Weirdomatic has a collection of  images of power plants, ranging from the oldest hydro-electrical plant in Austria to futuristic solar and nuclear facilities.

This dead leaf of a bottle brush tree will have to pass for fall color here in Thousand Oaks.

Shameful plug time, with help from Live Science:

 Ah, roses. Their heady fragrance and delicate petals glistening with dew could soften the hardest heart.

But take a sharper look at the dewdrops. They bead, rather than spread—and that’s because the material composing the petal surface doesn’t bond well with water.

Yet the droplets don’t roll off. What binds them to the petals?

To find out, a team of chemists led by Lin Feng of Tsinghua University in Beijing peered at the petals with a scanning electron microscope. What they saw was a carpet of minuscule bumps covered with even tinier ridges. To confirm that those structures — and not the chemical makeup of the petals — are what grip the water droplets, Feng’s team made a plastic cast of the petal surface. As with the original petal, water droplets stuck to the cast, even when it was turned upside down.

And the plug? That gorgeous rose photograph is from my website, Photo-Roses.com

Driving on 89A in Arizona along the Vermilion Cliffs, we came upon this unusual dwelling. Shirley Lane, who sells jewelry out in front, said the house had been there for 110 years. It was beginning to rain and she had her goods covered with a plastic sheet.

August is still monsoon season in Arizona, and we saw plenty of thunderstorms in seven days on the road. This was taken from 89A, about 15 miles south of the Navajo Bridge over the Colorado River, at 11:30 in the morning. Midday shooting is usually awful, but weather makes its own light.

I drove wearing polarized sunglasses, even when there was no sun, because I had forgotten my normal glasses. Serendipitous, because the polarizer is what made the column of rain visible — neither my wife nor daughter noticed it. My first shot without a polarizing filter failed to capture it.

Chinese artist Li Wei from Beijing started off his performance series ‘Mirroring’ and later on took off attention with his ‘Falls’ series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality.

Much more here.

In photography, HDR stands for high dynamic range — a technique which combines several exposures of a scene to create a single image. They can look realistic or artificial.

These obviously fall into the latter category. Both show high rise reflections from my balcony of the Hyatt Regency on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. 

…that begins with photographer Rick Smolan, many years ago, shooting photographs of a young girl in Korea and ends quite happily.

Another great video from TED Talks.

WATCH HERE.

It was a blistering five days here in SoCal - 100 degrees plus. Now, with the solar siege ended, it was time to cut some flowers — the few that weren’t scorched — and shoot some pictures against the fading sky.

No gondoliers, but plenty of ducks and pricey homes.

Some great images here by Washington Post photographer, Andrea Bruce.

It’s amazing this guy doesn’t get clobbered once in a while. 

This well-made website shows off award winning photographs from around the world. Each has an interview with the photographer.

Be sure to check out the story behind the portrait of Putin and the photograph of the evacuation of the dead gorilla (two images to the left of Putin).

But they’re all good. 

With Photoshop, making panoramic photos is easy. Shoot, import and stitch. But getting good images to stitch takes practice.

You can use a tripod if your tripod head that locks the camera but allows it to pivot. If it just locks the camera in place, it’s worse than no tripod at all.

Or you can buy one of these gizmos when they come out.

Still, the most ingenius tricks uses a piece of string. I was telling a friend about this yesterday. Here’s a video.

After a few days of intense jackhammering, a family of Nuttall’s woodpeckers made themselves at home in our maple tree. A week or so ago, we could just make out the faint chirps of the chicks. Today, their voices are robust and insistent as they demand food. This little squirt seemed to playing hide and seek as I set up my tripod and flash.

I took these photographs last night in Camarillo, California just before sunset.

The New York Times has a nice gallery of Adams’ iconic Yosemite images with a short audio description.

I spotted an interesting reflection of lights on railroad tracks in Camarillo, California last night. As I was shooting long exposures, a train came along and created a cool abstract.

A house in Houston, Texas in 1943. Photo is from the Library of Congress. Click the image for a larger view — lots of interesting details to observe.

If you’re new to Flickr, look for the “All Sizes” link above the photo.

Hard work. Photo taken in 1941 in the Virgin Islands, from the Library of Congress collection. (Click the link to open the page, then choose All Sizes for a large view.)

Yesterday, a very windy day, we visited the Channel Islands national park located 20 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara. Actually, we visited one small part of one of the islands, Santa Bruz.

The flowers in the foreground of the photo above are lupine. The photo below shows the seasonal grass being swept by the wind. The last image is of Potato Harbor, with the western end of the 22-mile long island curving north.

The top photo shows Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, CA from Simi Peak in China Flat. The flat is is dotted with ancient oak trees, each of which has a serial number assigned by the Parks Service.

Until the early ’90s, this property was owned by Bob Hope, who’d bought it decades before with plans to develop a golf course. The green season here is short, so yesterday I hiked up four miles and got some photos while the getting was good.

…to get a great photo. Photojournalist Joe McNally went to the top of the Empire State Building to shoot a lightbulb. I get the willies just watching.

Stunning. Click the photo to see it full size. View his portfolio here.

Children in the tenement district, Brockton, Mass. 1940. Photo is by Jack Delano and is from the Library of Congress archive.

Four inches of rain fell in Simi Valley and about 11 inches in the Topa Topa mountains, visible here from the Reagan Library.

We’re taking a couple days vacation in central California, staying in Cambria and exploring the wild places. Every year a colony of elephant seals returns to a beach just north of San Simeon where they give birth, fight, nurse their young, fight, mate, fight, wean their young, fight again and then return to the sea for another season.

There’s a very nice boardwalk set up for watching all this unfold. However, as a photographer, it gets old shooting from the same angle, so I was happy to learn that some 13 miles of coastline previously owned by the Heart Corporation was now state property. Just a few miles south is a section of beach beloved by kite surfers, which, in elephant seal season, becomes known as “losers beach” because this is where males go when they learn they lack the right stuff to be an alpha male.

Access to this beach is fenced off, but it’s not illegal to go there. Nonetheless, the state assigns someone from the park service to convince you otherwise. This morning I was warned not to mess with the elephant seals (good advice) and that if I did, they’d sic a ranger on me. I was also told that if I got bitten by an elephant seal, the state of California would not be responsible. “What if I skin my knee?” I asked, “Will the governor come put a bandaid on my boo boo?” Actually, I didn’t think of that retort until much later.

So there I was on a gorgeous beach, shooting tidepools and other natural wonders, when a hefty male approached from the sea. They don’t move fast, but they can weigh 5,000 pounds. Nothing to trifle with. I was shooting with a telephoto, so I wasn’t that close. But I was watching that big fella through the long lens, so it seemed close. I got out of the way. Reviewing the images on my computer, I noticed his hot, steaming breath.

I shot some video. If it comes out, I’ll put up some clips of the babies nursing and calling their moms — it’s sweet stuff. The pups weigh 80 pounds at birth and gain 10 pounds a day for the next four months until they’re weaned. Mother’s milk in this case is as thick as mayonnaise and impossible for the babies to suckle out, so the mother actually pumps it out.

Okay class, our nature lesson for the day is over. Go watch some football.

More on the elephant seals here.

Not quite the view Napoleon’s troops got way back when. Click the link for more.

HT: Tigerhawk.