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Sunday, January 8, 2023

Nature’s Diversity is Captured in Minuscule Detail in the 2022 Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition

Nathan Benstead, “Hemitrichia calyculata,” Young Category Winner. All images © the photographers and Close-Up Photographer of the Year, shared with permission

Among the winning images of the Close-Up Photographer of the Year contest, frilly slime mold stems from leaves, elegant insects splay colorful wings, and microscopic patterns create vivid abstractions. Now in its fourth year, the competition attracted more than 9,000 entries from 54 countries.

The overall winner of this year’s competition was captured by Samantha Stephens and glimpses two tiny amphibians trapped inside a carnivorous plant. She explains, “Typically, these plants feast on invertebrates such as moths and flies, but recently, researchers at the Algonquin Wildlife Research Station discovered a surprising new item on the plant’s menu: juvenile Spotted Salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum).” It was a timely capture; by the following day, the creatures had sunk to the bottom of the pitcher.

See some of our favorite captures below, and visit the contest’s website to view the Top 100 photographs of the year.

Uday Hegde, “Atlas Moth.” Second Place Dragonflies and Butterflies Category Winner

A photo of two juvenile salamanders in a pitcher plant.

Samantha Stephens, “Nature’s Pitfall,” Overall Winner and Animals Category Winner

A photograph of an insect that has been eating holes out of a leaf.

Minghui Yuan, “Little Naughty Draw Circle,” Third Place Insects Category Winner

A photograph of slime mould that looks like tiny mushrooms.

Andy Sands, “Slime Mould [Didymium Squamulosum] on Holly Leaf,” Third Place Fungi Category Winner

An abstracted photograph of water in seaweed.

Angelo Richardson, “Sea in Fan,” Third Place Intimate Landscape Category Winner

Marek Miś, “Batrachospermum Red Algae,” First Place Micro Category Winner

Ben Revell, “Gordian Worm Knot,” Second Place Invertebrate Portrait Category Winner

Viktor Lyagushkin, “Little Predator,” Underwater First Place

A photograph of a pink fish among shells on the sea floor.

Kate Jonker, “Beauty and the Beast,” Second Place Underwater Category Winner

A photograph of two birds on a table outside of a pizza shop in Germany.

Anton Trexler, “Doner Kebab and Pizza,” Third Place Young Category Winner

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Nature’s Diversity is Captured in Minuscule Detail in the 2022 Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition appeared first on Colossal.

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Friday, January 6, 2023

A Chicago Mother Raises an Abandoned Baby Squirrel in the Heartwarming Documentary ‘My Duduś’

In the summer of 2020, photographer and director Tom Krawczyk returned home to Chicago from Łódź, Poland, where he was studying film. “When I got there, my mother quietly walked me into a room where she gently pulled a strange, hairless creature out of a shoe box,” he recounts. “It looked as if it had plummeted to earth from another planet.” Meet the star of My Duduś, a friendly gray squirrel that tumbled out of its nest when it was only a couple of days old and into the endearing care of the filmmaker’s mother.

Krawczyk’s nine-minute Op-Doc presented by The New York Times chronicles the developing bond between his mother and the young squirrel, which she nurses and shelters in the family’s house at a time when animal shelters were filled to capacity. “My intuition told me to pick up a camera,” he explains. “I knew something special was happening. My mother, a Polish immigrant who had raised me by herself, had been dealing with her newly empty nest after I left for school, and I knew the joy that raising the squirrel would bring her.”

As Duduś grows, so does their emotional connection, but his instincts begin to take hold. He spends more time outside, and the relationship transforms as the young rodent matures. See more of Krawczyk’s work on his website and Instagram.

All images © Tom Krawczyk and The New York Times

A still from the short film 'My Duduś' featuring a young squirrel raised by a woman in Chicago.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article A Chicago Mother Raises an Abandoned Baby Squirrel in the Heartwarming Documentary ‘My Duduś’ appeared first on Colossal.

