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StockPodium
Photography 
The journal of my life in photographs bradengunem.com/PhotoFeed... via @RainerGS #photography
Classic Image of Vintage Hotel at Cardrona in NZ gwpstudio.com/content/car... #Photo
A ghostly and mysterious new image of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. www.nasa.gov/mission_page... via @IntimateRainbow @NASA
3 Time-Saving Tools for Twitter (That You May Not Have Heard Of) www.momeomagazine.com/3-t... via @CarlaYoung @smqueue
How to Optimize Images for Search Engines
If you didn’t know much about image search and how does it work then here is a small explanation for you: this is the query search that you can see as thumbnail graphics, supplanted by contextual information that match user’s search queries at its best; all this information can be submitted either by the image creator, the website owner where you can see these images, or by third party reviewers. This would be a general fancy definition but all in all it’s the images you see on the web when you...
Holi celebrations 2013 - The Big Picture
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The Big Picture
Stealth Wear: Counter-Surveillance Fashion Protects Privacy
[ By Steph in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ] The rise of surveillance technology, including face recognition software, drones, body scans and cell phones as GPS locators, has resulted in some creative attempts to elude it. Designer Adam Harvey experiments with “fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance” in a series called Stealth Wear (via PSFK). Anti-Drone garments protect against thermal imaging, a special cell phone pocket blocks signals, and off-the-wall makeup and...
WebUrbanist
The Future That Never Was: 12 Funny Gadget Predictions
[ By Steph in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ] Yesterday’s visions of today were surprisingly accurate in some cases, but in others, they were humorously off-base. We’re not zooming around our moon colony homes in jet packs, confirming our choice in mates with scientific body odor tests, or enjoying our favorite TV shows via implants in our brains. These 12 predicted gadgets and inventions never came to be, and while we’ll never need robotic cargo horses for our milkmen, we’re still...
Drive & Live Off Grid: Convertible Mobile Caravan Concept
[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ] Forget the trailer and start trailblazing – this emission-free and fully-electric vehicle can juice up just like its Tesla cousins, but can also use photovoltaics and solar sails to recharge well off the beaten path. Picture the three-wheeled Ecco as the latest in a long-standing series of streamlined and transforming vehicles for dwelling in, starting with Dymaxion and continuing to Airstream and through Volkswagen. Except,...
Drowned Out: 9 Abandoned Lifeguard Huts & Towers
[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ] Battered by wind, waves and relentless weathering, these 9 abandoned lifeguard towers still stand watch though the watchers have long since left. Genkai-jima, Japan (images via: Another Tokyo) The island of Genkai-jima in southern Japan’s Hakata Bay has seen a lot of history, not least being two unsuccessful Mongol invasions almost 750 years ago. Situated off the Itoshima Peninsula on the bay’s western side, Genkai-jima offers an ideal...
Hotel on Wheels: Portable Room Travels the World With You
[ By Delana in Boutique & Art Hotels & Global. ] Cities all around the world have vast, empty spaces just going to waste – abandoned buildings, empty lots, decommissioned military barracks – but the Hotello wants to put those spaces to use. The Hotello is a tiny, portable hotel room that can go anywhere and provide a comfortable sleeping space no matter where you are. Designed by Antonio Scarponi and Robert de Luca for the Swiss firm daskonzept, the Hotello starts out as a rather...
Traditional to Contemporary: 6 Cool Custom Bedroom Lofts
[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ] Sometimes you have nowhere to build … but up. And really, there is something nice and relaxing about removing oneself from the main floor of a home – which can be done at times even in a one-story dwelling, as these lovely lofts illustrate. Long and narrow is the name of the game in most of Manhattan, including the East Village where this condo by JPDA Architects is located. Taking advantage of a unique pop-up opportunity at the...
A powerful image by @earthXplorer ~ twitpic.com/b2xvsu via @thesocialsuite @AnnTran_
Colorful & Cozy: Striking Series of Lofted Kids Bedroom Sets
[ By Steph in Design & Furniture & Decor. ] Packing maximum function into tight spaces, Italian furniture maker Tumidei offers bright lofted bedroom sets with everything a kid needs built right in. These modern, compact and often modular all-in-one interiors hide extra beds under platforms, elevate study spaces and include lots of storage room. Available in virtually any color scheme, Tumidei’s lofted bedroom sets for children and teenagers have lots of slide-out components that save...
