The Best Of The Best Photographs Of 2019

Hubble’s Latest Portrait of Saturn

The new year is a wonderful time to look at great photographs!

Dozens of media outlets collect their best from the past year.

You’ll find links to the best of the best below.

Enjoy!

Time’s 2019 Top 100 Photos
The New York Times Year In Pictures 2019
CNN 2019 Year In Review
CNN’s Best Travel Photos Of 2019
Bloomberg’s Year in Pictures 2019
Bored Panda’s 30 Most Powerful Press Photos Of 2019
Magnum’s Pictures Of The Year 2019
Top AP Photos Of 2019
New York Post’s Best Photos Of 2019
The Guardian’s Best Photographs Of 2019
The Guardian’s A Decade In Pictures 2010-2019
The Atlantic top 25 News Photos Of 2019
The Atlantic The Most 2019 Photos Ever
The Atlantic Photos Of A Decade 2010-2019
Reuter’s Best Photos Of 2019
CBS News Best Photos Of 2019
World Press Photo 2019 Contest Winners
Agora World Photography Competition 2019 Winners
My Modern Met
The Best New Yorker Photography Of 2019
National Geographic
Gizmodo’s Best Wildlife Photos Of 2019
Audubon’s 2019 Photography Award Winners
Business Insider’s Best Wildlife Photos Of 2019
Science’s Favorite Photos Of 2019
Sports Illustrated’s Best Photos Of 2019
The Guardian’s Best Sports Photography Of 2019
Best Photography Books Of 2019 – I
Best Photography Books Of 2019 – II
 
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What In The World Is Color Psychology ?

Flypaper Textures Autumn Painterly Collection Texture for artwork and photography from Flypaper Textures
Color psychology is the study of how color affects human behavior. It’s a long-standing, field used in art, design, marketing, sports, medicine, and much more.

Despite its long history and widespread use, there’s a lot more to discover about how color affects people scientifically. Here’s are a few facts that have been scientifically proven.

We see certain colors more quickly than others.

Warm colors are stimulating and cool colors are calming.

A red room feels 10 degrees warmer, while a blue room feels 10 degrees cooler.

Colors can enhance the effectiveness of placebos.

The presence of green speeds healing.

Athletes perform better in certain colors and get penalized more in others.

Clearly, the responses to color are at once physical, psychological, and social, so identifying the strongest contributor(s) to a response(s) is no easy matter. The more social the response, the more likely it is to vary between individuals. Socially, color psychology has many layers – universal, cultural, regional, communal, individual. And then there’s time. Age (as well as gender) can also influence how a person perceives and interacts with color. An era or a moment can become important factors too. It’s complicated but it’s fascinating!
Color affects body, mind, and emotions. Color can be used by physicians to promote physical and psychological health, by businesses to brand identities and influence purchasing decisions, by political movements to propagate values and ideas, and by artists to communicate aesthetics and emotions. Color is a powerful communication tool that can be used to influence perception, mood, and action.

Considering the psychological dimensions of color consciously will give you a greater awareness of the phenomenon of color and improve your ability to communicate with it. Remember, there are shared responses to color and you have your own individual responses to color. Being able to tell the difference can be insightful. This mindfulness is something every visual artist will benefit from.
How will you use color?

Read more on Color Psychology here.
Learn more in my digital printing and digital photography workshops.

The Best Of The Best Photographs Of 2018 Collected

Best Of Best Photographs 2018

The new year is a wonderful time to look at great photographs!

Dozens of media outlets collect their best of the best.

You’ll find links to the best of the best below.

Enjoy!

Pulitzer Prize Winners In Photography 2018

Time Top 100 Photos Of 2018

NY Times The Year In Pictures 2018

Magnum Pictures of the Year 2018

International Photography Awards 2018

World Press Photo 2018

The Guardian Best Photographs 2018

The Atlantic Top New Photos Of 2018

Reuters Pictures Of The Year 2018

The Atlantic Top 25 News Photos Of 2018

Bloomberg The Year In Pictures 2018

NY Times Best Travel Photographs 2018

CNN Best Travel Photos 2018

National Geographic Best Photos Of 2018

Sony World Photography Awards 2018

Lens Culture’s Favorite Photographs Of 2018

My Modern Met Top Photographs From Around The World 2018

Huff Po iPhone Photography Awards 2018

Drone Awards 2018

Audubon Photography Awards 2018

Nikon Small World Photography Winners 2018

The Guardian’s Astronomy Photographer Of The Year Shortlist 2018

Sports Illustrated’s Best Photos of 2018

Car and Driver’s Hottest Car Photos of 2018

Berify’s 11 Famous Portrait Photographers Of 2018

My Modern MET 20 Best Architecture Photos 2018

Best Photography Books Of 2018 – Part 1

Best Photography Books Of 2018 – Part 2

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The Best Photographs Of 2017 Collection

Photos_Best_2017
The new year is a wonderful time to look at great photographs!
Dozens of media outlets collect their best of the best.
You’ll find links to the best of those below.
Enjoy!
Time’s Best Photographs Of 2017
New York Times The Year In Photographs 2017
The World Press Photo Contest Winners 2017
CNN’s The World’s Best Travel Photos 2017
Bloomberg’s 100 Best Photographs Of 2017
Reuter’s Pictures Of The Year 2017
Reuter’s Best Business Photographs Of 2017
Visual Culture’s Most Powerful Moments of Journalism 2017
Sports Illustrated’s Best Photos Of 2017
National Geographic’s Best Photographs Of 2017
The Guardian’s Best Of Wildlife Photography Awards 2017
Audubon’s Photography Awards 2017
CBS Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2017
Nature’s Best Science Images Of 2017
Space’s Most Amazing Space Photographs Of 2017
Popular Science’s Best Picture’s Of The Solar Eclipse 2017
The Huffington Post’s Best iPhone Photographs Of 2017
My Modern Met’s Best Photographs Of 2017
Lens Culture’s 75 Experts Name the Top Photo Books of 2017
Sign up for my newsletter Insights for more digests like this.

