Via Kadrey: “Alice in Waterland” by Elena Kalis.

I have a time machine, apparently, because I got all these Christmas pictures!

God, I’m lazy.

Two short pix sets from before the holiday:

• In which my mother-in-law runs the Marine Corps Marathon AGAIN; and

• In which we are Thankful in Mississippi.

More to come.

This extraordinary blog post from photographer Jeremy Cowart is all over the net, but I saw it at MetaFilter.

Go click. It’s worth your time.

This short GoPro film documents Kevin Richardson’s relationship with, among other things, wild lions in South Africa. They’re very happy to see him, on the order of the old Christian the Lion videos; they run up to him and want to snuggle. I’m sure his science is dodgy, but the video is still fantastic.

We here at Heathen care, which is why we’re pointing out this picture of Idris Elba and Janelle Monae, which contains a powerful distillation of pure awesome.

Know who Eero Saarinen is? Maybe not. But you know his designs.

(Mrs Heathen: don’t miss this.)

Not sure how this happened. Just last year, she was five.

Anyway: here.

Robert Ellis at Discovery Green.

“A Documentation of the Annual Spectacle of Exuberance Commemorating the Anniversary of the Birth of His Holiness Carl Ludwig IV.”

I may have amused myself with the captions.

• Bats y Kirsts y Bridges
• Ellybelly!
• Nitetime with JZ

Enjoy!

Long exposures taken from space are even cooler.

This year’s trip had two phases:

• NIECESES; and
• SEA MONKEYS

Enjoy.

Here’s a pic I took at a minor league baseball game in Louisville.

Olympus OMD E-M5 w/ Lumix 14mm. 1/80 sec @ f/4, ISO 500.

We fell behind. Sue us.

• A few fun bits from the Steampunk Ball portion of Comicpalooza, with Abney Park. The lights were my nemesis!

• Free Press Summerfest, which is mostly Ume.

• In accordance with regulations, we now provide photos of NEW KITTENS.

Q. E. D.

Of general interest, perhaps, are pictures of The Joy Formidable playing at Fitzgerald’s earlier this month.

Of more narrow interest are deeply joyful pictures of Frank and Hadleigh’s wedding weekend in Jackson, which was SO SOUTHERN.

(Heathen Nation: “How Southern was it?”)

Well, I’ll tell you: It was so southern that the officiant was a blood relative of Flannery O’Connor.

Finally, because if I don’t include this, someone will complain: one more pic of Joy.

This set of color shots from 1939-43 is completely stellar.

Thanks, Rick!

Fortunately, someone else DID say that. And they took pictures.

h/t: Triple-F

This Tumblr is full of images found in the National Geographic archives. Enjoy.

Jonathan Coulton is using a picture I took on his home page today, in his post about the cruise:

Go me!

That tiny frog hates you.

Mefi.

It’s rather a bigger set than I usually post, but we were gone for a whole week: Pictures from JoCoCruiseCrazy 3.

Via MeFi, we find this promo of a somewhat intense encounter with a polar bear. His real-time narration is a bit breathless, but then again he IS being investigated by a giant bear who would like to eat him.

That said, White House photographer Pete Souza’s best of 2012 is a great set of photos. Enjoy.

SI’s 100 best ever sports photos rundown is pretty great.

Because I am me, my top ten photos from 2012 actually includes thirteen shots. Deal with it.

Look, pix from Mississippi!

Alessandro Della Bella put together some pretty amazing time lapse shots from atop a couple of mountains in eastern Switzerland. Go. Watch.

These dental mannequins ask WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

Canon: State the nature of the problem?

Photographer: Well, I was in Africa, and a lion borrowed by 5D.

Go here, to the Atlantic’s first installment of 2012 in photos, and scroll down, immediately, to photo number 19:

Julian, a two-month old pet monkey, bites the ear of Kan, a transvestite performer, backstage at the Tiffany’s Show in Pattaya, 150 km east of Bangkok.

NatGeo’s contest is in again; the second batch of their winners is particularly fine. The bat shot (#22) and the one of the owl (#50) are really, really great.

AWESOME.

Two Star turned ten. There were pictures. Enjoy.

(Also: related content.)

This tab has been open for a while, so I’m not sure where it came from, but the astronaut gave a 30-ish minute talk at Luminance 2012 about the challenges and awesomeness of shooting in space.

It’s worth your time. For serious. Fun fact: hard drives fail quickly in zero-gravity, and nobody (to Pettit’s knowledge) has figured out why, so they transmit the raw files back to the ground as quickly as they can.

