The [red-tailed] hawk is hunting, floating on the wind searching for small prey, its head perfectly still while its body stabilizes around it. I could watch this clip on repeat for the rest of the day…so cool!
This is not just a thing that hawks do — see also This Owl Will Not Move His Head and The Eerie Stillness of Chicken Heads. Birds: nature’s steadycams.
Source: Jason Kottke on kottke.org.
I admire the professionalism of these hard-working sheep dogs.
The video was shot from a drone.
Time for something a little lighter.
These are the four finalists for the 2020 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.
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This panorama was created by combining hundreds of still photographs. For details, click on Gorgeous 4K Video of Mars by Jason Kottke for kottke.org.
I found this video by Vadim Sherbakov on the Colossal web site, via kottke.org.
These time-lapse photos were taken by Mike Olbinski. Hat tip to kottke.org. Best viewed on full screen.
Photographer Christian Spencer shot these pictures of jacobin hummingbirds from his verandah in Rio de Janeiro. The translucent wings act as a kind of prism that turns each bird into a tiny rainbow.
The Swiss have a nice custom—ladders to allow cats to enter and exit from upper story apartments and rooms. These photos are from a book, Swiss Cat Ladders, by Brigitte Schuster, focusing on outdoor cat stairways in the city of Berne. To look at more photos, click on the links.
LINKS
Cat ladders: a creative solution for felines in flats in The Guardian.
Quirky Photos Showcase the Ingenuity of Cat Ladders in Switzerland on My Modern Met.
Click to enlarge
Gabriel Zaparolli took this striking long-exposure photo of a lightning storm over the outskirts of Torres, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, during the evening of June 10, 2018. I found it on the kottke.org web log.
I found this video on the kottke.org blog. It is a time-lapse photo of a kidney bean sprouting into a plant, shot at the rate of one shot every 9 minutes 36 seconds and played at the rate of 30 frames per second.
The little bean seems strangely gallant to me. It makes me feel proud to be a carbon-based life form.
These cute pictures were taken by a British animal photographer named Miles Herbert. Looking at them made me smile. He does business as Captivelight. His other specialties are frogs, reptiles and birds of prey.
I found this set of photos on the Bored Panda web site, which posted a gallery of 20 of Herbert’s mouse-and-tulip photos in all.
I found this on the deMilked web site. It consists of time-lapse photos of the travels of a cargo ship from the Gulf of Aden to Hong Kong, with stops along the way.
These amazing time-lapse videos were created last spring by Mike Olbinski, who chases storms each spring on the Great Plains, and has a second job as a wedding photographer in Phoenix. Arizona. I came across his work on a National Geographic web site.
These time-lapse photos were taken by Jamie Scott. over a period of six months in Central Park in New York City. He visited 15 locations, two days a week, just after sunrise, from August, 2011, through January, 2012. The music is by Lower Dens. I found this video on the Colossal website.
These photos of church signs were collected on the Bored Panda website.
On rare days, cold air is trapped in the Grand Canyon under a layer of warm air which, in combination with moisture and condensation, create what’s called a full cloud inversion, which resembles something in between ocean waves and fast-moving clouds. Beautiful!
Click on Colossal for still photos and background information.
These time-lapse photos were taken by Jamie Scott over a period of three years. The background music is an original composition by Jim Perkins. I found this video on the Colossal and kottke.org web sites.
Hat tip to kottke.org.
Click on this and this for more by photographer Jan Fröjdman.
I never thought of fog as beautiful. Or that it could come in waves.
These photographs were taken by Nick Steinberg over an eight-year period in the San Francisco Bay area, using high peaks such as Mount Tamalpais as his vantage point. What a labor of love that must have been!
It’s good to remember that there are other things in the world besides politics and economics.
An eagle with a Sony video camera flew off the top of Burj Khalifa, currently the world’s tallest building, in Dubai, enabling us to (sort of) see what an eagle in flight sees. It’s too bad there is no footage of the eagle’s last few feet of flight before landing, but the footage is still something to see.
North of the Arctic Circle in Finland, there is a period of about 50 days when the sun never rises above the horizon, known as the Polar Night.
Artist and photographer Hannu Huhtamo uses this period of darkness to paint with light. He makes his strange and haunting works of art by making a long-exposure photograph of a moving bright light source against a dim background.
LINKS
Hannu Huhtamo Photography. His website.
Light Painting Artist Hannu Huhtamo | Light Painting Photography. An interview.
This Photographer Paints With Light in the Finnish Polar Night by Lisa Lanot for Konbini.
Polar Night and Midnight Sun articles on Wikipedia.
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