World’s First Mobile Research Station Opens in Antarctica
[ By Steph in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ] Built under some of the most extreme conditions on planet Earth, the Halley VI Research Station by Hugh Broughton Architects is now serving as a mobile home base for Antarctic expeditions. The facility is located on the floating Brunt Ice Shelf, and can be moved inland on its ski-like feet to avoid being stranded as the shelf drifts. Hydraulic rams enable it to be raised above accumulating snow. The $25.8 million research station...
Tons of Art: Christo Unveils World’s Largest Indoor Sculpture
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ] Well known for grand gestures and huge installations, Christo (images by Wolfgang Volz) has outdone himself once again in this latest work – and the first since his wife and partner Jeanne-Claude passed away four years ago. Its stats are hard to fathom: an inflatable interior you can occupy, it spans nearly 300 feet vertically with a radius of over 150 feet. Tens of thousands of square feet of fabric stretched between over ten thousand...
Of Love & War: 3D Printing Dazzling Dresses & Daring Guns
[ By WebUrbanist in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ] There is almost no industry left untouched by 3D printing, from cars to houses, but now things are really heating up with everything from stunning outfits and home-printable arsenals. These two extreme examples show just how diverse the adopting user groups have become – the technology has become untethered from hobbyists and is now found everywhere from the realms of high-fashion fans to anonymous freedom fighters. Francis Bitonti...
Do you know who owns the copyright if you hand your camera to someone else to take pictures? ht.ly/2Bulp
Alaska Outdoor Photography: Little Su River http://t.co/lY7ADUGZlR #alaska #photography #nature via @Alaskachic907
Shadow Sculptures: Illusions from Clumps of Junk
[ By Steph in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ] These chaotic and random collections of objects placed on pedestals don’t seem gallery-worthy on first glance, but shine a light upon them in just the right way, and something magical occurs. These bits of broken glass, disassembled furniture and household objects created by Diet Wiegman transform into Michelangelo’s David, the Venus de Milo, hovering chairs or Michael Jackson. While Wiegman is not the only artist producing light and shadow...
Twin Tree-Covered Towers: The World’s First Vertical Forests
[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Offices & Commercial. ] Concept designs from far-fetched futurists have toyed with the idea for years, but one firm has finally made the vision a reality: towers extensively populated with intensive (meaning: large and heavy) plant life. In short: trees! Situated in Milan, Italy, many skeptics were sure these two towers were just another pie-in-the-sky plan for an impossible building. After all, the load-bearing requirements alone for over 10,000...
Not Photoshopped: New Optical Illusions by Felice Varini
[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ] As you approach a curve in a parking garage, suddenly a large abstract object seems to float in space just ahead, as if overlaid on top of a static image rather than a three-dimensional setting. You’re not hallucinating: it’s a painted geometric illusion by artist Felice Varini, who has a vast portfolio of similar works spanning decades. The Paris-based Swiss artist has painted dozens of settings, public and private, indoors and out, that...
Domestic Daredevils: 12 Insanely Cool Home Climbing Walls
[ By Steph in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ] When the mountains are too far away and you don’t feel like going to the gym, you can always scale the walls of your living room or bedroom – if you’ve got one of these 12 amazing indoor climbing walls installed in your home. Ranging from the modest and colorfully modern to 36-foot rugged rock walls mimicking natural boulders, these residential climbing walls will give you something to do when you’re tired of watching television. 3 Way...
Cool Colors: Rainbow Igloo Built of 500 Translucent Blocks
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ] When your prospective future mother-in-law takes the time to fill hundreds of cartons with colored water before your visit, it would behoove you to do something with them. And thus this unexpected collaboration was born. Braving temperatures down to negative 25 degrees (both Fahrenheit and Celcius), engineering student Daniel Gray and his girlfriend Kathleen Starrie took these frozen ice bricked (formed by Brigid Burton) and...
