Cooper Griggs

Apple's still the king of Christmas when it comes to gadgets, but new holiday data reveals some intriguing new trends. iPhones and iPads accounted for over half (51 percent) of new devices activated during Christmas week, but Microsoft's Lumia device...

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dat smile

phnom penh, cambodia: romdeng

as cambodia continues to recover from years of war and high levels of economic inequality, several organizations have started businesses that provide job skills and career training to kids who come from poor families and typically end up on the street.

romdeng restaurant is a great example of this type of effort.

one of five training restaurants run by the tree alliance, we were treated to a wonderful student-made and student-served meal in a beautiful courtyard setting.

we started with pork belly in sticky rice and yellow beans, which gets wrapped in lettuce leaves with herbs before being dipped into a palm wine vinaigrette.

then we shared two dishes: a beef filet stir-fried with red tree ants and holy basil, and the khmer specialty amok, which is savory fish served in a banana leaf.

for drinks, we had the beautiful pisith pelika, a honey liquor with fresh lime, orange, and pineapple juices, served with fresh fruit chunks bobbing on top. so damned good.

apparently these types of training restaurants turn out such great staff that restaurants are in a queue to employ the students as soon as they’re available. and i can totally see why. we’d have eaten here again if we had another day.

(for those who’ve asked “how do you find this stuff?”, it’s just a bit of pre-trip research and looking at other travelers’ blogs. it’s all to easy to be stuck in the hotel part of town surrounded by bad tourist fare. with a small bit of planning, you can have a rich experience of local food and put your dollars into the pockets that matter.)

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Lou Noble, dear friend of Flickr and one of the inaugural judges in our Flickr 20under20 celebration, took the time recently to share his Flickr Faves with us. As a connoisseur of the luscious, we weren’t surprised when he sent us the following seven images from seven of his favorite photographers. They are rich and candid. They capture exquisite moments of tenderness, vulnerability, human connection, sexuality.

You can catch up with Lou at the excellent online magazine, The Photographic Journal, or read excerpts every Thursday from his interviews on the Flickr Blog.

Thanks for sharing your current Faves with us, Lou!

This photo strikes at my very core. It’s gorgeous, lighting and color and composition all in perfect harmony. But even more than that, Aftel utterly captures her subject (Edie, part of Chloe’s Genderqueer series). It is almost unnervingly intimate, and I am moved every time I look at it.

Everything about this photo delights me. But as much as I’m drawn to breaking it down into individual components — the light, the color, the subjects — it’s the image as a whole that draws me in, the perfect synthesis of the composite elements involved. When I think of fashion photography, this is what I hope for, this excellent display of clothing that doesn’t ignore the person wearing it, that suggests a story as well as highlighting couture.

There’s an elegance here, the shot is very evocative of classic Hollywood; from Hattie’s profile and hairstyle, to the use of lighting and smoke, it’s both simple and cinematic. And the imperfections of the print only add to that vintage feel, but not in a blandly nostalgic way, but rather to bring home the tangibility of the image, the feeling that you can reach out and actually touch it, feel the scratches, dab your finger and pull away a bit of the emulsion. Makes the image appear more Real, more than a series of ones and zeroes.

A shot perfectly created to evoke a moment captured. A romantic shot, two lovers so caught up with each other they’re forced to stop in the middle of the street, the story is all laid out by the details of the image, and every aspect of the image serves the story, from the angle of the car in the road, to the two subjects half in/half out of the seat. A quiet passion to the photo, lovingly embraced by the day’s fog.

A photo so exquisite it takes my breath away, each time I look at it. The perfect sunset, the lush colors that bring out the forest, the mysterious woman in the image’s center. A grand landscape that practically begs to be looked at more closely, to better appreciate the detail in the trees, the reflection in the water, the subtle rays of the sun playing across the scene. Tremendous.

A simple, beautiful portrait, whose name, unsurprisingly, is Adonis. Exquisite lighting, with just enough detail in the background to suggest the portrait is taken out in the street, that this moment is not one crafted, but captured. And that this moment of stillness, of strength that exists alongside beauty, isn’t one that had to be made, but one that exists freely in the world.

