White, it looks even better.

I have tons of IR photos to share, but alas, due to the server downtime I mentioned previously, I cannot share them at this time, sorry.

{PetaPixel|tumblr}

Not just a snow slide, or snow sculpture, but more of a snow crop circle. That’s what Simon Beck makes.

Located in the French Alps, he makes these amazing snow crop circles by hand (or foot rather) because he walks around in snow shoes to make the patterns.  According to him they take anywhere from 3 hours to over 15, and spread out over multiple days.

That’s some dedication to work there, and trust in the weather.

I think that one might be my favorite, look at the detail on the edges, with the fractal, very Escheresque.

He tried to go for a 3-D effect here, I think he pulled it off pretty well, wouldn’t you?

I would call that the most Crop Circle like of them all.

Those were my favorites, I’m sure there are more that he’s done in the time since I wrote this, but I like those best, and I’m far to lazy to save this, and post it when actually intend to publish it.  But it’s not winter anymore (at time of writing), which is why I’m writing it now, and going to keep it until winter before I publish it.  I do that sometimes, deal with it.

{MAKE}

It’s that time of year again ladies and gentlemen, the 60th anniversary of the detonation of Ivy Mike, and the grand entrance into the age of the fusion bomb.

I think it’s still too early to go for a repost of all that is Ivy Mike, so I will keep it short and sweet and leave you with the awesome photo above as a reminder of the awesome power of the nuclear bomb.

67 Years ago the United States of America showed the world how powerfull we truly are.

The first of 2 nuclear bombs was dropped in anger on another country.  The US was attempting to finish what the Japanese had started 4 years earlier.  Except, we warned them weeks ago to surrender, they didn’t listen.

Well, it started looking like a cityscape, but quickly turned into just a mess.  Actually, scratch that, it started as a mess.

Total count was 65,000 LEGO bricks, and 12,775 photos taken over 71 hours by 2 cameras.

I like the idea of sorting, and it looks like they are towers of different brick sizes, but it just seems like soo much more work to turn them into towers like that, then put them into bins, color coded like that.

{PetaPixel}

68 years ago was a turning point in the global incident known as World War II.  Commonly known today as D-Day, but, it also goes as Normandy Landings, Operation Neptune, or Operation Overlord.  All are good.

D-Day was the just one of the many “ultimate elements” that happened in WWII.  It was the largest amphibious landing in history, and while not really the turning point of the war, for all intents and purposes, it was.

Stephen Speilberg immortalized the event in the opening of Saving Private Ryan, and for better or worse, that’s stuck with us.

Now, I’d like to draw your attention to the photo I posted above.  That is a composite shot (in case you couldn’t tell), of a historic WWII photograph, and one taken from the same spot today(ish, the dates are hard to read on this Russian site).  Servey Larenkov spent a year traveling around Europe taking photographs in those famous WWII places, and then painstakingly combining them with the historic WWII versions.

I think he did a good job.

He didn’t just take those three, there are dozens of them, many as you can imagine from Russia, and Moscow, but plenty from the occupation of Paris, and the general Western European campaign.

{PetaPixel|Paris Part 1|D-Day}

Today marks the last time in all of our lifetimes that we will get a chance to see the Venus Transit.  Little known fact (or one everyone seems to overlook), this is the 2nd time Venus will pass inbetween the Earth & the Sun in the past decade.  The previous one in June of 2004.  Back before Facebook, before Twitter, before the internet was the internet, and was just a series of tubes.  Back when only the cool people knew, (or cared) about this once (or in my case twice) in a lifetime event.

I miss those times.

Anyway, that round dot there in that grainy photo is Venus.  I need to get a better scanner to fix up that photo.  Back in 2004 we got to see the full transit from here in NY.  This time around we’ll only be able to see the start of it, because the sun will set before it’s halfway through.  That’s unfun.

Also if you take alook at the current photo of the sun (to left) there’s quite a bit of Sun Spot activity, which would also add to the dynamic of the event.  I like my photo though, the dark orange of the sun with the clouds passing by makes for a unique photo.

I took this early in the morning of June 8th 2004 through my 70mm Telescope.  The focal length on that, 700mm, brings us to an f/10.  I can’t remember the eyepiece I had in my adapter when I hooked up my 35mm SLR to the back of it.  Hopefully I wrote it on the back of that photo when I got it developed, so I just need to find it and mark it digitally.  Oh well.

If the weather gets better hopefully I’ll have some nicer photos this evening to show you all, but I’m not holding my breath.

{SOHO}