Spooky photos of an abandoned asylum. What is it about asylums (asyla?) that makes the creepiness just sort of stick around? The photos remind me a bit of Dave McKean‘s work in Batman: Arkham Asylum. Not really for any visual similarity, but the atmosphere. The rest of the site has some other cool collections of modern ruins. [via things]
Category: photos
Here’s a very large Flickr photo group dedicated to HDR photography. Some of the photos are just spooky, better than real life in a Pixar meets National Geographic kind of way.
Hmm. In its digital cameras, HP now offers a “slimming” feature to make people in photos appear thinner than in reality. What do you think? Harmless gadgetry? Symptom of cultural decay? Somewhere in between? [via df]
Photos of Chernobyl, still a ghost town some 20 years after the nuclear reactor meltdown. I love seeing how the trees have grown in and reclaimed the land.
Here’s a sweet photo of the moon. The colors are accurate, but the image was tweaked so that the colors are more saturated.
A cool collection of photos of books, almost like good portraiture. [via mefi]
So here’s another guy, Noah Kalina, that has photographed himself every day for more than 6 years and made a video out of it. See my earlier post for a similar film and an annual family photo timeline.
And here’s a selection of similar photography projects.
The BBC has a photojournal of life inside a Bolivian jail. “There are no guards, no uniforms or metal bars on the cell windows. This relative freedom comes at a price: inmates have to pay for their cells, so most of them have to work inside the jail, selling groceries or working in the food stalls. Others work as hairdressers, laundry staff, carpenters, shoe-shine boys or TV and radio repairmen.”
That’s just amazing. As the later photos and commentary indicate, it’s not heaven–but it’s certainly completely different from prisons in the US. It brings to mind Robert Murphy‘s brief speculation on prisons in Chaos Theory. [via LvMI]
The Nonist introduces us to Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut. “Full-frontal objectification of the library itself,” featuring some pretty incredible photos. Books, shelving, tables all laid bare. Wish I were there…
The GigaPxl Project produces super-detailed, ultra-high resolution panorama photography, which “adds a humanizing touch to subject material which otherwise tends to be dominated by its monumental scale.” See the image gallery, San Diego for example. As they mention on the site, I like the preservation and archival potential of this technology. If they care to, future generations could scrutinize these for years.
–Georgia Tech has an online gallery & text of Edward Emerson Barnard’s book A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, published 1927. Check out Plate No. 5, a Nebulous Region in Taurus or Plate No. 14, Dark Lanes in Ophiucus. Aside from the photos, you can also access images of the text and the various hand-drafted charts, like this one for the Nebulous Region in Taursus. So much information, but such elegance.
–It seems like people like to click on eyes and brightly-colored things. I’m not sure what this means for society in the long run.
—USA Today reports some religious demographics in the United States, highlighting those who don’t belong to any church. Apparently, Washington is where all the heathens go, with some 25% in the “no religion” category. Close on its heels were most of the other western states in the 20% range. I was surprised that 97% of the respondents in good ol’ North Dakota claimed a religion of some form. The Glenmary Research Center also does studies of this type, providing some maps for religious populations, so you can find all the Amish hot spots. [via digg]
—I suppose this is reason enough to go to Hong Kong. What an incredible skyline.
–Emporis went through the trouble to rank skylines drawing on a little formula and a database. Atlanta makes #32. Hong Kong wins easily.
Mark Larson 