Despite being a fan of Traci’s since my earliest days on Flickr, her work continues to astound me. The way she plays with composition, the lack of artifice in her photographs, her continued experimentation with double exposures. This shot, in particular, exudes a warmth, subverts the expectations of composition in a shot of this kind, and like so much of her work, speaks of a communion with her subject, two people being in tune, creating something.

There was a ton of hoopla about Sony releasing The Interview through internet services before it even hit theaters, but how much did this not-entirely-intentional experiment in online distribution pan out? Quite well, if you ask Sony. It just reveale...

aozoramusume:

Children of Hiroshima (Kaneto Shindo, 1952)

Forget having to lift smudges from a touchscreen to copy someone's fingerprints. According to a Chaos Computer Club presentation, you only need a camera... well, that and a little luck. The hacking association's Jan Krissler recently demonstrated tha...

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Boatsheds, a family home in Auckland, New Zealand by Strachan Group Architects with Rachael Rush.

asylum-art:

Famous Musician Portraits from Their Own CDs - Mirco Pagano & Moreno De Turco

It’s very popular to create musicians portraits from vinyl records or recycled cassette tapes. This time the following portraits were created from cds. For the inauguration of First Floor Under, a pop-vanguard culture magazine, artists Mirco Pagano & Moreno De Turco  spent more than 200 hours lining up the CDs to recreate the portraits of seven world-famous musicians: Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, Michael Jackson, James Brown, and Freddie Mercury. Take a look!

Wow. Very cool. But… where da women at? What, no Janis? No Nina? No Joan? No Tina? No Madonna? 

Interactive apps, multiple theme-tune remixes, constant recommendations, memes or trans-Atlantic and server-collapsing debuts are but mild indicators of Game of Thrones' public success. What's the real measure of a show's popularity? It's how many pe...

Since a young age, Paris-based artist and designer Christophe Guinet (aka. Mr. Plant) has been obsessed with trees, grass, and seeds, all materials he utilizes in his vegetation-specific practice. One of his most recent projects from earlier this year saw the creation of shoes using flowers and other plant material, which he has since followed up with Natural Skateboarding, a 32″ skateboard built from a panel of tree bark. While it would be fun to imagine a line of bark-based skateboards, “Plant Deck” is a one-off piece meant primarily for display. You can see more of Guinet’s work here. (via Fubiz)

via http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/a-showcase-of-beautiful-architectural-photography

One of the most gratifying aspects of watching stop-motion films is the knowledge that every bit of motion seen on screen is created by human hands, frame by frame, millimeter by millimeter. While an animator might tell you it takes an entire day just to film a 3-second sequence, it’s still difficult to imagine how much physical labor is involved to accomplish it. Lucky for us, the animators behind Laika’s Boxtrolls snuck in a short post-credits timelapse that reveals a brief glimpse of what happens behind the scenes to make two characters come to life.

I first saw Boxtrolls in the theater last September with my son, and this single scene caused a more vocal response from the audience than any other moment in the entire movie. People were literally gasping, myself included. Over the holidays, Focus Features finally made it available online through their YouTube channel.

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queergear:

em3alvarez:

Using electricity to make a Nikola Tesla portrait

This is fitting. I approve. He would approve.

liddo-cait:

i reblogged this before but we actually started playing this game and it has resulted in spilled drinks, flying cigarettes, and friends getting hit in the gut with 5lb crystal balls

it is fantastic

siem reap, cambodia: sunrise, angkor wat

if you find yourself in this part of the world, and you’re already dog tired from a day of travel, and someone says “i’ll be by at 5:00am to get you for the sunrise at angkor wat”, your response is “yes, see you then.”

Facebook's automated 'year in review' slideshows are meant to surface highlights from the year that was, but for some the virtual scrapbook simply brings back bad memories. In the case of web designer Eric Meyer, a photo of his recently deceased daug...

I could spend hours sitting next to this woman, watching her making rice paper roll sheets. And then fill those rice papers with noodles, cilantro, shrimps, hoisin sauce, cook them in a steamer, and eat them with an ice cold beer.

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