Awkward Family Photos blog

ahahhahahahahahahahaah….

“Awkward Family Photos is fast becoming the greatest site on the internet.”

How Would You Like A Giant Poison Stinger Buried Deep Inside Your Brain?

Nasty yet fascinating…

i09:

“Here you can see an ant shooting a dose of venom straight into a centipede’s head. The centipede is translucent, so you can actually see the stinger in its brain. And there’s more.

Alex Wild, who took these photographs, is a scientist who researches ants. He also happens to be an extremely talented photographer who always manages to capture both the danger and the beauty of the insect world. While he has a number of gorgeous ant portraits, I think his most stunning work comes in action photos like these, where ants are battling it out with other insects. That ant stinging the centipede, by the way, isn’t killing the centipede. She’s just paralyzing it so that the larvae in her hive can munch on it while it’s still really fresh.

Here you can see a very strange encounter between a fly and an ant that was wandering up a tree. Wild says he saw flies landing on the ants, holding them against the tree for a few seconds, and then flying away. He couldn’t figure out what was going on until he used the magnifying action of his camera lens to get a good look at what the bugs were doing. It turned out the flies were mugging the ants, pinning them down and stealing their food.

Most flies take their attacks on ants far beyond mugging, however. These flies use ants as incubators for their larvae, using a canulated organ called an ovipositor to inject eggs into the ant’s abdomen. Eventually the baby flies eat their way out of the ant’s body, getting a lot of nourishment but killing the insect in the process. In this photo, you can see the fly injecting her eggs into the ant.

If you want to see more of Wild’s exceptionally cool insect photography, including some friendly pictures that do not involve muggings or deadly injections, check out his blog Photo Synthesis.”

Teens send balloon into space, get aerial photos of Earth

Boing Boing:

“Teen scientists at IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia sent a latex balloon 20 miles into the sky, to the edge of space, and took stunning photos of the Earth with it, using a cheap digital camera:

Building the electronic sensor components from scratch, Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort managed to send their heavy duty £43 latex balloon to the edge of space and take readings of its ascent.

Created by the four students under the guidance of teacher Jordi Fanals Oriol, the budding scientists, all aged 18-19, followed the progress of their balloon using high tech sensors communicating with Google Earth.

Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said: “We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible.”

Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon (Image: METEOTEK IES LA BISBAL SCHOOL/BARCROFT MEDIA)

Synchrotech’s CFMulti adapter brings Eye-Fi support to CF cameras

Engadget:

“Been longing for Eye-Fi support in your Sony a350? Or any CompactFlash-lovin’ camera, for that matter? Meet Synchrotech, your new best friend. The company famous for making incredibly useful adapters has just pumped out its latest stroke of genius, the CFMulti. As you’d expect, this card fits into traditional CF slots but enables Secure Digital cards to be read, including Eye-Fi’s range of wireless SD cards. In addition to that, the device accepts standard SD / SDHC and MMC / MMC+ cards. You know you’d pay $28 for all that functionality in one tight package, right?”

[Via MacsimumNews, thanks Robert]

Apocalyptic Photos from the Decline of the Recording Industry

Thanks, Eric, for the tip on this one….

Dinosaurs and Robots:

“Greetings music fans, and welcome to Metaphor City!

I love these photographs of abandoned Tower Record stores that were taken by Calvin Kaneda. It’s no secret that sales of recorded music are in a deep nosedive, and the 2006 bankruptcy and liquidation of Tower Records is an apt symbol of the industry’s woes.”

MORE PICTURES

Fix Your Photos’ White Balance

Lifehacker:

“If
you take a lot of digital photos but are frustrated with the strange
yellow glow or green hue to your results, weblog Of Zen and Computing’s
guide to adjusting the white balance of digital photos is for you.
Taking you step-by-step through adjusting the color temperature in
Photoshop, the guide makes it easy to understand how to fix these
imbalances and give your pictures the more natural look they deserve.
We’ve covered this territory once in the past, but this post’s screenshots and detailed instructions are worth another look if you’re new to correcting color.”

How to Adjust the White Balance of a Digital Photo [Of Zen and Computing]

mmk_kobayashi’s funny photostream

Awesome photostream…

Boing Boing:

After Mister Jalopy
posted a link to mmk_kobayashi’s “tasteless, frequently mean,
sporadically NSFW, sometimes jaw dropping and generally hilarious”
Flickr photostream my productivity ground to a halt.

LINK

Rescue Lost or Damaged Photos with Zero Assumption

Lifehacker:

“Windows
only: Zero Assumption Recovery is a simple tool that can be a serious
lifesaver, especially if you’ve just accidentally formatted a memory
card or came home from vacation to a supposedly empty camera. The free
download does what many professional (and costly) image recovery
programs do, running through memory blocks and piecing together
scattered pictures, then dumping them in a folder of your choosing. ZAR
supports most major image formats, including JPEG and RAW, and our commenters
have given it a try and subsequent thumbs up. Zero Assumption Recovery
is a free download for Windows systems only; portions of the program
are paid-to-unlock, but image recovery is free.”

Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery [via Digital Photography School]

Adobe Photoshop Express launches today for online editing

DVICE:

“Adobe announced its intention to create a free, online photo editing application in the fall of last year.
Today, Photoshop Express launches for public consumption. It’s not much
like the computer application of the program, so if you’re used to
using Photoshop, or even a free software imitation like Seashore
with precise number-based controls, you may be disappointed. On the
other hand, Photoshop Express offers a lot of options and some freedom—
it’s easy to use and completely free without requiring a download. The
program also teams up with Facebook, MySpace, and Picasa, pulling and
letting you edit all the pictures from your online albums there. Go
ahead, crop out your exes without taking a single picture off-line.

Right now Photoshop Express offers 2GB of storage, but don’t try to
upload all your pictures at once: it could be first day jitters, but
right now uploading speeds on the site are quite slow. While it’s no
Photoshop, we expect Photoshop Express will be useful to millions of
on-the-go photo posters who want to to upload, crop, straighten,
sharpen or distort their photos from public places or without relying
on a hard drive.”

Photoshop Express, via Gizmodo

You Suck at Photoshop #9

Digg: “Donnie Hoyle gets as close to a pair of tomatoes as he’ll ever get.”