guest post by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

What was that big thing? Yesterday? Up in the sky? If you happened to look up sometime around 3 pm, you might have seen it: A twin-deck Airbus A380 superjumbo airliner looping around downtown San Francisco.

The A380 was here as part of a promotional tour by Emirates airlines, and I managed to weasel my way aboard for a celebratory 90-minute flight to nowhere. As we cruised in the skies over Northern California, I snacked on frou-frou canapes and explored the brand-new aircraft.

The first class suites are amazing:

The first-class shower is even more amazing:

Even the economy class seats were relatively roomy, and the onboard entertainment system offered an awful lot of ways to distract yourself. News feeds. On-demand video. The words.

My favorite was the Tailcam, realtime video piped to each passengers’ seat showing the view from the top of the A380’s vertical stabilizer. It’s basically the same view you get in many popular flight sim packages, but it’s more fun when it’s real. Here’s our landing at SFO:

There’s more nerdy technical detail abut the flight in my post over at Telstar Logistics, and the link to more pictures is below:

Telstar Logistics photoset “Emirates A380 at SFO”

photos & images by Telstar Logistics, except for the view from below, which is used courtesy of Brian Kusler

The Big Picture is currently featuring a gallery of incredible photos of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a huge particle accelerator with circumference of 17 miles being built on the border of France and Switzerland by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). LHC testing is scheduled to begin this month.

See Previously: The Big Picture, A News Photography Blog by Boston.com

photo by Maximilien Brice

guest post by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

This Friday, August 1st Robert Holmgren and Joe Reifer will be hosting a show of their toy-camera photographs from 7 - 10 pm at the fabulous Lucky Ju-Ju Pinball Arcade (and Art Gallery) in Alameda. The show is free, and the pinball costs $10 for all-you-can-play. Robert writes:

Since 2005 nearly the only camera I’ve used is a cheap toy camera –the Holga. With a plastic lens, single aperture, and guessed focusing, I produce pictures that hope to triumph over these limitations. Whenever I’m asked why I take pictures with a cheap plastic camera I find myself giving an answer something along the lines of, ‘Well, aesthetically I’m conceptualizing an alternative to the dominant form of image capture vis a vis the digital realm’. The reality is closer to ‘I don’t know’, but the answer likely to be somewhere around same reasons that people fix-up old cars, brew their own beer or play the ukulele. It’s low art with outsized dreams.

Toy Camera Dreams: Photos by Robert Holmgren and Joe Reifer

photos by Robert Holmgren and Joe Reifer

The new Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 high end, wide angle compact camera looks promising. It features a 24-60mm f/2.0–2.8 LEICA DC lens, which should improve shooting in low light situations, plus it processes in RAW. Instead of increasing the megapixels (currently 10), they instead increased the sensor size which should help decrease noise and improve dynamic range. The DMC-LX3 comes out in August at a price of $499 and is available for pre-order through Amazon.

The LX3’s F2.0 24mm ultra-wide-angle LEICA DC VARIO-SUMMICRON lens also represents a major step up from the LX2. The F2.0 lens is about twice as bright as the previous F2.8 lens, itself generally considered a bright lens. With the new F2.0 lens, the LX3 can shoot at higher shutter speeds and capture stunningly clear, sharp, blur-free images even in lower lighting conditions. This advanced lens also makes it easy to produce beautiful photos with pleasing soft-focused background. Also, the 24mm ultra-wide-angle lens - rare on a compact camera - gives photographers a wider range of composition possibilities. The super-high-quality LEICA DC VARIO-SUMMICRON lens minimizes distortion even at the wide end, so users can get stunning, true-to-life images with outstanding resolution and detail.

I’ll be curious to see how this stacks up against my trusty Ricoh GR Digital II which is an amazing little camera.

guest post by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

If you’ve ever enjoyed even a little bit of Joseph Conrad, Patrick O’Brian, Moby Dick, or Pirates of the Caribbean, you really should get down to Pier 30/32 in San Francisco during the next few days to check out the tall ships that are now tied up there. Or, at the very least, be sure to savor the view of them as you drive across the Bay Bridge.

