Chuck and his MSR hubba (tent) on the coastal plain, ANWR, Alaska. We spent 2 weeks rafting the Canning river, and this photo was taken toward the end of the trip. It wasn’t as cold as it looks; Chuck’s from Florida. Good times indeed.

Hey Folks,

I’ve decided to make some changes to the blog and will be trying to get them up and running in the coming months. The first one is in this particular post. I want to post a kind of ‘Clips of the Month’ page; videos, photos, articles, quotes, whatever, that caught my eye during the month. I find nowadays there’s simply so much amazing material getting blasted around the web that it’s about impossible to keep up with even a fraction of it. Facebook posts and Tweets come down the pipe a mile a minute, all pushing (and pushed) down the page, completely gone; disappeared before I’m done reading the actual link; it’s a frustrating race to the bottom. I end up missing most of what folks post out there.

That’s compounded by a popular trend whereby (some) folks think it’s good to simply tweet and post every link that runs across their monitor – which wastes an awful lot of time for the receiver. Rather than simply tweeting every single post that says “Hey, check out this totally awesome photo”, I thought it might be useful to post a collection of links that (a) I’ve actually visited/read/watched, and (b) I honestly thought were not just above the banal, but that I felt were pretty cool/interesting/and yes, even awesome. Hopefully posting them as a blog page makes the content a little less transient, as well. We’ll see if the idea is a good one or not. It’s simply a collection of links to articles, photos, etc, that I ran across, one place or another, and thought were actually worth sharing.

Photography Stuff

Awards. Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards, 2010. One of the most prestigious photography competitions in the world. Definitely worth browsing these images.New eBook by Guy Tal. Creative Landscape Photography. An instructional text aimed at “intermediate and advanced photographers seeking to evolve their skills beyond the basics.” What’s not interesting about that? I’m going to review this book more closely in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

More exceptional images winning awards. Charter Institute of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) Environmental Photographer of the Year, 2001, Awards. Some great work here.

The Key To Findability. A nice article on Digital Asset Management (DAM) and database-driven search. Effectively, how to manage your sh** so you (and others) can find it. John Mancini’s article here.

The Nikon Post: David duChemin has it right. “I am approaching this post with trepidation knowing what kind of strange misplaced fury these issues bring up in some people. If only some people put as much energy into” their creative lives, eh? But you are not those people, so that’s why I’m not keeping this to myself. In other words, he knows that few things garner readership on his blog like a post about switching from Canon to Nikon (or vice versa) … Read David’s article —>

Extreme Exposures. Annenberg Space for Photography honors 5 great photographers with this series – Clyde Butcher, Michael Nichols, Paul Nicklen and Donna & Stephen O’Meara. See the slideshow online at Treehugger.com (check out photo #10).

National Geographic Photo of the Day. A great way to start your day. Click and browse National Geographic’s Photos of the Day. Galleries of wildlife, landscapes, adventure, black and white, people, etc, etc. Some really nice images here. Check out, for example, this photo of Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland erupting.

Quote #1: “When you trust your point of view, that’s when you start taking pictures.” ~ Rolling Stone magazine photographer, Annie Leibovitz.

Nature Photographers Head to Bosque. Naturescapes Photography Series: Bosque del Apache, New Mexico. Join Greg Downing, along with Deborah Sandidge and Tim Grey for a nature photography extravaganza this December, at Bosque del Apache, New Mexico. That’s gotta be a blast to attend.

How to land a gig. A short (and pretty cool) video by Alec Brownstein, showing how he landed a job with one of the top advertising agencies in NYC … “When top advertising creative directors Googled themselves, they got a message from me asking for a job.” For a total outlay of 6 bucks. Good ideas come from where? Take a look at this 60 second video.

Odds and Ends

Documentary Film about Gary Snyder. Author of “Practice of the Wild” (one of my favorite books) and poet laureate of deep ecology, Gary Snyder is featured in this documentary film about his life. Snyder rocks! The film premieres in NYC, Nov 12. This short, 2 minute trailer gives a hint of what’s to come.

Quip from the Onion! This appropriate quip from twitter: “NEWSWIRE: The Huffington Post has launched a new print edition featuring articles torn out of other newspapers.” Ha ha — classic! So much for News feeds, eh? Definitely add the Onion to your Twitter feed.

Quote #2: “A sycamore leaf helicopters down, gold, in the south wind. A train whistle blows lonesome to the west.” Now THAT’S a beautiful Tweet! Tweeted from @BluegrassPoet.

Social Media News: New York Times Has More Twitter Followers than Print Readers .. How does the NYT end up with 140 character tweets more valuable than their printed articles? An interesting read. “Could a future of so long print and hello headlines in 140 characters or less be far away? … “

Facebook in the News (again). Facebook and their Privacy Issues. An article on what you can do in dealing with the recent facebook debacle. F-b, it seems is just a pain in the a$$.

Quote #3: “A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.” — Henri Matisse.

What’s cooler than being cool? Bret Debbold, checking out the Chitistone Canyon, Skolai Pass to Wolverine, July 2010.

Environmental Stuff

What Price for Species?A thought provoking article that discusses the question ‘why do species matter?’

The Great Bear Rainforest; Home of the Spirit Bear and (potentially) an oil/gas pipeline? Searching for the Spirit Bear, a video from abc News. They have a few videos on the Spirit Bear, or Kermode bear, in this series.

ANWR and Wilderness? Wilderness Designation for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: “A planned study of possible new wilderness protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has sparked a furor in Alaska, where energy companies have long dreamed of tapping oil reserves beneath its vast coastal plain home to herds of migrating animals.  ……” – essentially, the US F&WS finally decide to study the refuge in order to (hopefully) designate wilderness protections. The sooner the better!

Arctic Warming? Scientific American article on Climate Change and arctic. People still think this is a ‘when this might happen’ issue, as opposed to the reality of ‘it’s happening right now. Crazy stuff. “Warming continues to shrink the snow and ice cover that defines the Arctic, signaling the region’s shift to a new climate pattern, scientists said yesterday. …. ”

Polar Bear News. A federal judge asks US F&WS why did they choose to list the polar as ‘threatened’ rather than endangered’. Article here. (hmmm .. now why would the Bush administration have done that, Carl wonders aloud?)

The Gulf Between Us: writer Terry Tempest Williams, via Orion Magazine, on the Gulf Oil Disaster.“This story in the Gulf of Mexico is not a new story. Living in the American West, I understand the oil and gas industry, both its political power in a state like Wyoming and its lack of regard for the safety of workers.”

The Wolverine. “Long viewed as mean, belligerent and solitary, appear to have gotten a bum rap, according to new research conducted at Glacier National Park.” Learning about the Wolverine. This is an interesting article about one of the coolest animals in the mountains – Gulo gulo.

Scientists Versus Think Tanks. A dozen scientists have written an article essentially pointing out the dishonesty of a couple of “independent” think tanks.. Apparently the World Growth International (WGI) and International Trade Stategies Global (ITS) 2 think tanks on logging and forestry, walk “a thin line between reality and a significant distortion of the facts”. WGI are simply lobbyists for the forestry corporations masquerading as an NGO operating for the world’s poor.  Those think tanks are, not surprisingly, closely associated with conservative US groups such as The Heritage Foundation & American Enterprise Institute.  Both Mongabay and Andrew Revkin have good articles on the story.

That’s the news from here til next month. If you have any items you’d like to add below, please do so. The only qualifiers are that you must have actually read the article/watched the video/browsed the photo/s, AND thought the link actually worthwhile sharing. Put everything else on Twitter. 🙂

Thanks folks.

Cheers

Carl