Cloud Floating in the Blue

30 Jan

Photographs from the series Homage to Wilson A. Bentley by Yuji Obata.

I’ve been to New York City four times in the last year, most recently last weekend. Having finally ticked off most of the major exhibition spaces, this time I visited some of the smaller Chelsea galleries, and this was the best discovery.

As Liz Danzico quoted earlier today,

Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake.

Obata takes that as a starting point, but goes further. As the Danziger gallery’s biographical notes say,

Like Bentley, Obata was obsessed with the challenge of doing something no one had done before – in his case photographing snowflakes in freefall rather than on a flat surface without digital or any other manipulation. It took Obata five years to achieve but his breakthrough resulted in the capture of pictures that allow the snowflakes to relate to each other in space and size, creating dynamic compositions and scenes. Obata chose the location to shoot the series, in the mountains of Hokkaidō, based on its history as the place where Dr. Ukichiro Nakaya did research that led to his invention of artificial snow.

The reproductions here (taken from James Danziger’s blog) give you an idea of the beauty of the photographs, but if you’re in New York between now and the 25th of February, it’s well worth visiting the gallery to see the works in person.

(Also nearby: Weegee’s Naked City and Vivian Maier next door at the Steven Kasher Gallery; Damien Hirst’s Complete Spot Paintings at the Gagosian; and, at the Mary Boone gallery until the 4th of February, Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds. All are worth at least popping in to if you’re in the area.)

26 Jan

mpdrolet:

Lenticular cloud over Mount Shasta at sunset from Lake Shastina, October, 2010

Mark Stensaas

(via npr)

25 Jan

good:

A Gorgeous Time-Lapse of Lighting Storms Over Africa From Space

The world is beautiful, especially from a view like this.

theatlanticvideo:

This time-lapse shot from the International Space Station reveals the Milky Way as storms illuminate Africa below. The video is courtesy of the Crew Earth Observations group at NASA Johnson Space Center.

23 Jan

Daylit astronomy

bobulate:

I have been inseparable from The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds after receiving it as a gift a few days ago. In it, I’ve just learned of “cloud streets:”

Low clouds can line up parallel to the wind to form Cumulus radiatus. Also known as ‘cloud streets’, they’re the Roman roads of the cloud road.

See also:
So irregular is their movement that when physicists came up with Chaos Theory in the 1970s, some had been inspired by gazing up at the clouds.

Emergent roads or our perception of such couldn’t help but remind me of constellation thinking — another example of such. These water droplet roads are our construction of structure such that we can make sense of their constructs. Most clouds fall into 10 main types, although we typically know the Cumulus, not only because it’s one of the Low Clouds. Together with the other nine types and varieties, they comprise our daytime astronomy. To cloudgazing.

[NASA, Earth Observatory, January 24, 2011]