Yesterday the Coast Guard gave me tour of the USCG Eagle, a steel-hulled, three-mast ship that was originally built by the Nazis in 1936. After World War II, the ship was seized as a war prize by the U.S. military. Once in American hands, it was handed over to the Coast Guard for use as a training vessel, and it’s been in use at the Coast Guard Academy ever since.

I happened to be there a few hours after yesterdays Parade of Sail, just as the cadets were lowering the Eagle’s sails, and it was an acrobatic spectacle. There are no “Retract Sail” buttons to push; instead, dozens of cadets climb 100 feet up the masts to lower the sails by hand. It was nerve-wracking to watch even while we were tied up at Pier 30 on a calm and sunny day in San Francisco, but the thought of trying to do all that on a stormy sea made me shiver me timbers.

Check out the USCG Eagle if you can. (If you can’t, I took a lot of photos.) The Eagle and the HMS Bounty are open for tours at Pier 30/32 on Friday (today), Saturday, and Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm.

Aboard USCG Eagle (Flickr slideshow from Telstar Logistics)

photos by Todd Lappin/Telstar Logistics

guest post by Aaron Muszalski

San Francisco’s RayKo Gallery is currently presenting “Into the Ether,” an collection of work from ten contemporary photographers who use the historic collodion - or “wet plate” - process to create their unique images.

Come see this landmark West Coast exhibition featuring the work of 10 of the greatest contemporary collodion artists to ever coat a plate. Both ambrotypes (one-of-a-kind images made on glass) and ferrotypes, or tintypes (one-of-a-kind images made on thin metal plates) will be exhibited. The photographers come from a wide variety of backgrounds and pursue a wide range of subject matter, but they are united in their choice of process and their passion for this technique that renders some of the most exquisite photographs ever seen.

The exhibition includes work from John A. Coffer, the “traveling wetplate artist” who spent seven years wandering through North America in a horse and carriage, working as an old-time portrait photographer.

In 1978, John Coffer hitched a bay workhorse named Brownie up to a 19th century style darkroom wagon dubbed the “Photographic Van” and criss-crossed the continent for seven years, plying his trade as an old time traveling portrait photographer. This was an experience as unique as the many tintypes he made and sold along the way. In 1985, after more than 11,000 wagon miles and having passed through 36 different states, John and his horse, Brownie, settled down on their own 50-acre farm in the heart of the beautiful Finger Lakes country of up-state New York. John lives in a one-room cabin that he built himself. He lives off the land and has no phone, no electricity, no automobile, and no running water. There, Coffer photographs the livestock, the farm implements, and the annual cycles of nature.

“Into the Ether” will be on display through August 28. RayKo is open Tuesday-Thursday from 10am to 10pm, and Friday-Sunday from 10am to 8pm. Gallery admission is free.

via Criollo

photos by Will Dunniway and John Coffer

Dave Schumaker recently visited Dublin, Ireland and while there he took a tour of the Guinness Storehouse at the St James’s Gate Brewery and shot bunch of beautiful photos of one of the “holy shrines of the beer drinking world”.

Here’s his Guinness Storehouse gallery on Flickr.

photos by Dave Schumaker

“It’s Lovely! I’ll Take It!” is hilarious blog that collects poorly selected photos that have been used in actual real estate listings.

photos via “It’s Lovely! I’ll Take It!”

Last month Boston Globe’s Boston.com launched The Big Picture, a fantastic new blog featuring galleries of large, high quality photos related to a specific news story.

Today’s gallery features stunning photos of Anti-Terrorism Exercises in China.

Andy Baio recently did an interview with Alan Taylor, creator of The Big Picture.

photo via AP Photo/Xinhua/Fan Changguo

Last week MOO launched their fabulous new line of full-size business cards. Also just like their classic MiniCards, you can have a different image on the back of each card and since the card is larger, you won’t need to do as much cropping of your photos.

