Organisers of the British Wildlife Photography Awards have announced the winners of this year's competition.
Called Ocean Drifter, an image of a soccer ball floating in the water with dozens of goose barnacles underneath took out the top prize.
The picture, taken by Ryan Stalker, is reminiscent of viral images of icebergs that reveal the shocking size of the clump of ice under the surface of the water.
"Above the water is just a football," Stalker said of the image, featured above.
"But below the waterline is a colony of creatures.
"The football was washed up in Dorset after making a huge ocean journey across the Atlantic.
"More rubbish in the sea could increase the risk of more creatures making it to our shores and becoming invasive species."
It is unclear where the ball came from or how it came to be in the water.
"I do wonder about the journey the ball has been on," Stalker said.
"From initially being lost, then spending time in the tropics where the barnacles are native and perhaps years in the open ocean before arriving in Dorset."
Stalker took out the overall prize for the competition, which attracted more than 14,000 entries.
From those entries, judges picked out the top two images in each category to be printed in a hardcover coffee-table book.
And the contest organisers are already looking towards next year, with entries now open for the 2025 competition.
Here are the top two photos for each category:
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If you’re lamenting the fact that you used to be able to shoot through a 500-page novel in like a day when you were in middle school and now you can’t, it’s worth bearing in mind that a big part of that is because when you were in middle school, your reading comprehension sucked. Yes, mental health and the stresses of adult life can definitely be factors, but it’s also the case that reading is typically more effortful as an adult because you’ve learned to Ponder The Implications. The material isn’t just skimming over the surface of your brain anymore, and some of the spoons you used to spend on maximising your daily page count are now spent on actually thinking about what you’re reading!
Reading as a kid: “I can tell that this is supposed to be an emotionally moving ending, but I genuinely cannot remember who two-thirds of these characters are.”
Reading as an adult: *reads a paragraph* *pauses* *reads the same paragraph again* *flips back and re-reads the preceding page to make sure you didn’t misunderstand something* *stares into space for ten minutes as the Implications sink in*
added to this: most of us have a whole lot more going on in our lives as adults than we did as kids, in the sense of having a constant background awareness of Tasks That Need To Be Done, which impacts your ability to immerse yourself in a book. so whereas your middle school self could effortlessly devote their whole brain to reading, your adult brain is equivalent to an overtaxed CPU attempting to juggle thirty open tabs across two browsers, an excel spreadsheet, bloatware, security popups, the trial version of adobe, and a song that won’t stop playing because itunes froze
They’ve Always Been Watching Us: From COINTELPRO and Martin Luther King, Jr to the NSA’s surveillance program, the US Government has been keeping a close watch on the American Left for a long time.
by Andy Warner and Jess Parker
(Continue Reading)
Bill Braun is a “trompe l’oeil painter” who creates paintings that look like paper craft, complete with visible paper folds, shadows, and even the “staples” holding the “paper” to the backing. What an incredible illusion. And I always enjoy an artist who is reticent to give an artist statement or explain their work:
I don’t like to give an artist statement because it undoes the premise of my work, trompe l’oeil painting. Literally from the French, trompe l’oeil means “trick the eye”. An artist’s statement might undo the fundamental aim of convincing the viewer, at least for a moment, that what he sees are actual objects and not a painting. The basic rules of trompe l’oeil painting are that objects are rendered in real scale, and totally within a shallow painted space. This type of painting has always been a minor branch of realist painting, but with a very long history. The Athenian painters Xeuxis and Parrhasios in 5th century B.C. (as told by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History) and Roman murals of the 2nd century A.D., 16th century Dutch vanitas painting and the 19th century Philadelphia School painters, Harnett, Peto and Haberle, are examples. Today there are still trompe l’oeil painters around; I am happy to be one of them.
(via tohippo)
Tags: art · Bill Braun · optical illusions
This is a fun ad for the 2024 AICP Awards about the pitfalls of focus-grouping & corporatizing art, featuring an annoyed van Gogh (“How can a painting fail?”) and an even more annoyed Frida Kahlo. (via noah kalina)
Tags: advertising · art · Frida Kahlo · video · Vincent van Gogh