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Detailed Illustrations Brim with Manic Mayhem in Mattias Adolfsson’s Exuberant Sketchbooks

All images © Mattias Adolfsson, shared with permission

In Mattias Adolfsson’s meticulous illustrations, organized chaos is the name of the game. Drawing inspiration from a recent trip to Japan, the Swedish artist has recently filled his 41st Moleskine notebook with science fiction-inspired scenes of sushi bar mayhem, urban piles, and travel woes. Redolent of Where’s Waldo, Adolfsson often incorporates a caricature of himself into each scene; his face peeks out from advertisements, food, and anthropomorphized objects. His characteristically frenetic drawings fill each spread from edge to edge in a finely-tuned balance of order and insanity, encouraging the viewer on an endless seek-and-find journey that reveals more peculiarities, details, and twists the more one looks.

Explore more of Adolfsson’s fantastical worlds on Behance and YouTube, where he pages through completed sketchbooks. You can also find more work on his website and purchase prints on Etsy.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Detailed Illustrations Brim with Manic Mayhem in Mattias Adolfsson’s Exuberant Sketchbooks appeared first on Colossal.

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Thursday, January 5, 2023

A Scientific Paint-By-Number Pastel Drawing Was Our First Closeup Image of Mars

All images © NASA, JPL-Caltech, and Dan Goods

Let’s rewind to 1965. Around ten years before the personal computer was invented and twenty years before the first cell phones were released to the public, this was the year that saw the first color television released to the mass market. Families would gather around the set to catch up on daily news broadcasts on one of three channels. On July 15, when NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew within 6,118 miles of Mars as it passed the planet, it was big news, but when the image data was transmitted back to Earth, scientists didn’t have the technology to quickly render a photograph that could be televised. Taking a queue from a popular mid-century pastime, the very first representation of another planet viewed from a vantage point in space was a data-driven paint-by-number drawing.

The Mariner 4 probe was NASA’s second attempt to capture an image of the surface of Mars after a camera shroud malfunctioned on Mariner 3. Dan Goods, who presently leads a team called The Studio at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, describes how the scientists troubleshot and devised their next steps when faced with technical anomalies and errors:

After the flyby of the planet, it would take several hours for computers to process a real image. So while they were waiting, the engineers thought of different ways of taking the 1’s and 0’s from the actual data and create an image. After a few variations, it seemed most efficient to print out the digits and color over them based upon how bright each pixel was.

Detail of numbers on ticker tape

We now turn our focus to a scientist named Richard Grumm, who chose a more analog means of visualizing data as a failsafe if the intended image failed to transmit. He went to a local art supplies shop and requested gray chalk; the shop sent him with back to the lab with a pack of Rembrandt pastels. He and his team used the crayons to color in the 1’s and 0’s data, printed on 3-inch wide ticker tape, and determined the brightness level of the image using a key in shades of orange, brown, and yellow.

In spite of Mars’ nickname the “Red Planet,” the color scheme was coincidental. Grumm was concerned primarily with gradients and how it would appear in grayscale, since televisions were still in black-and-white. He justified the drawing to the Jet Propulsion Lab’s wary PR department—which thought the pastel drawing would be a distraction and preferred the public saw the real image—as a means to record the data in case Mariner 4’s equipment also failed. Eventually, the media found out anyway, and the pastel drawing was the first image of Mars to be broadcast on television.

In time, Mariner 4’s black-and-white photograph did come through successfully, and in comparison, Grumm’s drawing appears widened due to the width of the ticker tape. You can read more about this historic moment on Dan Goods’ blog and on the NASA website. (via Kottke)

Left: Color key. Right: Mariner 4 tape recorder

Richard Grumm’s team creating the drawing

Left: Richard Grumm’s team creating the drawing. Right: The pastels used to create the image

The image compiled from Mariner 4 data

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article A Scientific Paint-By-Number Pastel Drawing Was Our First Closeup Image of Mars appeared first on Colossal.

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Hapless Hangups and Silly Spoofs Abound in the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

A photograph of an animal with a bird behind it so that it appears as though it has wings.

Highly Commended Winner, “Pegasus, the flying horse” © Jagdeep Rajput and Comedy Wildlife 2022

Since its inception in 2015, submissions to the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards (previously) have captured some of nature’s most hapless and humorous moments. The overall winner was Jennifer Hadley’s timely snap of a 3-month old lion cub tumbling down a tree, taken in the Serengeti, Tanzania. Hadley shared that she and her travel companions had been watching the cub in the tree for some time. “It didn’t even occur to me that he would make a go of getting down by himself in the most un-cat like fashion. I mean, how often do cats fall out of trees?” she says.

