Cooper Griggs

Medomak River House, located in Waldoboro near Boston by Anmahian Winton Architects. (Photography: Jane Messinger & Peter Vanderwarker)

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/32/8088955945

Interior View

via http://thisisnthappiness.com/page/2

A warning: The video you’re about to watch is heartbreaking. In just a few seconds, you’ll see 27 years of Arctic sea ice melt like a handful of snowflakes next to a space heater.

The animation is beautiful, until you realize the implications. Sea ice has become the canary in the coal mine of global climate change.

This animation was produced by painstakingly tracking individual bergs of sea ice for years by satellite and ocean buoys. According to climate.gov, as the animation begins in the 1980s, 26 percent of the Arctic ice pack was four years old or older. By last year, that number had dropped to 10 percent. The oldest ice, once common throughout the Arctic, is now banished to a narrow region near northern Canada.

The Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet in recent years, due in part to the loss of the bright white reflecting surface of sea ice. Darker water is able to retain more heat, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle of melting. A recent study showed that as more of the Arctic reverts to open water, winds are increasing and waves are growing larger—which are further enhancing ice loss. Another study showed that changes in the Arctic may be altering the weather, too.

Here’s what’s happening: For the last 15 years or so, increasingly warm water has been making its way northward, through the narrow gap between Alaska and Russia. Once inside the Arctic, the warm water turns into an ice-eating machine. The summer surge of warmth gnaws away at the edges of the ever-shrinking gyre of floating ice, a relic of the Arctic’s frozen past. New ice can no longer replace the ice that is naturally lost through the Fram Strait, east of Greenland. The result has been a sharp decline in old ice in recent years, with much less resilient younger ice taking its place.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the 10 lowest Arctic sea ice seasons have all occurred in the last 10 years.

Last year’s melt season was more of the same—resulting in the sixth-lowest extent on record, with open water as far north as 300 miles from the North Pole. That was a new record for the satellite era, which began in 1979.

Profound changes to the Arctic may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean climate change is a lost cause. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said there’s still two precious decades left before the world is locked in to “dangerous” levels of global warming. That ought to be all the motivation we need.

When actors play doctors on TV, that does not make them actual doctors. And that does not mean they should scour some Internet boards, confront their pediatricians, and demand fewer vaccinations for their children, as some Hollywood parents in Los Angeles have apparently been doing.

(via becausebirds)

via http://postnext.com/archives/063499.html#more

More Brilliant Shower Thoughts (images via imgur)

Previously: 20 Mind-Boggling Shower Thoughts

You might not typically think of Jeopardy! as a source of opinion on the hot-button political issues of the day, but on the Jan. 21 edition of the game show, a saucy clue challenged that perception. Under a category called “Civil” the $800 clue read as follows: “Some opponents of same-sex marriage say, hey gay folks, how about these? Wouldn't these be good enough?” The correct answer, of course, is “What are civil unions?” The clue writers’ flippant tone in the rhetoric attributed to gay marriage opponents is clear evidence of how they—like most gay people—feel about civil unions as an alternative to full marriage equality: They are a weak attempt at placation that suggests second-class citizenship, if not a kind of segregation.

(via 4gifs:video)

Which is more fun for you, the sketches, that gestational period where you’re putting all the pieces together, or the shoot itself?

They’re all so different… The preproduction is dragged out forever and allowed time to marinate. The shoot happens so quickly that it’s a whole separate type of energy, which is great for its unique intensity.

My favorite part is the moment when the post–production is finished and I can just sit with the final image. The interaction with the photo itself at that point is its own experience, which is always more enjoyable to me than the actual creation of it. This is especially true when the outcome exceeds your expectations and you have produced something far better than you ever thought was possible at the beginning stages of the concept’s inception.

That actually brings up something I’ve been thinking about a lot, lately. Which is the important part: the process or the result? For me, if the shoot was a mess but the photo is good, I don’t see that as a success.

That completely makes sense. We do this for the process and not just for the result. If we just wanted to churn things out without enjoying the experience on the way, then we might as well be robots. It all needs to be there.

It’s what makes creating photos so much fun, and also why I hate picking favorites. Sometimes the end result is awful and nowhere near what you expected but the shoot itself was a good time, so you still have a success. I definitely would like to put more effort towards enjoying the early stages of the process and not get so caught up in the practical notion of the end result.

I suppose it can’t be helped a lot of the time when the result determines getting paid, getting work in the future — eating soup in a can versus some sweet BBQ in Compton.

For sure. Sometimes you just need to eat. Generally I’m going for the BBQ though.

How much do the professional concerns guide what kind of stuff you shoot these days?

The amount of commercial versus personal work has stayed fairly consistent over the years. I feel fortunate with how much they actually overlap. I don’t spend a whole lot of time shooting unrelated commercial work and wishing I were spending more time on what I really want to do. I try to avoid that type of work because it defeats the reason I got into this in the first place. I get excited about most of the commercial work because it generally is in line with my style.

Also, I try not to think too much about directing my personal work towards some sort of commercial goal, but often the lines blur and I’m okay with that. It seems more ideal than having to accept a scenario where I’m always saying, ‘I just do this because I have to but I would really rather be doing something else.’

Because you go back and forth between bigger scenes and smaller portraits, do you see your work heading in a particular direction? Bigger? Smaller?

Ideally the smaller and bigger scenes have a consistent enough look that they work together. I wouldn’t say I’m pushing towards one or the other. It depends again on each individual concept and what is required to communicate that effectively. I have a lot of fun with the big scenes but I don’t want to arbitrarily throw a bunch of people in there for no reason.

You don’t feel the urge to move to even bigger narratives?

If the concept calls for it. The scope of the scene isn’t a driving point for me.

What do you want people to take away from your images?

I don’t make a conscious effort to direct their experience. I wish I had some highfalutin artist–statement–type–thing to interject here, but the truth is that it’s all relatively shallow.

You can look at the images and argue against that quite easily since there are obvious themes being communicated within each story, but that’s not the point for me. As an after thought, I suppose I hope what any artist would hope — that people like the work. Maybe it’s because they were simply entertained, or maybe they felt challenged to question the impact of divorce on a child’s development. Either way, that’s up to them. I think the options are there but they don’t need to be force–fed.

Keep reading the complete interview on The Photographic Journal.