A slide show of great images.

Taken at the Getty Villa last Friday.

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.

A pig roast in Bulgaria, from the WSJ photos of the week.

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.

Here at Boston.com

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.

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.

My Father’s Garden from Mirko Faienza on Vimeo.

Much more here.

Photos of carnivorous plants here. This is a Pinguicula Titan.

Slideshow here.

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.

A nice collection from Boston.com

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.

Lovely video shot with a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR.

Check out this 360 degree panorama of Prague.

Zoom in for amazing detail.

Full list and portfolio from Discover here.

A gallery of photos of things that look like places.

That’s a hair from the inner ear. Full gallery here.

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.

From the WSJ photos of the day, a village surrounded by flood waters and a lovely autumn scene in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Great photographs from China’s recent 60th anniversary celebration.

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.

Plenty more excellent images at The WSJ photo blog.

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.

Ralph Lauren’s folks go overboard with the Photoshop.

Story and picture here.

HT: Tigerhawk.

Full story and more photos here.