For more Pettit, check out his blog or his Flickr account.

But I did throw this up on the intarwubs, just to amuse myself and a few other people. Shot with the Olympus still camera, which is sort of amazing, really.

Observe my 2012 photo folder:

The top box encloses the 12 events between June and early July wherein I took pictures.

The bottom box starts when I bought a new camera (to replace the one stolen in early September), and encloses the 20 events between early July and late October.

As should be obvious, I’m still pretty darn happy with the Olympus.

I liked these better as black and white.

The triumphant return of JW Americana, with photos by yours truly.

The Jackson niece just turned five. There are pictures.

This new camera I picked up has made me pretty happy. I’m sure I’m leaving a little on the table vs. a DSLR, but the size more than makes up for it.

But that doesn’t mean I’m entirely pleased, and here’s why: Every piece of documentation for the Olympus refers to it as having a USB port. It ships with a cable that looks like USB, too, and sports two ports that look, at first glance, like one is probably micro- or mini-USB.

I happened to use the supplied cable the first couple times I downloaded pix, so I didn’t actually notice that there was anything weird until this weekend.

When I was out of town.

I hadn’t bothered to take the actual Olympus cable with me because, as a pretty seasoned traveller, I keep a couple spares in my “travel kit” that live in my bag all the time.

It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that I realized I had a problem. The ports on the Olympus may technically be a variant of USB and not just some goofball “fuck you port” from Olympus, but the end result is the same: you can’t buy a cable for this camera at Best Buy or Target. You have to use the fancy CB-USB6 cable.

This sin is compounded by the fact that Oly seriously downplays the incompatibility of the supplied faux-USB cable; it’s just called a “USB cable” in all documentation, and sports a normal USB tip on the computer end. Only DEEP in the manual (supplied only on PDF) does it state that users should only use the supplied cable. Cute.

Here’s the news, Olympus: People in 2012 have an expectation of easy connectivity. Pretty much everything has a normal USB port on it now. That’s how shit should work. The era of needing to keep up with dozens of different cables for one’s devices is past, and thank God for it. Using this connector today is complete bullshit, and represents a giant fucking step backwards. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

It also makes me a whole lot less excited about my new camera. I feel a little duped, to be honest. So, you know, fuck you for that, too.

This is mostly a camera experiment.

In the years since I bought my old camera, the game changed a bit. The Rebel didn’t shoot video at all, but now basically every reasonable camera system shoots HD video really, really well — entire movies and TV shows have been shot with the now obsolete Canon 5D Mk II, for example.

Now, to do video at a professional level, you need to control lots of other factors (chief among them sound and lighting), but the core ingredients are there, which is pretty rad.

As an experiment, I shot this clip (1:10) of one of Amanda Palmer’s opening acts, a sax duo called Ronald Reagan who bill themselves as “Boston’s Premier 80′s Pop Saxophone Duo”. The focus drifts a little (operator error), but overall I’m totally shocked by the clarity. I was standing in a scrum of people on the floor at Fitz, holding the camera over my head to get a better angle. I mean, seriously, this is amazing.

Anyway, here it is.

I also grabbed a couple other clips, but this was the best of the lot. One is plagued much more by the focus drift issue, and the other was during an all-hands-on-deck finale of “Careless Whisper,” which was played at eleven, so the mic got a bit overloaded. But this one’s a good example of what this little camera can do.

I took the new tiny camera with me to the Amanda Palmer show last night at Fitzgerald’s. I took a few pix.

The little Oly did VERY well, though I need to learn a bit more about keeping the focus constant when shooting video. It also appears I’m gonna need that battery grip (or just another battery), because I only got to about 450 shots before it was done for the night. I got super spoiled with the Rebel, which would shoot for days, but if this is the main drawback I encounter, I’ll be TOTALLY cool with it.

All shots with the Olympus M.Zuiko 45/1.8, which turns out to be a GREAT lens. It’s not the equal of the Leica 25/1.4, but for things like this it’s perfect.

Writer and photographer Richard Kadrey provides 1,000 words on the subject.

(Btw, that link is SFW, but the rest of Mr Kadrey’s Flickr may not be.)

Other than some neat pix of Mrs Heathen and the cats, this set is kinda thin, but here it is anyway.

Interesting note for the photo-geeks in Heathen Nation: the stolen Rebel had a top ISO of 1600. The new hotness, an Olympus E-M5, shoots at ISO 25,600; the pix of Sen. Wiggins are examples.

No, seriously.

In her younger years, it appears Christina Hendricks trended goth.

Dolphins. That’s what.