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Celebrated National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz spent the last 15 years paragliding high above the world’s “extreme deserts” for a stunning new photography book.
What a photo!
This crazy waterspout appeared on Saturday close to the shoreline near Bateman’s Bay, 140 miles south of Sydney, Australia.
Talk about dedication! It took photographer Robert Buelteman 13 years to create these eye-popping images of electrocuted flowers.
He didn’t use a camera, but rather a painstaking photogram process involving plexiglas, silicone and 80,000 volts of electricity — a technique first developed in the 1930s by Russian inventor Semyon Kirlian.
First he whittles flowers down to transparency with a scalpel, and places them between color transparency film, a diffusion screen and sheet metal, all of which floats in liquid silicone sandwiched by plexiglas.
Then Buelteman shocks the prepared materials with 80,000 volts from an electric pulse, shooting electrons through the sheet metal and flower. Finally, he uses a hair-thin fiber optic flashlight to develop the image, leaving what Kirlian called the “aura,” or “life-force” of a living organism.
“I decided I wanted to approach photography as more of a full self-expression, without regard to realism or capturing images that are recognizable,” Buelteman told The Daily. “This world is about the world as sensed, it’s beyond description and beyond meaningful interpretation.”
It’s time for another visit to the Department of Awesome Natural Wonders. These pretty amphibians with perfectly transparent underbellies are called Glass frogs. They live in the cloud forests of South america, are one of the relatively small number of species where the fathers exclusively care for the young, and scientists are still trying to figure out why they evolved to have transparent tummies.
Complete transparency has evolved multiple independent times. This suggests that a translucent underbelly provides some evolutionary advantage. Juan Manuel Guayasamin, an evolutionary biologist who studies glassfrogs extensively as a researcher at Universidad Tecnológica Indoamérica’s Center for Research on Biodiversity and Climate Change, explains:
“Most frogs are not transparent because this would expose organs to the deleterious effects of sunlight and heat.” But in transparent glassfrogs, key organs like the liver and digestive tract are covered by a thin layer of light-reflecting organelles called iridiphores. These iridescent cellular subunits may provide a layer of protection from heat and sunlight, a feature that Guayasamin says could give glassfrogs the ability to optimize their internal homeostasis by simply moving about, “covering each organ at a time, as opposed to the entire body cavity.”
Guayasamin says another hypothesis holds that transparency evolved to help glassfrogs avoid predators (an ability commonly referred to as “crypsis”). ”Most glassfrogs are green and reflect light almost as a leaf. For predators (and amphibiologists), it is quite difficult to find a glassfrog if it is not, for example, calling.”
You can even see their hearts beating inside their bodies. That’s pretty awesome.
Top photo by Heidi & Hans-Jurgen Koch, via National Geographic, bottom photo by Martín Bustamante.
Zermahgerd, see-through frogs!
The wonders in nature never cease.
These eye-popping pictures are truly wild! They’re just a few of the winning photos from the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, an annual showcase for the very best in nature photography.
Whoa!
These incredibly clever little archer fish of southeast Asia use specially adapted tongues to form powerful jets of liquid to knock bugs off leaves. No spider, beetle or fly that comes too close to the water is safe from these sharpshooters, who soak the insects so they fall into the pool to be gobbled up.
And if all else fails, they’ll leap for their dinner.
The Discovery Channel’s two-hour documentary “Winged Planet” takes “bird’s eye view” to a whole new level!
It took four years for the ambitious project to train birds to fly alongside small airplanes, and others to fly with cameras strapped to their backs. The results are these stunning images.
Hello, fellow Instagramers! For our latest weekend hashtag contest, we asked our followers to show us the light in their lives by tagging their photos with #TheDailyLight. We loved all of the photos that were submitted!
Big congrats to winners, clockwise from top left: @amphlettc, @ktlovell, @theurbanfarmer, and @afranche
Follow @thedailyphotos and stay tuned for our next challenge!
Call them The Expendables — the World Conservation Congress’ list of 100 most endangered species. Most of them are endangered not only because of of human actions like destruction of habitats, pollution, hunting and climate change, but because they provide humans no obvious benefits.
The incredible winning photographs of this year’s photo contest sponsored by National Geographic Traveler magazine open your eyes to a world you’ve never seen before.
About 6,000 shutterbugs in 152 countries submitted roughly 12,000 pictures.
The winner, titled “Butterfly,” is from one of those places that no average tourist will ever see: the inside of a family yurt, or portable tent, in the Kyrgyz lands of Afghanistan’s remote Wakhan Corridor.
Shot by professional photographer Cedric Houin, the photo shows that the woman and the other members of her tribe still know the creature comforts of the 21st century — a TV and a sound console — despite their harsh homeland.
We can’t stop staring!
