Images from the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. in 1964

In Focus, the photography blog at The Atlantic, is running a five part series of images from 1964 -- 50 years prior to the date of the posts.  The second set is a particularly moving series of images from the U.S. civil rights movement -- I hadn't seen most of them before.  Here are two from June 1964 in St. Augustine, Florida, a city that saw a lot of protests -- and violence -- arising from its laws mandating racial segregation
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Caption from In Focus: "Ivory Ward, 43, sits in his car, with a hole in his windshield that he said was made by a bullet fired from a truck driven by white men, after African Americans marched in an integration demonstration, June 10, 1964, in St. Augustine, Florida. (AP Photo/JK)"

Caption from In Focus: "A state police officer with club in hand overtakes a white segregationist, as African Americans attempted to swim and were attacked by a large group of whites at St. Augustine Beach, Florida, on June 25, 1964. The state police arrested a number of whites and African Americans. (AP Photo)"

Yum, Delicious Seawater

Seawater (possibly from Moorea, French Polynesia?) magnified 25x, taken by David Liittschwager.  Link via Colossal. LARGE IMAGE HERE.

Native American Portraits from c. 1905

Below (and after the jump) is a small sampling of a series of great portraits of Native Americans at In Focus, The Atlantic's photography blog.  The full series, posted a few months ago, is worth seeing.

The Incredible Underwater Photography of Alexander Semenov

Alexander Semenov, a Russian zoologist specializing in squid, started taking underwater photographs a few years ago, and his work has simply taken off. Below a selection of close-ups of coral. His site is worth going through for a full selection of his work (or just see my prior post on his photos -- not not really, go to his site).

Japanese Bridges

Apropos of nothing particular, pulled from various internet locations at unknown times (and so, sorry, references long lost) -- clicking on the image or "read more" brings up the full set:

Calvin & Hobbes in a Photographic World

Nite4awk, a user on Imgur has made some nice wallpapers using images of Calvin and Hobbes mixed into photographs. That is all. Via MetaFilter.

DNA Variations and the Diversity of Pigeons

The New York Times has an interesting science article on genome sequencing of pigeon DNA, which is being used to study how a few genetic variations can lead to great diversity of species (there are over 130 species of pigeons and doves, which are a form of pigeon). The article is a font of interesting factoids, such as the practice of Charles Darwin and Thomas Jefferson each in raising pigeons; the use by those as diverse as the ancient Greeks to Genghis Khan of pigeons as messengers, the fact that Akbar the Great always traveled with a colony of 10,000 pigeons. The NYT's article arises from an article in Science, which traced the genetic variations of pigeon DNA (and confirms, among other things, that the progenitor is Rock Pigeons, as Darwin thought).

Interesting as all of that is, what I liked most about the article was its photo spread on pigeon variations, which was rally beautiful. It's worth clicking through to. (A few examples below.)

Inauguration Photos

There are a lot of pictures of the inauguration out there -- here's a few links:

• In Focus (The Atlantic) on inauguration day
• President Obama's First Four Years
• New York Times on inauguration day
• National Geographic with more of a historical take
• The Wall Street Journal with a huge spread
• President George W. Bush -- oh wait, he didn't go

Watercolor -- Photographs by Gilles Bensimon

Via Devid Sketchbook some abstract-ish photographs by Gilles Bensimon, who is a fairly famous french fashion photographer. I like these better than his ordinary Elle oriented fashion work ...

The Orion Bullets

The Orion bullets are ejecta of mostly iron gas in the Orion Nebula moving at about 170 kilometers per second (about 380,000 mph or more than 1/2000 the speed of light). They're also massive: larger than ten times the diameter of Pluto's orbit around the sun. Their wakes are hydrogen ionized (and therefore glowing) as the bullets moved through.

The recent high res image of the cluster (shown at left, click through on link for full image) was taken by the Gemini South Observatory at La Serena, Chile. The mirrors on the telescope are deformable to correct for atmospheric distortion which is measured from aberrations in the laser light from five guide stars.

Just all so very cool. (Oh, while we're at it, here's a selection of great photos of the Orion nebula.)

Electron Micrographs from the Blog Small Stuff

Small Stuff (or is its name Many Little Things? it's not clear) is an awesome tumblr blog featuring mostly fantastic electron micrographs. Here are some of just the most recent ones (not in original order), just because ... they're cool.

Hydrozoans on the surface of a krill

National Geographic Photo Contest Winners ... At Last!

It's three weeks since National Geographic was scheduled to announce their photo contest winners .. and now that it has done so I admit I'm a little disappointed. These aren't bad photos -- they're great photos -- but the judges overlooked a lot from what they had to choose from, in my view. I've covered the entries previously, and I've linked at the end of this post to my collections of what I thought were the best photos of the 22,000 submitted. Ah well ...

Grand Prize and Nature Winner

Clouds

It's worth clicking through to see the rest of them. Inspired in part by My Modern Met.

Sports Illustrated's 100 greatest Sports Photos

Sports Illustrated has what it purports to be the 100 greatest sports photos of all time -- of course, it's U.S. centric (since, evidently, the greatest sports photos are about the U.S.), but it's a great review, anyway. No photos from the swimsuit edition made the cut (I carefully looked). Via Kottke.

2012: Best-of Lists

I promised to post 2012 best of/wrap-up lists before the end of 2012, which just goes to show you how good my promises are. Well, I am finally doing it, below the break, but let me note, first, that Miss Cellania has a bunch of really good collections of lists from around the internet -- you know, if you really needed these you could have gone there:

• Music wrap-up lists
• Books wrap-up lists
• Movie year end lists
• Sports wrap-up lists
• TV wrap-up lists
• Science wrap-up lists
• Advertising wrap-up lists
• Tech and games wrap-up lists
• People oriented wrap-up lists
• Internet news/events/video wrap-up lists
• Photograph best-of lists
• Blog wrap-up lists
• News wrap-up lists
• Miscellaneous wrap-up lists 

That's a lot to go through (as if one really needs to go through every best-of list), so here's the best ones, in my view (as if one really needs to go through any best-of lists):

In Focus's Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar

Every year Alan Taylor, formerly the editor of the Boston Globe's The Big Picture and now the editor of The Atlantic's In Focus, posts pictures from The Hubble Space Telescope leading up to Christmas.  Well, I got busy, what with sleigh repairs and everything, so, here you go a little late (click through for the full set of images, which are great) and here are some links to his prior advent calendars. The shots he selects are always beautiful and incredible.

Now This is a Tree

Took this shot in the backyard yesterday -- I'm the guy in the red coat at the bottom. (Really, it's from National Geographic.)

The Humane and Beautiful Photography of Lee Jeffries

Lee Jeffries is (was?) an accountant and amateur photographer who began taking close-up images of the homeless after an encounter with a homeless girl. His work expresses not only the extraordinary humanity and depth of his subjects but radiates integrity. He's been around the web a bit (two posts on Colossal, for instance, and the source for some of the literalist graphite portraits by Franco Clun); but this hardly gives range to his works. There are extensive collections of his work at Flickr and 500px -- better sources than the few below since they're viewable larger size -- and his work is for sale at Yellow Korner.

National Geographic Contest Photos, Final Post of the 2012 Entries

Bringing us up to date, here are links to the prior posts (in reverse chronological order): here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. That, again, is about .5% of the total contest entries, most of which were pretty good photos (that is I've posted about 1 photo for every 200 that were entered in the contest).

More Great Photos from the National Geographic Photo Contest