Urban time-lapse

Nathan's Banyule Flats, Heidelberg

Here on the last day of Google Reader, comes a fascinating Vimeo video


Miniature Melbourne from Nathan Kaso on Vimeo.

It captures a day in Melbourne during Moomba - the Birdman Rally and the parade down St Kilda Road, from dawn to dusk (with the Spirit leaving Station Pier).
The photos/video was shot by Nathan Kaso of Melbourne, you can see more of his time-lapse at his Vimeo site, check out his storm pics of the Yarra Valley (when people use the term roiling clouds this must be what they envisage!), or the 'Toy boats' I always love the Sydney Ferries. Then there's his website with still photos of New Zealand, the High Country (Vic & NSW), and mist in the Dandenongs.

Milford Sound NZ - Nathan Kaso

Castaway theory

I was alerted to this snippet via ALIA Weekly, the online newsletter that my annual membership helps pay for. The headline read - 'Photos found by NZ archivist could solve Earhart mystery' (the key word here was obviously archivist). 
As the world knows it, Amelia Earhart was attempting to circumnavigate the planet in 1937, when she went missing on the 4,000km leg from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island in the Pacific. Radio contact with the plane was lost after she reported running low on fuel, and the massive sea-and-air search that followed proved unsuccessful. 
Heaps of theories have been advanced as to what truly transpired. The best one was that she was secretly an agent for the CIA, on a mission to overfly Saipan to check out Japanese military expansion into the Pacific area - and that they shot down her twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane, captured her and wounded navigator Fred Noonan, and that she died years later in a Japanese prison on the island.

The area under investigation

Satellite image of Nukimaroro Island

Back to the archivist story though, photos unearthed by a Christchurch archivist  Matthew O'Sullivan, could prove Earhart spent her final days as a castaway on a remote island north of New Zealand, and that she didn't, as some believe, die in a plane crash. 
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) has long theorised that after Earhart's plane went off course while en-route to Howland Island, the pair made a safe landing on a reef near Nikumaroro Island in Kiribati, previously Gardner Island, and made it safely to shore, living out the rest of their days as castaways.

THE photo, Nikumaroro Island, apparently showing the wreckage

O'Sullivan was rifling through his collection of aerial films and came across one with an entry saying 'unnamed atoll'. He notified Tighar of his find, and the group responded, telling O'Sullivan he had discovered the ''complete set of aerial obliques taken on December 1, 1938'' by an aircraft of the New Zealand Pacific Aviation Survey. They believe the photos, taken two years after she went missing, show where Earhart's plane went down. A representative from Tighar was now organising a trip to New Zealand with a forensic imaging specialist to conduct further research.
It should be relatively easy to ascertain whether or not if the splodge on the photo is the wreckage, we await further developments.

Here & There photos

Having explored ‘Now & Then’ photos I’ve now been confronted by some ‘Here & There’ images, courtesy of my old friend WebUrbanist in Urban Hybrid: Double-Exposure Photos Fuse London & NYC. 
 

Architect by training and photographer by profession, Daniella Zalcman decided to document her old home town of New York using her iPhone. When she arrived at her new home in Great Britain, she spent time photographing London in the same way. Then…she overlaid the secondary exposures over the first - a Here & There.
 

Daniella created the double exposures from the New York and London images with a little help from photo-editing apps like Instagram.

The results are predictably unpredictable – a mix of juxtapositions ranging from smooth transitional gradients to sharp spatial contrasts, capturing street art and sidewalk scenes as well as broader cityscapes and edge conditions.

In the end, many of the most jarring compositions defy the brain’s desire to organise a coherent narrative, an effect reinforced by the gritty texture and grainy quality of the images themselves.

Daniella Zalcman was born in Washington, DC, she graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture in 2009. As a freelance photographer, her clients include The New York Times, the New York Daily News, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Saatchi & Saatchi, National Geographic, Wired, and The Nation. Daniella has also since launched a Kickstarter project (Kickstart Project creators set a funding goal and deadline. If people like a project, they can pledge money to make it happen) to create a book of these images.

Following the abandoned links

Knowing of my fascination for abandoned places, the other day I was encouraged to follow a link from ABC Western Victoria's Facebook site, 
 

plus love their cover photo

to an article from the Daily Mail's online edition titled "Family life frozen in time" showcasing Dutch photographer Niki Feijen's book "Disciple of decay" a series featuring decaying family homes where the furniture, ornaments and clothes are still in place amidst the peeling plaster and rotting chairs.
This in turn led me to his Facebook site, and finally to his website.

Niki on the beautiful staircase in the Chateau de Loup

Born in the Netherlands Niki Feijen discovered Urbex - Urban Exploring - photography. The examination of the normally unseen or off limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities.

As he says basically visiting and photographing abandoned buildings, tunnels, industry, castles, etc. He also admits to a crazy stairs addiction, spending hours beneath a staircase to capture one awesome shot.

In November 2010 Niki and his girlfriend decided to live the urban explorers dream and journey into the Chernobyl exclusion zone (obviously he hadn't seen the 'Chernobyl diaries' film). He found it "like a movie set, a ghost town. The emptiness is overwhelming. Unsuitable for living due to the radioactive contamination it's a nightmare for its former inhabitants, a dream for urban explorers."

Here are just some of his photos shared from his site. One thing I appreciated was that at his site he had a variety of share options - embeddable links, social bookmarking, feeds, etc., made adding these photos so much easier.

Pripyay classroom, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

'Disco inferno' - a burned-out disco

A grand staircase in an abandoned castle

'Shattered fairytales' - the ruined Chateau de Noisy