The Grand Canyon, photographed by Travis Roe (HT Kurt Andersen)

Time-Lapse sky photography by Matt Molloy

via Beautiful Decay

Sebastian Junger tells Terry Gross about the day the late photographer Tim Hetherington started taking pictures of sleeping soldiers while the two were filming Restrepo:

It was a very hot day, boring day. We hadn’t been in a fire fight for at least a week, perhaps more, and the guys were just zoned out. … [S]oldiers kind of sleep as much as they can. One of them said to me, “You know, if you sleep half the time it’s only a six-month deployment,” and so they were sleeping in the middle of the day, sprawled on the ground in their little bunks … and the flies were buzzing around and Tim was scuttling around photographing them. I was like, “Tim, man, what are you doing?” For me it was the ultimate situation where nothing’s going on journalistically and you can just space out and he said, “Don’t you get it? All the photos you see of soldiers, they’re all geared up and they’ve got their weapons and they’re all tough-looking, but when they’re asleep they look like what they really are which are little boys.” And they did: they all looked like they’re about 10-years-old, so vulnerable, you know. And no nation wants to think that their soldiers are vulnerable, but of course they are and Tim saw that.

Nevalla, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2008. © Tim Hetherington via the International Center for Photography

This is very cool.

Very Short List:

Zamaaan is a crowd-sourced digital collection of vintage family photos from the Middle East.

This gallery of Edward Curtis photography is worth checking out.

Petapixel:

In 1906, etiologist and photographer Edward S. Curtis set out across the United States to draw, photograph and otherwise document the lives of Native Americans that hadn’t yet been contacted by Western society.

Funded by J.P. Morgan, he would return 20 years later with over 40,000 photographs, which he used to illustrate his famous 20 volume series “The North American Indian.” Only 222 complete sets were ever published (one of which sold last year for $1.44M at auction) and even though it has been criticized by some as misrepresenting the Native American culture at the time, its value as a documentary publication is enormous.

HT @nyttjaaa

The aptly-named Camille Seaman’s photographs of icebergs.

This photo from a series of photographs that answers the question “What Would You Look Like If You Were Simultaneously A Kid And An Adult?” expresses how we feel when we look at these photos by Cristian Girotto.

via Beautiful Decay

The Cav via Flickr:

I took these images from my rooftop after my wife and I saw this storm coming up. I could see that the cloud was beginning to twist into a tornado with a rainbow underneath it….how weird is that?! It was 8pm with the sun setting which made the color of everything on the yellow/orange side.

It was sunny all day until we heard thunder. This storm was moving away from me otherwise my wife might have yelled me down from the roof. The neighbours were out watching too. It was quite the spectacle. The result of this storm is that it faded away into cloud patterns but not before dumping golf-ball sized hail on farms 3 miles out of town. There was major damage to cars, trucks, roofs with a few horses being spooked!

HT The Earth Story

At the end of work the other day, I followed a few links that eventually led me to the Soundcloud page of “Conversations with Margaret Daniel” and I began listening. While I should have been heading home for the night, instead I found myself wanting to stay plugged into my computer, listening to this woman talk about the plants that populate her yard: Roses, camellias, azaleas, lilacs… The audio is a collage of many different conversations with this woman and the result is a wonderfully intimate, reflective, and touching look at what is alive and what is dead. “Whoever this Margaret Daniel is,” I thought, “She is a pleasure to spend time with.”

Turns out, Margaret Daniel is the childhood neighbor of photographer Susan Worsham. Worsham turned to Daniel as a subject after losing her brother, mother and father. This audio was played in the gallery for an exhibition of Worsham’s featuring Daniel.

You are introduced to Daniel with these words:

As you go through life, don’t forget to smell the flowers. … ‘Give me flowers while I’m living. Do not wait until I’m dead.’ They come with all these flowers. Mother said that’s the worst thing it could be. Why not do good for a human being while they know? When they’re gone, no matter how many flowers you pour on, it’s nothing.”

- Nell

Image by Susan Worsham courtesy of the artist

Our interview today is with historian Bruce Levine about his book, The Fall of the House of Dixie, so to keep with the Civil War theme we’ve got going, here’s a cool photo of a reenactor visiting the Atlanta Cyclorama by Jon-Phillip Sheridan,

From a book of photographs and essays about London by Chicago-based writer and photographer Brian Leli. Explaining the project on his website, Leli says:

From the end of one strange summer to the next, I walked around London looking for the closest thing I could find to the truth in any given moment. It didn’t feel great a lot of the time. But it feels a little better now.

via yatzer

All these moments happened — and were captured by photographers — this year.

The Atlantic’s In Focus blog has its annual round-up of the best pictures from the year and it’s an amazing gallery. - Nell

livelymorgue:

Though the weather was freezing, skaters descended on the Wollman Memorial Rink in Central Park, December 10, 1968. Photo: Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

Is it just me or does this photo inspire spontaneous outbursts of “Walking In a Winter Wonderland”?

laughingsquid:

Photo of Draining Sink That Looks Like an Eye

Spooky. When you finish washing your dishes, does your sink look like an eye like this?

buzzfeed:

Eighty-eight-year-old Misa found her odd-eyed kitty, Fukumaru, abandoned in a shed. Now the two are basically inseparable.

Possibly the most beautiful love story of all time - told in photos.  —Yowei