In this year’s juried contest, 5,000 entries from 85 countries amounted to fierce competition, showcasing “seriously funny” images in an effort to highlight the diversity of the world’s wildlife and raise awareness of the need for conservation. In partnership with the Whitley Fund for Nature, the contest contributes 10% of revenue toward conservation efforts in countries across the Global South.

See a gallery of all winning images on the competition website, and if you would like to enter your own images for consideration in the 2023 contest, applications are now open.

A photograph of a lion cub falling out of a tree.

Overall Winner and Serian & Alex Walker’s Creatures of the Land Award, “Not so cat-like reflexes” © Jennifer Hadley and Comedy Wildlife 2022

Two penguins on a shoreline. One appears to be telling the other one to "talk to the hand."

Affinity Photo 2 People’s Choice Award, “Talk to the Fin” Image © Jennifer Hadley and Comedy Wildlife 2022

Left: Two kangaroos at sunset on a beach appear as if one is swinging the other one around by its feet. Right: Two meerkats play together; one appears to strangle the other.

Highly Commended Winners. Left: “It’s all kicking off!” © Michael Eastway and Comedy Wildlife 2022. Right: “I’m gonna strangle you” © Emmanuel Do Linh San and Comedy Wildlife 2022

A photograph of two penguins standing side-by-side, one without a head.

Highly Commended Winner, “Keep calm and keep your head” © Martin Grace and Comedy Wildlife 2022

Two fish get up close and personal to the camera lens.

Creatures Under the Water Award, “Say Cheeeeeeese” © Arturo Telle and Comedy Wildlife 2022

A photograph of a heron and a hippo. The hippo has its mouth open wide and looks like it will eat the heron whole.

Spectrum Photo Creatures of the Air Award, “Hippo and Heron” © Jean Jacques Alcalay and Comedy Wildlife 2022

A photograph of a small owl winking from inside a pipe.

A photograph of a raccoon in a snowy landscape that looks like it is waving to the viewer.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Hapless Hangups and Silly Spoofs Abound in the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards appeared first on Colossal.

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In ‘Lost Tablets,’ Jan van Schaik Constructs Deteriorating Architectural Sculptures with LEGO

An abstract, architectural tablet-like sculpture made from LEGO.

“The first one I made, I made by accident, like a three-dimensional doodle,” says Melbourne-based architect and artist Jan van Schaik about the sculpture that founded his Lost Tablets series. Now encompassing 89 works, the ongoing project continues to reflect this intuitive, imaginative impulse as it scales principles of monumental design into dozens of models that stand about ten inches tall.

Built with secondhand LEGO, each monochromatic construction encapsulates questions of legacy and decay. Remnants like writing, dirt, and divots imprinted in the plastic bricks from rough play are visible in van Schaik’s sculptures, which recreate aspects of “the city caves of Matera, the churches of Borromini, the arches of the Doge’s palace in Venice, the buttresses of Gothic cathedrals, and the blue ceilings of the Shah Mosque of Isfahan” as deteriorating structures. Varied in style and aesthetic, the walls contain gaping, window-like arcs, exposed mechanical gadgets, and uneven bricks that appear on the verge of collapse. Each is named after a ghost ship, or a vessel found at sea with no crew members on board, imbuing the pieces with a sense of mystery about their origins and existence.

A third-generation architect, van Schaik has long been interested in “the ways that cities recombine themselves” and how new constructions often reuse materials, objects, and foundations and embed local history within the contemporary landscape. “Cities are always building themselves on top of themselves,” he tells Colossal, referencing the ancient walls of the acropolis of Athens as an early example. His use of LEGO mimics this tradition and captures the universality of the material and subject matter. “Architecture is for everybody, and everybody is aware of it, whether they intend to be or not, whether they’re conscious of it or not,” the artist shares. “That’s why (the works) have a strange familiarity.”

This year, van Schaik plans to complete the Lost Tablets series, which will total 100 constructions, and publish another book to explore the latter half of the collection. You can see the pieces on view at two spaces in the state of Victoria, Boom Gallery in Newtown and NAP in Mildura, this spring and at The Other Art Fair in Melbourne in March. Until then, find more on the Lost Tablets site and Instagram. (via Yatzer)