Kingfishers in action

The Telegraph has these incredible shots of kingfishers fishing, taken by National Geographic photographer Joe Petersburger.

Giant crystals

National Geographic has a photo feature of the cave of giant gypsum crystals at Naica, near Chihuahua, Mexico. Click through for more images and information. Thanks Matthew for the link.

Update: there is a BBC video clip of the cave here which is quite mindblowing.


PS National Geographic is selling complete DVD-ROM sets of every National Geographic issue since 1888! That also does my head in. When I was a child my family had a shelf with about 6 feet of National Geographics, but that was only a few years' worth....

Holly and Pohutukawa

How could holly be any more spiky? Have a look at this wintry image by Jesper Grønne, here.





Here in New Zealand it's summer and the pohutukawas are in bloom. Known as "The New Zealand Christmas Tree", they have become something of a cliché in our visual media. However they are still jaw-droppingly magnificent! I snapped these two in Sumner, yesterday:




If you like pohutukawas, you may like to hear about the work of Project Crimson, which campaigns for the protection and propagation of pohutukawa and rata within their natural ranges.

Clever octopuses

For anyone who hasn't seen it, check out this amazing footage of veined octopuses in Indonesia improvising shelters for themselves out of coconut shells. Interestingly, along with cuttlefish and squid, octopuses are coleoidean cephalopods, molluscs which do without an external shell of their own.

More from the BBC:

"The shells provide important protection for the octopuses in a patch of seabed where there are few places to hide.

Dr Norman explained: "This is an incredibly dangerous habitat for these animals - soft sediment and mud couldn't be worse.

"If they are buried loose in mud without a shell, any predator coming along can just scoop them up. And they are pure rump steak, a terrific meat supply for any predator."

The researchers think that the creatures would initially have used large bivalve shells as their haven, but later swapped to coconuts after our insatiable appetite for them meant their discarded shells became a regular feature on the sea bed." -- read whole article

If you want to read more about octopuses, the Wikipedia page has lots of cool stuff.

Flying hordes

These amazing radar images show the night-time skies over the US are thick with migrating birds. Thanks to Mekayla for the link.

Rather him than me

Photographer and mountaineer Alexandre Buisse has this page of breathtaking images taken while climbing in Peru. He says he takes about 300 shots a day while climbing! To me it sounds, and looks, quite impossible. Kudos to him for bringing back such amazing pictures for non-climbers to enjoy. :-) Thanks to Ben for the link.

Garden at Night

This is an unusual book of garden photographs. All the images were taken at night, in whatever ambient light was available, using long exposures. As a consequence, the plants loom dramatically out of the darkness, and the setting resembles nothing so much as an empty stage or film set. The colours appear not quite as usual. And as a consequence of the long exposures, fine detail is slightly blurred. I've never seen anything quite like it.

Layers of sunset

I don't think there have been nearly enough cloud pictures recently, so here are a couple. :-)



What these images show is how low cloud can be scattering the sunset colours of pink and red and gold while most of the sky is still blue. It's at sunrise and sunset that the layering of clouds is shown most clearly.

Falcons for grapes

Country Calendar has a nice feature on the Falcons for Grapes project in Marlborough, where New Zealand falcons are introduced to vineyards to discourage smaller birds which damage the grapes. They also look at research into the breeding patterns of these magnificent birds, which are rare and threatened, and the challenges of ensuring their long-term survival. You can view that video here.

The terrific NZ Birds site has background information on the NZ falcon.
And Te Ara has some particularly fine photographs.

Hallucinating Tony Fomison

These pictures are also from Tunnel Beach. As I say, it's a magical place.

Tunnel Beach

I was at Tunnel Beach recently, and it really is an amazing place. It's just South of Dunedin city, seaward from the suburb of Green Island, and it costs nothig to visit. Try to visit when the tide is out, as you will be able to explore more of the beach. Reasonable fitness is required as the path is steep: you realise exactly how steep, on the way back :-)



There are fantastic cliffs:

The beach access is through a short tunnel carved in the limestone. The walls of the tunnel have a wonderful texture:

On the beach, there are more amazing cliffs:

Some of the eroding limestone cliffs take fantastical shapes:

Beautiful nature photographs

BBC Nature photographer William A. Bolton is featured in the Guardian with some recent works. They're all very striking, but this one is my favourite.
Thanks to Tom for the link.

