thisiscolossal

Macroentomotography

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Composite image by Levon Biss via ThisIsColossal

About five years ago we featured a piece that coined the term “entomotography,” and we’ve been sharing stories about insects frequently since then; one was even closely related to this post and could have shared the title, of bees photographed close-up. The specimens shown below, however, are not single photos but actually composite images of thousands of shots in the best lighting for each angle, stitched together to create amazing results. Kate Sierzputowski writes for ThisIsColossal:

Commercial photographer Levon Biss typically shoots portraits of world-class athletes—sports players caught in motion. His new series however, catches subjects that have already been paused, insect specimens found at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. The series originally started as a side-project capturing the detail of bugs that his son would catch at home, and is now displayed at the museum in an exhibition titled Microsculpture.

Composite image by Levon Biss via ThisIsColossal

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Drones Shed Light on New Perspective

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Aerial night photograph by Reuben Wu, via ThisIsColossal

Photographer Reuben Wu has been practicing a new form of his trade using drones–which many people are, nowadays, but none that we know of so far have used this recent technology to create dramatic scenes at night with lighting from above. On his website, Wu writes of this project, titled Lux Noxtis, that it is:

a series of photographs depicting landscapes of North America within the framework of traditional landscape photography but influenced by ideas of planetary exploration,19th century sublime romantic painting, and science fiction.

We are overwhelmed everyday by beautiful images of the familiar. I imagine these scenes transformed into undiscovered landscapes which renew our perceptions of our world.

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New Egg Art

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In the past I’ve shared some of my egg-based artwork, known in Ukrainian as pysanky, that’s for sale at the Xandari Resort gift shop in Costa Rica, including a sped-up video of the process. But my painstaking handiwork, with wax and dye, can now be replicated to some extent by a machine called the Eggbot, which is an open-source robotic machine that can draw on eggs or other spheroids. Most often it uses pens but it can also even work with an electric-heated “kitska” or wax stylus similar to the flame-heated ones that I use.

The video above displays the various works of an Eggbot used by Jiri Zemanek at Continue reading →

Glass Art by Kiva Ford

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Glass-blowing is an amazing art and science that has continually impressed us in the past. Thanks to the art/design blog ThisIsColossal, we’ve been exposed to the creations of Kiva Ford, who applies the skills he learned for blowing scientific instruments to his personal art, which you can see examples of in the video below:

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Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time

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Photo by Beth Moon. Via thisiscolossal.com

For obvious reasons, we’re big fans of trees. We’ve shared a piece on tree-sitting (which is, of course, linked to tree-hugging), and featured an environmental history essay that included some hypothetical dendrochronology. Now, we’re happy to find some amazing photographs developed in the almost lost art of painstaking platinum/palladium processing by Beth Moon.

Photo by Beth Moon.

Abbeville Press on Beth Moon’s book of photography, Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time:

Beth Moon’s fourteen-year quest to photograph ancient trees has taken her across the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some of her subjects grow in isolation, on remote mountainsides, private estates, or nature preserves; others maintain a proud, though often precarious, existence in the midst of civilization. All, however, share a mysterious beauty perfected by age and the power to connect us to a sense of time and nature much greater than ourselves. It is this beauty, and this power, that Moon captures in her remarkable photographs.

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