Perseid meteor or ....

This is in the right place and at the right time (the bright star just right of center is Deneb) so might just be a Perseid meteor:

From Astronomy

Clear sky the light pollution even out here in the countryside didn't make for optimal viewing conditions and neither did the camera settings in this instance. You can however just make out a very faint trace of the Milky Way. The other option for the streak in the picture are satellites, but according to my searches the only things in the vicinity were 3 GPS satellites (14,22,24) and passing through that area though moving orthogonally to the steak was Saudisat 1A (SO-41). NOAA-13 was too far to the right of Deneb to be a candidate.

Why do stars twinkle?

A long time ago in school I was told that stars twinkle because they are constantly exploding - but our Sun was "different"...hmmm...anyway, an often asked question by children and the answer is because of the Earth's atmosphere. Anyway, years later (many years later), today actually, I came across this excellent explanation and a stunning photograph of Sirius from the superb (and occasionally mentioned) Bad Astronomy blog by Phil Plait:

 Siriusly twinkling

If you live nearly anywhere on Earth — those of you north of 73° you’re out of luck, but I’m guessing there aren’t many of you! — and look to the southeast shortly after sunset, you’ll see the figure of Orion. Follow the three belt stars to the east, and you’ll see a bright star: Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. If it’s near the horizon, you may see it twinkling madly: flickering, dancing, perhaps even changing colour.

So, next time you're asked, now you know a great place to go to answer the question.

Sipoonlahti Bridge

An hour of long exposure, high contrast, night photography fun on a cold night, resulting in a good dozen or so pictures...overall, quite pleased with some of the results:

Fishing

Fishing at Sunset

A Walk in the Park

A couple from a small photographic expedition in Helsinki...

Food Blogs

An advertisement for a friend who is both a chef and a photographer....

From a Cook's Heart
 
I recommend the roast garlic soup.....

Jupiter

A little experiment with the Canon 55-250mm kit lens:  Jupiter with (left to right) three of the Galilean moons: Io, Europa and Ganymede:

Not the greatest photograph but it demonstrates that it is just about possible...the disk of Jupiter is completely saturated while the moons are out of focus blurs. Impossible to focus correctly and it was windy - not a great lens for this sort of work either...

Landscape Gallery - Test Posting From Picasa

Nikkilä landscape looking towards the churches.



This is a test posting from Picasa using the Google+ stuff

Photography and vampires...

Apart from the issue of sailing on an umbrella, this photograph is genius - as the caption states clearly, "no detail is overlooked"...

...more at Photoshop Disasters...

Critique (Photographic)

I think this applies to peer review of scientific papers just as well, however here it is specifically aimed at those writing a critique of photographs:

• Dgrin Forum - How to Critique
• Nature Photographers (.net)
• More thoughs on critique (continuation of the above link)
  
• The Hamburger Method 

So, no more "nice shot" or "I don't like this" or "Its not special"...the last one is quite amusing as the writer defined special as "his"...

Doctored Photographs

Returning to that particular theme from earlier, Time is running an article about
doctored photographs...

Top 10 Doctored Photographs - Time Magazine

Black and white pictures

Some really stunning, minimalist black and white work here:

http://www.michaelkenna.net/

Industrial minimalism: http://www.michaelkenna.net/gallery.php?id=7

Autumn

Some autumnal pictures to cheer you up:


http://share.ovi.com/album/ioliver.Autumn

What you see...

...is not always the "truth". Now that Ralph Lauren has finally apologised for its cock-up regarding photomanipulation though from the sounds of it they haven't apologies for the abuse of the DCMA which does not cover these situations (fair use), for the purposes of education and posterity I along with thousands of others, a few major search engines and media outlets will preserve this for posterity and draw attention to other "Photoshop abuses".

As Blogger removed the original post because they caved in to a DCMA thread, hosting site Boing Boing didn't. Click here for the picture in question; and the picture (used under fair use rules).

Humans generally don't have heads bigger than their pelvis...not even Barbie make that bad a mistake.

Anyway, to start, Photoshop Disasters contains many of these, and here's the article about the Ralph Lauren case. Which a few news agencies picked up and and made their own exposes about this, such as ABC about the Ralph Loren picture and a minor touching up of a photograph to remove a bump. A few more from Art Threat about the Ralph Loren picture and a collection of 50 more from Graphic Design Blog.