New Zealand landscapes: Northland to Antarctica

There have been a lot of books published about the New Zealand landscape, but none are like this one! Grant Sheehan has assembled a stunning collection of fresh images and new angles on areas he obviously knows intimately. Sheehan's landscapes are not the sort you find on postcards; instead, he picks out rich colours and textures: lichen on a fence, crops in a field, layers in rock, reflections in water, clouds soaring in the sky. He captures the atmosphere of a place more than recording its landmarks.

Grant Sheehan's images are perfectly complemented by a CD of son Rhian Sheehan's ambient music, included with the book. Rhian Sheehan's spacious soundscapes recall Brian Eno in his Music for Airports period: they're lush but subtle, and they fit the New Zealand landscape so well.

You can order the book from the publisher, Phantom House, here.

I hope the book is a wild success for the Sheehans -- it deserves to be.

You can find out more on Rhian Sheehan's music here, and you can listen on his MySpace page.

And here's a video to be going on with:

Lenticular clouds

Summertime in Canterbury is a great time for lenticular clouds - those lens-shaped clouds that form downwind of a mountain range because of air turbulence. Lenticular clouds are beautiful and strange. I'd love to take as good a picture of them as this one by Wairarapa photographer Chris Picking!

Images copyright Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.

Photographic anxiety

You'd think that perusing stunningly beautiful photos of meteorological phenomena (http://www.atoptics.co.uk/) would be a nice soothing thing to do before bed, right?
Well, it gave me nightmares!

In the dreams I would see an amazing spectacle unfolding (mirage, halo, clouds, whatever) and reach for my camera. There are a number of ways this plays out:
1) I have left my camera at home
2) I reach for my camera but it is not in the case/bag
3) I have left the camera in the car, which is parked on the far side of a busy highway, which I have to cross (twice), Frogger-style, before I can attempt to take the picture. I think there was even a variant of this dream in which, having crossed the highway, I had lost the car keys, and could only look yearningly at my camera through the car window.
4) My camera battery is flat
5) When I press the shutter button nothing happens. This is actually the worst, since I can see the amazing scene framed by the lens, but can't record it.

In each scenario the amazing spectacle disappears unphotographed.

Do other people have these sorts of terrifying nightmares?? clouds

Atmospheric optics - what an amazing site

Anyone interested in clouds, rainbows, ice halos, the aurora, green flashes, or any other crazy optical effects happening in the atmosphere will love this site.

Honestly, it has so many pages full of information and stunning photographs that I have only looked at a small portion! Which means I have a lot more to look forward to. :-D

The page that I first looked at is of rare ice halos photographed over Antarctica in 1999. Truly staggering images! And the site explains the more common halos to look out for, as well as fascinating speculation on the ice halos that might be seen on other planets, where the airborne ice crystals are made of methane, ammonia, or carbon dioxide!

That's it, I'm moving to Norway!

I thought new Zealand was beautiful, but check out these amazing photos of Norwegian landscapes! (clicking the link opens a slideshow, or you can open a static page here)

Prehistoric bugs in amber

How can you examine tiny and microscopic insects and plants trapped in ancient, opaque amber?

"The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material, revealing its inner structure.

Tafforeau and colleague Malvina Lak have put kilos of opaque amber chunks in the way of this beam and have found a treasure trove of ancient organisms.
From more than 600 blocks, they have identified nearly 360 fossil animals. Wasps, flies, ants - even spiders. There are also small fragments of plant material. All of it caught up in the sticky goo of some prehistoric tree and then locked away until modern science provided the key."

Having scanned the amber from at least 1,000 angles, a 3-D scale model can then be produced on the 3-D printer.

Amazing! Read the whole story here.

Bang!

This image by Michael Lidski is the most unusual photo of fireworks I've seen! His nature photos are also fantastic. What about this one?! Wow.

Andes - Flight of the Condor

This is an astonishing book: a tour-de-force of photography by NZ photographer Tui de Roy. Collected over 30 years, there is a huge variety of Andean imagery here, and every photograph is compelling. Every environment found in the Andes is here: cloud forest, volcanoes, high plateaux, salt lakes, jagged peaks, windswept coast and glaciers, complete with all the unique plants and animals which are found there. A treasure of a book.