Here’s MOO’s promo video for the new business cards:

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK recently interviewed MOO CEO Richard Moross about the launch of this new service.

See Previously:

- Flickr MiniCards by MOO
- MOO Launches NoteCards
- MOO Launches New Product: StickerBooks

photos via MOO

Here are a few photos and videos I shot today at RoboGames 2008 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. RoboGames runs through Sunday, June14th (tomorrow), so there’s still plenty of time to check it out.

More Coverage:

- Tim Hwang
- James Shearhart

photos by Scott Beale

guest post by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

There’s construction underway at the corner of Howard Street and Hawthorne Lane in SoMa, and sometime during the last few months the building that previously stood on the corner was demolished and removed. The result is that this fantastic “ghost sign” for the Sherwood Packing Company, a long-forgotten wholesaler of pork products, has re-emerged to see the light of day.

The sign is painted on the side of 639 Howard, and in a fittingly postmodern coda, the building that once housed the Sherwood Packing Company is now home to… A Verizon mobile phone shop.

photo by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

guest post by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

San Francisco’s new Contemporary Jewish Museum opens to the public on Sunday, June 8, but yesterday I managed to weasel my way into a preview tour of the building. Created inside the shell of a (gorgeous) former PG&E power substation that was designed by architect Willis Polk in 1907, the new museum was reinvented by the reknowned modern architect Daniel Libeskind. The facade of the original PG&E building remains largely intact, with the obvious exception of a giant “blue steel” cube — Libeskind said that, not me — added to the western side of the structure.

Libeskind was also the architect for a famously somber Jewish Museum in Berlin, but he explained that the message conveyed by this project is very different. In Germany, he said, the Jewish museum is inevitably linked with memories of the Holocaust, but San Francisco’s CJM “celebrates Jews and Jewish life, in the spirit of the West Coast.”

That’s about right. The CJM includes several multimedia performance spaces, and it won’t have a permanent collection. The exhibits on display at the grand opening will include a sound project by John Zorn and installations by seven contemporary artists who reinterpreted the story of Genesis. I spent about an hour wandering through the grounds and spaces, and enjoyed it thoroughly, so check the link for more photos. There’s also an opening party scheduled for Saturday night, called DAWN 2008, with $15 tickets available at the door.

photo gallery: Touring the Contemporary Jewish Museum

photos by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

As part of their Image of the Day series, NASA posted a beautiful image of a sunset on Mars sent by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on May 19, 2005.

via Buzz Andersen

image via NASA

Glen Mullaly, Mike Middleton and Todd Franklin created great Flickr pool featuring photos of Growing Up Star Wars: 1977-1985.

via Cynical-C Blog

photos via Tom and Carolyn & Todd Franklin

Thanks to everyone who came out to Laughing Squid Lucky 13, I can’t think of a better way to have celebrated my birthday and 13 great years of Laughing Squid.

photos by Lane Hartwell

photos by Mitch Aidelbaum

photos by Steve Rhodes

Here are a few photos I shot during the setup of the party.

I also shot a few short videos of Extra Action Marching Band, our surprise special guest that close out the party with a bang.

The Camera Flash Experiment is the latest mission by Improv Everywhere where 700 agents lined up on the Brooklyn Bridge and created a wave of flashes from Brooklyn to Manhattan. See the full mission report for more photos and video.

photo by Katie Sokoler

Here are some photos and videos I shot at last Friday’s opening for Paul Cesewski who is the current Artist In Residence at SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. (aka the San Francisco Dump).

UPDATE: Brock has more coverage of Paul’s opening over on SFist.

photo by Scott Beale

via The Triumph of Bullshit

photo by passive-aggressive notes

“Chihuahua on Cheeseburgers” is the latest in the “with cheeseburgers” series of photos by Austin photographer William Hundley, where he places unique objects on top of cheeseburgers and then photographs it. Chihuahua can has cheeezburger?

Last October I posted about William’s amazing Jumping Fabric photography.

via The Triumph of Bullshit

photo by William Hundley