The Big Picture is featuring beautiful photos of Martian Landscapes shot from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

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photo by Bill Hall

Bill Hall of the Caltrans District 4 Photography Department has a great series of photos documenting the repair of the Bay Bridge eyebar.

See Previously: Detailed Analysis of The Bay Bridge Crack

via Lenore Edman

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photo by Pierre Ducharme

The Big Picture has some amazing photos of NASA’s launch of the new Ares I-X rocket which took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday.

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guest post by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

photos by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

Sure, it’s fun to fly over San Francisco with Google Earth, but there’s no substitute for the real thing.

I recently had the opportunity to buzz the city in a humble Cessna 182 “Skylane.” We departed from Palo Alto under blue skies, then headed north above Highway 101, crossed over SFO right above the runways (the safest way for a low-flying plane to transit an airport is to fly directly over it), then reached San Francisco. At an altitude of about 1500 feet, we made a few loops over The Mission, got eye-to-eye with Sutro Tower, then did a pass over Sausalito and the Marin Headlands before turning east to fly right over the Golden Gate Bridge.

The weather was perfect for photography, so my shutter-finger got a major workout. Hope you enjoy the photos I took during the flight!

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Flickr has just launched People in Photos, a new feature that allows you to associate Flickr users with their image in photos. Flickr has also revamped member profiles.

We’ve launched People in Photos, a new feature that will help put a face to the Flickrverse and enable you to highlight members that you’ve photographed in a whole new way. People in Photos lets you add a member to a photo, find photos of people you know, and manage which photos you’re in. Huzzah!

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Plug1 of the San Francisco photo blog WHAT IM SEEING has just outed himself as Troy Holden and has joined forces with Brad Evans, Stuart Dixon and Julie Michelle to launch the new group photo blog Caliber. Congratulations guys, it looks great!

Our subject matter will focus on The City and its surrounding cities, with the occasional trek across state and international borders.

I should also mention that we are honored to be hosting Caliber on our cloud service.

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Last week Adobe released a free Photoshop.com iPhone App, that allows you to manipulate photos shot with an iPhone and share them on Photoshop.com.

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides a fun, seamless experience to view photos with full-screen previews and edit images with gesture-based editing. Consumers can transform their photos with essential edits like crop, rotate and flip. Users can correct and play with color by adjusting the saturation and tint, enhancing the exposure and vibrancy and converting images to black and white.

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone also offers eye-catching special effects. The Sketch tool helps photos look like drawings, and Soft Focus can give photos a subtle blur for artistic effect. With just one click, users can also apply dramatic changes to the look and feel of their photos with effects such as Warm Vintage, Vignette and Pop. Edits or changes can be undone or redone so users can experiment without the worry of losing the original photo.

Here’s more on the app from Josh Lowensohn (CNET’s Web Crawler) and Thomas Hawk. The Photoshop.com iPhone App can be downloaded from the iTunes store.

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Photojojo, a wondeful newsletter featuring photography tips and projects, has just released a new book “Photojojo! The Book, Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas”, written by Amit Gupta and Kelly Jensen.

Get out of a photo rut, construct a photo mural, make a photo chandelier, create (temporary) photo tattoos, attach a camera to your dog, break the ice at parties with your camera, make a tripod from a bottlecap, craft your own snow globes and photo ornaments, sew a photo messenger bag, wallet, and laptop sleeve …and much, much more! phew.

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Within 48 hours of the incredible dust storm that turned Sydney, Australia orange last week, Derek Powazek had published Strange Light, a magazine featuring beautiful photos of this rare event. The 40 page magazine is available for $6.

Strange light fell over Australia on 23 September 2009. An unexpected dust storm blanketed New South Wales and Queensland, turning everything an eerie shade of amber. At its peak, the storm swept up 140,000 tons of soil per hour. In spite of the worst dust storm in 70 years, intrepid photographers ventured outside to document what was happening to their homes, neighborhoods, and country. This is what they saw.

Derek describes the process of how he published the magazine using the print-on-demand service MagCloud. His project was recently featured in TIME Magazine.

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photos by Thomas Aylett

Thomas Aylett shot some amazing photos of a massive dust storm that turned Sydney, Australia orange this morning. There are more great photos of the storm on The Big Picture and Tom Coates created a Flickr gallery of dust storm photos.

UPDATE: Derek Powazek has published a magazine featuring photos of the storm: “Strange Light, Photos From the Great Australian Dust Storm”.

via Coudal Partners

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photos by Geoffrey Ellis

My friend and fellow San Francisco photographer Geoffrey Ellis is currently the featured artist on 20×200, which is selling two of his limited edition prints.

I love junk. And since I’m not allowed to bring any more into the house, I now photograph it. My project, Horses, Dolls, and Other Junk, pays homage to items in flea markets, junk shops, record shops, second-hand stores and personal collections. Across seemingly disjointed images of old toys, decaying photographs and porn that was once hot, a greater picture of unpolished America emerges.

