Saturday, 9 April 2016

All aboard... let's fly!

These satellite photos were collected by Benjamin Grant in a study to illustrate the impact humans have on nature, seen from an unusual viewpoint. We're going to take a breathtaking tour around the world:

1. Valparaiso, Chile


2. Tulip fields, Netherlands


3. Melrose Park, Fort Lauderdale, Florida


 4. Complicated road system, just outside Madrid, Spain


5. Snails Pass, in the Andes, on the Chilean side of the border with Argentina


6. Blue evaporation ponds at a potash mine in Moab, Utah


7. Makati City, one of the 16 cities that constitute Manilla, capital of The Philippines 


8. Bourtange is a star shaped fort in the Netherlands 


9. The Grande Dixence dam in Switzerland is the highest gravity dam in the world, at 935 feet


10. Agricultural development in Austria


11. New data reveals that China burns 17% more coal each year


12. L'Eixample district of Valencia, in Spain


13. Victoria Falls, on the Zambezi river, between Zambia and Zimbabwe


14. The village of Espel in the Netherlands is home to 774 inhabitants


 15. Oil field service ships sit off the coast of Borneo


16. Nishinoshima is a volcanic island 940km south of Tokyo, Japan


17. We finish our tour in Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia

Friday, 8 April 2016

Pirouette's clever trick

I've been trying to capture this moment for quite a while. Last night I finally succeeded and here she is, opening Peter's bedroom door. Watch how she uses her back foot to lower the handle.


Thursday, 7 April 2016

Taking a closer look...

Canadian photographer Waldo Nell took a very close look at something very beautiful and photographed it through a microscope, with magnifications varying between 10x and 40x. The results are breathtaking. The final photo is not by him. I included it to reveal the subject of Nell's images.












Wednesday, 6 April 2016

This is me, in five cute cartoons

I'm a confirmed night owl. I got it from my dad and I think mornings suck!






Monday, 4 April 2016

So... we bought a lizard

Haha! It's a cast iron lizard, and he now lives permanently on our wall. Pirouette is a great fan of lizards and tried to catch this one. She was very disappointed when she found out how hard he is and how he wouldn't budge. The weather is getting warmer and very soon she'll start bringing us gifts of live lizards, fortunately much smaller than the cast iron one!



[Our pictures are always crooked. Grrrr!]

Saturday, 2 April 2016

A different take on the surreal

These paintings, by Brazilian artist Cláudio Souza Pinto, are intriguing, colourful and quite theatrical. I spent ages observing some of the quirky details and decided that I like them. That's why they caught my eye in the first place!







Here's Cláudio at work:


[I love it when I find pictures of the artists. Sometimes they can be quite surprising...]