Photography
student at an exhibition
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography Monday, June 28, 2010 at 9:27 amwould you eat this?
When eating artichokes, I often ponder how human beings ever thought of them as food. They’re spiny, hairy and don’t often much to eat until you get to the heart.
Recently my wife and I came across a wild artichoke while hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. It looks even more forbidding.

Here is some history from About.com
Native to the Mediterranean region, the artichoke is the edible flower bud of a thistle-like plant in the sunflower family. It is eaten as a vegetable.
Its botanical name, Cynara scolymus, derives from the Latin canina meaning canine and the Greek skolymos meaning thistle. Its English name comes from the Arabic al-khurshuf also meaning thistle, which became articiocco in Italian, and ultimately artichoke.
Although mankind has been eating artichokes for more than 3000 years, the fall of Rome plunged the artichoke into obscurity until its revival in Italy the mid-15th century.
Catherine de Medici, who was married to King Henry II of France at the tender young age of 14, is credited with bringing the artichoke from her native Italy to France, where its success was instant.
The artichoke quickly made its way to Britain and as a result, the term artichoke first appeared in written English records in the 15th century. It made its way to America via French and Italian explorers.
Now California produces 100 percent of the U.S. commercial artichoke crop, rivaled in popularity only in France and Italy.
Speaking of California, here are some being cultivated.

life through the lens
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography Monday, May 10, 2010 at 8:43 amA man, a camera and a paraglider
George Steinmetz captures great images from his paraglider.
Check out his website — and this is important — click the View Story on each gallery to see all the photos.
There is a lot to see.
nice, big, sharp Icleand volcano photos
Posted by Jim Bass under Natural Disasters , Photography Monday, April 19, 2010 at 9:46 pmYesterday on the Corrizo Plain
The Corrizo Plain is a little-known, little visited National Monument about 45 minutes east of Santa Maria, California. We made the trek yesterday to capture the brief moment when the flowers light up the place.
The mountains you see below are the Temblor Range, so named because the San Andreas Fault runs along their line. The aerial photos of the fault that most people remember were taken here.
The primary yellows are from a flower aptly known as goldfields. The blue band in the photo above is a soda lake, normally dry, but with enough water to give off the blue color.
The scent from the purplish blue flowers, above, was powerful.
The dry soda bed wasn’t entirely dry, which you discover at your own peril. Your feet sink and the stuff sticks to you.
watercolors

This is an outtake from a photo shoot yesterday done at a commercial diving school in Santa Barbara. Still water is required for clear shots, but this one had a cool impressionistic quality I liked.
bridges of death
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography , Science Friday, February 26, 2010 at 3:37 pmplants that love animals
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography , Science Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 9:56 amnew 9/11 photos
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography , Terrorism Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 9:22 amiconic photos
Here’s a website devoted to, yup, iconic photos, such as this one of James Dean by Dennis Stock. This nonsense from Gopnik is amusing:
A cynical curmudgeon, protege of Henri Cartier Bresson and chronicler of post-war Hollywood, Dennis Stock–who died last week in Florida–was more famous for the iconic photograph he posed for Andreas Feininger. Stock’s own most famous photograph is probably that of James Dean hunched on the Times Square, ‘bearing the weight of a generation on his shoulders,’ according to Adam Gopnik writing for The New Yorker.
More likely, he was just keeping out the rain.
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great winter photographs
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 12:57 pmstormy weather
Returning from a three day shoot in Santa Barbara, I spotted this sailboat that was beached by the storms that have battered most of California. After three years of drought, no one is complaining.
A larger view here.
going to california
Lovely video shot with a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR.
prague in 18 gigapixels
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 10:28 amtop ten Astronomy Photos of 2009
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography , Science Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 10:07 amaccidental geography
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography Saturday, December 19, 2009 at 9:26 ampop-sci’s most amazing photos of 2009
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography , Science Monday, December 7, 2009 at 10:27 amcalifornia cabbage patch
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 3:25 pmthe march of technological progress
Canon released its 5DMark II one year ago, the first digital SLR capable of also shooting 1080p HD video. What you see below is a montage of shots from an upcoming documentary shot in Cairo and Beirut.
As media budgets shrink, photographers are being forced to do more with less, sometimes blurring the lines between videographer and still shooter.
Egypt / Lebanon Montage from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo.
nature’s fickle ways
From the WSJ photos of the day, a village surrounded by flood waters and a lovely autumn scene in Sofia, Bulgaria.


After the rain
This was taken yesterday, one day after SoCal’s first rain storm of the 2009 season, at the base of the Conejo grade in Camarillo, facing south. If you flew straight across the mountains, you’d reach Malibu.
Pictures of the Day
Posted by Jim Bass under Photography Monday, October 12, 2009 at 8:45 amunderstanding faces

The human face is unlike anything else a photographer shoots. Why and how people react to faces, and photos of faces (especially their own), fascinates me.
The images above are from an article in Scientific American on the neuroscience of visual illusions.
The left seems more feminine, the right more masculine. The only difference is the degree of contrast between the eyes/lips and the skin. No wonder women use eye shadow, mascara and lipstick.
But this raises the question: do we perceive the higher contrast face as more feminine because we’ve been exposed to women wearing makeup or is the tendency innate?
Check out all ten examples in the article.



















