The Texas-based fashion company Magnolia Pearl offers up a feast for the eyes. Company owners Robin Brown and John Gray are two souls I'd love to have in my circle of friends. When the two take to the open road to scout antiques, they do it their Magnolia Pearl converted Airstream trailer.
"Thought for today" - Kopan Monastery, April 2011
The life as a monk is not one long struggle against oneself, a life of repentence and wishful thinking a partial or stunted life. It is full of rich and brings an inner tranquility comfort that far surpasses any other kind of comfort. I have known before or since..
Brad Snead walks past melting ice on the Cook Inlet beach, Saturday, March 26, 2011, in Kenai, Alaska, while looking for agates. (AP Photo/Peninsula Clarion, M. Scott Moon)
“As you can see I love the Icelandic Horse. Born and raised with them, I love to work with them and watch them ... they have unbelievable network of communication and energy I can´t explain with words”. – Gigja Einarsdottir. Photo: “Runners”. (Photo by Gigja Einarsdottir)
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde is interested in the ephemeral -- impermanent states of being which he documents through photographs. For Nimbus II, he used a smoke machine, combined with moisture and dramatic lighting to create a hovering indoor cloud in the empty setting of a sixteenth-century chapel in Hoorn, a small town in Holland. “I imagined walking into a museum hall with just empty walls. The place even looked deserted. On the one hand I wanted to create an ominous situation. You could see the cloud as a sign of misfortune. You could also read it as an element out of the Dutch landscape paintings in a physical form in a classical museum hall.”
“I started photography in June 2009. At the time, I was searching for a way to express both the rigorous scientist and the creative artist in me. There are few hobbies that let these two approaches work together, so I really was enthusiastic about it: I am now spending all my free time studying various techniques, contemplating others' fantastic work, and of course, making pictures”. – Christophe Kiciak. Photo: “The Hero”. (Photo by Christophe Kiciak)
Talented French artist, Pierre Beteille, is skillful in manipulation of portraits (specially his own self portraits) using Photoshop. This is how he describes himself: “I am not a photographer or an artist, I just make images… I shoot very average or even bad photos that I try to improve thanks to Photoshop”…
Photo: “En attendant d'avoir des balles”...., 2007 (Photo by Pierre Beteille)
In 2009 we embarked on a project to get unique close-up, ground level photographs of African wildlife. To achieve this I built BeetleCam; a remote controlled buggy with a DSLR camera mounted on top. Matt and I travelled to Tanzania and used the buggy to get groundbreaking photographs of elephants and buffalo. However, we lost a camera and BeetleCam was almost destroyed in our only encounter with a lion.
We returned home and published “The Adventures of BeetleCam”. The story quickly went viral, appearing all over the web, in print and on television networks worldwide. However, we weren’t entirely satisfied… just imagine what we could get with a lion-proof BeetleCam!