Photography is a great medium for recording the world around you as we all know. Pictures of your family, beautiful scenes, food, fashion, buildings, people…the list is obviously endless, but as I saw today, there is also another element, one that for some reason I hadn’t really seen before now which is a combination of art and photography. I came across this series of photo-art by Zander Olsen that had been generated in woodlands and I loved it! With this work, the person, who I will term a physical artist (a person who creates art using physical materials rather than a photographer who captures and image on film/digital) generates a piece of art and uses the medium of photography to record it as a picture or artwork. In these images Olsen has used white material to follow the horizon and create interesting optical illusions. Very cool!

This image was taken by the Hubble telescope and shows ultra deep space. It may just look like a bunch of colourful stars and blobs, but click on it and zoom in and really look at it. It’s amazing what you can see and what is out there.

The area of the picture that really caught me was was the swirling yellow planet/sun (I’m no astro-physicist) down at the bottom right-hand corner. Trying to imaging the size of Earth, and me, in this huge universe really hurts my brain (a bit like trying to imaging what is outisde the universe, but I’m not even going to ask that question!).

We have our little planet in amongst this infinitely HUGE universe, yet we fight each other and try and destroy what we have. Why are we not working together to help our survival in this big, black hole insead of each thinking we are better, and know better, than the person next door?

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/entire/pr2006012b/

Related articles

• Hat’s Off To Hubble (41cmc.wordpress.com)
• How is the hubble space telescope able to operate outside of the atmoshere (wiki.answers.com)
• Hubble Spots Disk Around Distant Black Hole (wired.com)

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Greece/Thessaly/Trikala/Meteora/photo789966.htm

Having spent far too long gazing at this, I moved on and came across another image that I was drawn to look at based on the pro photographers comment that he ‘loves this shot’. I don’t know what you think, but I was quite amazed when I opened the link to be confronted with this:

http://yfrog.com/h3y4pmvzj

I don’t get it. My simple question is why? I’m always intrigued to find out what draws people to some images and what turns them away from others. It’s the same with modern art. I always remember the painting which is simply (in my mind) a canvas painted black. I don’t get it. Surely I could simply grab a canvas, paint it black, or blue or green for that matter, call it ‘art’ and sell it for a huge sum of money? If you have an answer, please let me in on the secret before I go mad!