Bread Balks: 13 Old & Moldy Abandoned Bakeries
[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ] What becomes of bakeries when they’re no longer kneaded? Do the well-bread upper crust take their dough elsewhere, cooking up some other pie-in-the-sky scheme? This baker’s dozen of abandoned bakeries have closed their oven doors for good; victims of flour play, management missed cakes and muffin’d opportunities. Wonders Will Never Cease (image via: Ruth E Hendricks Photography) Well, yes and no… the original Wonder Bread bakery at 697 N....
Geometric Projections: Light Art Radically Reshapes Nature
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ] Everyone knows there are mathematical patterns to be found everywhere in nature – though few such geometries are as explicit and dazzling as those imposed by this projection artist. Javier Riera plays with simple regular forms in part because such elementary shapes precede language processing. In short: like nature, geometric concepts are immediate and fundamental, short-cutting the part of our brain that demands articulation and...
Treehouse Taster: 3 Wildly Different Types of Tree Houses
[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ] Regular readers will know that this site love tree houses of all types, but in researching articles a few have slipped through the cracks, their stories and histories unknown, yet the images of them are too amazing to go un-shown. These more mysterious examples come from a combination of Pinterest and Repinly, and range from pragmatic well-constructed residences to wild and overgrown structures that seem to have grown...
Body Paint Illusions Transform Human Models into Animals
[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ] Intricately painted and carefully posed, the human bodies serving as canvases for artist Gesine Marwedel are virtually unrecognizable as they morph into swans, flamingos and iguanas. The 25-year-old German painter employs performance artists to bring her colorful illusions to life, leaving their faces and other body parts visible as part of each composition. The ability to contort into unusual positions is a crucial element of making each of...
A+ Architecture: The World’s Most Dazzling Designs
[ By Steph in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ] Can modern architecture be accessible – and even alluring – to everyone in the world? Architizer believes that it already is, and the 87 winners of its first annual A+ Awards prove that assertion with a dazzling array of designs ranging from dramatic mountain overlooks to bright, graphic pop-up stores. Chosen by a jury and 150,000 public voters, the A+ Award winners accomplish the blog’s goal of “breaking architecture out of the...
Doing it Wrong: Funny Photo-Edited Urban Improbabilities
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ] It would be entirely right and wrong at the same time to call this body of work realistic. On the one hand, the results look like pictures (which form the basis of these manipulations) – on the other hand, while not impossible, the reality they present is dramatically improbable. This series by Robert Rickhoff is titled Out of Place and features all kinds of ordinary spaces and situations, from swing sets, crosswalks and roundabouts to...
Stop Shops: Virtual Store Shelves in Subway & Bus Stations
[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ] If you are going to have to wait for a ride anyway, why not do some shopping? No, not on your laptop or that tiny screen of your smartphone – right there on the wall, via virtual aisles on a life-scaled billboard full of products. First in South Korea thanks to Tesco, and now popping up in Australia and other countries, it works something like this: a range of popular everyday products is displayed on the wall; scan the QR...
Waste Not: 1890s Urinal Turned into a Sandwich Shop
[ By Steph in Architecture & Offices & Commercial. ] Sit at a counter embedded into a wall of urinals and enjoy a nice sandwich at Attendant, an eatery in London built in a former men’s bathroom. While it’s virtually unrecognizable after an extensive $150,000 renovation, it’s hard to imagine how the owners were able to look into the trash-strewn pit of a subterranean restroom and think about food. The Attendant restroom had been abandoned for more than fifty years before its two-year...
Self Snuggling: 7 Super-Cozy Full Body-Wrapping Seats
[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Furniture & Decor. ] Forget your chair-and-blank combination – with these ultra-warm wonders of domestic design, curling up with a good book has never seemed more enticing. Speaking of chairs and blankets, Aga Brzostek (well familiar with winter cold in Poland) starts off this series with her combined vision of both items in one. Sitters and sleepers alike can curl themselves up into a warm integrated sweater. It also comes complete with a pocket for...
Algaculture: Symbiosis Suit Produces Food from Breath
[ By Steph in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ] Inspired by ‘plantimals’, photosynthetic organisms like lichen, sea slugs and salamanders that welcome algae into their bodies in order to thrive, the Algaculture Symbiosis Suit aims to enhance humans with new, partially artificial bodily organs. The suit designs a new symbiotic relationship between us and algae, letting us become more plant-like by gaining food from light. Exploring alternative ways in which we could sustain...