I document these once-majestic items in their limbo. At one time shiny and new, these things are now only perfect to me in their current environment: inside a glass case, on a flea market tarp or on a pegboard shelf. These are things that have seemingly lost all value, with a price crudely written on a jagged patch of masking tape. Items once loved, or once mass-consumed, waiting for a new owner, and forlornly seeking a new home.

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For their latest mission, Improv Everywhere installed a temporary photography studio on a random NYC subway car to take photos for a imaginary yearbook of riders.

photo by Katie Sokoler

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Barbara Traub has been shooting photos of Burning Man since 1994. Time Magazine did an video interview with Barb about her experiences photographing the event.

In 2006 Barb published a book of her Burning Man photography “Desert to Dream: A Decade of Burning Man Photography”.

Time also posted a video about “5 Things Cities Can Learn from Burning Man”.

I’m not sure why Time’s video embeds are so small, I’ve asked them about it.

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Swoon gallery by Hryck

Flickr has just launched their new Galleries feature where you can create online galleries using up to 18 public photos or videos from Flickr users.

For whatever you find interesting, fascinating, or mind-blowing on Flickr, galleries are a way to curate up to 18 public photos or videos of your fellow members into one place. It’s an opportunity to celebrate the creativity of your fellow members in a truly unique way around a theme, and idea or just because.

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photo of Green Day at DNA Lounge by John Adams

“A Disorderly House” is a new book featuring five years photos by John Adams documenting San Francisco’s legendary club DNA Lounge. Proceeds from the sale of the book go to the DNA Lounge Legal Defense Fund to help their battle with the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) which is trying to shut down the DNA Lounge.

For more than five years, John Adams has photographed events at the DNA Lounge, chronicling many national and local acts such as Green Day, New Model Army, The Birthday Massacre, and Halou.

Over 150 full color photos from 70 events fill this book, which contains a behind the scenes look at the flier creation process of R. Black, a special backstage section, and coverage of the Hubba Hubba Review burlesque show.

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Flickr has just released a new native iPhone app. The interface has improved quite a bit over Flickr’s mobile website, which was already pretty good. You can even shoot photos and upload them directly to Flickr from the app.

via Daring Fireball

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EFF directs our attention to the Balsa Man photo policy which claims all rights to all thumbnails of the event. Touché my friends.

See Previously: Balsa Man 2009, A Tiny Version of Burning Man

via Hugh D’Andrade

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photos by Neil Girling

Neil Girling has been shooting some amazing photos of Burning Man 2009. He does a great job of capturing the atmosphere out there. Here’s the full set on Flickr.

via Affinity on the Burning Blog

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guest post by Simone Davalos

The Wisconsin Historical Society has a great archive of vintage circus photos, a visit from the ghosts of circus past:

Trapeze artist Erma Ward by H. A. Atwell Studio

Vintage photos of jolly things like circuses always strike me as a little creepy. It could be the memento morii aspect, a philosophical meditation on time passing and the joys of today being subsumed by the ruins of tomorrow. Or perhaps it’s a call to a simpler time, nostalgia for the allure of the mysterious world that carnies and show people inhabited, the excitement of getting just a glimpse of that sordid existence, free from the mundane, signified by the sudden appearance of the circus parade on Main Street of small-town America.

Toto the Clown with children by Angus B. McVicar

Or it could be the clowns. Yeah, actually, I would have to say it’s definitely the clowns.

via Ephemera Assemblyman & the inestimable Adam Koford

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Canon has just announced their new EOS 7D DSLR camera. It features a 18MP sensor, a 19-point AF system, shoots up to 8 fps and includes 1080p Full HD video. The retail price is $1699.00, placing it between the 50D and the 5D Mark II.

The EOS 7D boasts significant EOS advancements including a completely new 19-point Autofocus system, a new Canon iFCL Metering System (Intelligent Focus, Color, Luminance) and a new Intelligent Viewfinder. An 18-megapixel Canon CMOS sensor and Dual DIGIC 4 Imaging Processors fuel the EOS 7D’s 14-bit A/D data conversion and its ability to freeze fast motion in high-resolution with eight fps continuous shooting up to 126 Large JPEGS using a UDMA CF card, positioning this camera for the studio as well as the sideline. The EOS 7D captures beautiful low-light images with or without a flash, at occasions such as a dance recital or wedding reception, thanks to a wide range of ISO speed settings from 100-6400 (expandable to 12,800). In addition to its new still capture capabilities, the EOS 7D features Full HD video capture at 1920 x 1080 resolution with selectable frame rates of 24p, 25p or 30p. Native 24p recording helps videographers achieve a more cinema-style look for their footage without the need for post-processing.

DP Review has posted a hands-on preview of the 7D.

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