Satellite Timelapses Powered By Google


See and learn more about these awesome timelapse videos here.
“Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.
That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.
It took the folks at Google to upgrade these choppy visual sequences from crude flip-book quality to true video footage. With the help of massive amounts of computer muscle, they have scrubbed away cloud cover, filled in missing pixels, digitally stitched puzzle-piece pictures together, until the growing, thriving, sometimes dying planet is revealed in all its dynamic churn. The images are striking not just because of their vast sweep of geography and time but also because of their staggering detail. Consider: a standard TV image uses about one-third of a million pixels per frame, while a high-definition image uses 2 million. The Landsat images, by contrast, weigh in at 1.8 trillion pixels per frame, the equivalent of 900,000 high-def TVs assembled into a single mosaic.
These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it — razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve. It takes a certain amount of courage to look at the videos, but once you start, it’s impossible to look away.”

Encourage Plans To Evolve

Oriens I, Death Valley, California, 1999

I missed the shot(s) the first time. When I got back from Death Valley, a friend said, “Zabriskie Point? Again? Well, I’ll bet you could photograph it in a way that hasn’t been done before.” I knew what she meant, but her comment actually clarified another idea for me.

I had been deeply impressed by the way the light changed mercurially over time, continually transforming the landscape from pre-dawn through early morning. It first lit the blue-gray sky with pale pinks, then turned the far mountains from a cold brown to a hot coral, crept slowly across the valley floor to set Manley Beacon on fire (the crescendo in a magnificent symphony of light that most photographers favor), and continued to create moving pools of light in the foreground during a process that lasts for more than an hour. It is a wonder to behold and to fully appreciate it, one needs to be still and vigilant for some time. Its full impact cannot be found in a single moment. I found it in many.

The solution? Make multiple exposures of the same composition throughout changing passages of light and then blend them together to create the impression of an extended moment in time.
I had made exposures of sunrise at Zabriskie Point, but I hadn’t made the ones I needed now. I had to go back. It took a year and a half. Knowing that so many unexpected things often happen, I prefer to make flexible plans, so I wondered if I would return for an idea that ultimately wouldn’t work. I envisioned glorious light in every layer of the landscape. As I began making the exposures, I realized there was a flaw in my plan. If I selected the ‘best’ light in every area of the picture, all areas would demand equal attention. There would be no contrast. The final image needed shadow just as much as it needed light. I persisted, making exposures, without moving the camera for more than an hour, of every significant change in light – and shadow. My original plan was useful but it needed to be modified as it was executed based on specific conditions, new information, and insight. To succeed, I had to listen not just what was in my head but also to the place and the process.

Later, as I looked at my transparencies, the final solution presented itself. This new solution even highlighted my feelings about the place more strongly than my original idea. The result, different from my initial conception but consistent with my intention, achieves a dramatic lighting effect never before seen at one time. Yet, throughout time, a similar sequence of experiences has been witnessed countless times by so many.

The light on the foreground is unaltered, or to be more accurate, I should say is faithful to the transparencies that recorded it. The separate portions have not been modified substantially, nor were they modified unequally – there has been no dodging and burning. Instead, the light has been reorchestrated with time, faithfully representing the existing light(s) but changing what can be seen in a single moment.

Nothing in the foreground, midground, or background has been added or removed. The sky, however, is an addition from another location. I found the smaller sliver of sky contained in the original exposures made the composition cramped. It lacked the vast sense of space found in the desert. The sky had in fact, been the first indicator of the presence of the coming light, making a thousand transformations before its arrival. But the sky that morning was not particularly noteworthy. I could have spent a lifetime waiting for the perfect sky. I chose instead to incorporate another sky from another location that supported both the composition and the light. This sky I altered dramatically, both in tone and color. I did so to expressively complement the drama of the light below, to support it and not detract from it. While the lower half of the image is a matter of resynchronization, the upper half is a matter of recontextualization.

Neither method (resynchronization or recontextualization) yields a classically objective document. However, the results of their application may yield artifacts that are truer to our experience of events than traditional photographic practices. If applied in specific ways, they can represent certain aspects of events more faithfully, such as the passage of time.

Making this image changed the way I think about and experience the essential elements of photography – light and time.

How many ways can thinking more predictively about change aid your creativity?
How many new ways can you think about the fundamentals of your medium?
How can planning increase your creative success?
What can you do to encourage your plans to evolve?

Read more The Stories Behind The Images here.

How To Find Time For Meditation


You can find time for meditation without changing your schedule. Simply perform your daily activities with your full attention. While you’re doing them, do and think nothing else. (This is much easier said than done. It takes practice!) This is meditation in action!

How much time can you find for this kind of meditation?
Find out by listing the time you spend doing the following activities daily.

____ showering
____ exercising
____ eating alone
____ walking to a place or activity
____ traveling to and from work
____ total
____ Multiply this by 5 to find the number of minutes weekly.

This figure is with weekends off. More time can be found on weekends.

____ Multiply this figure by 50 to find the number of minutes annually.

This figure is with vacations off. More time can be found on vacations.
In addition, there are some times that are easier than others to find moments for meditation.
Add these to your totals to find out how much of a difference they can make.

____ Waking up
____ Going to sleep
____ Breaks
____ Waiting (for someone or something) This last one is extraordinary!

What other times can you think to find for meditation?

Even if you choose to meditate in less than half of these cases – that’s a lot of time!

Think of these types of meditation not as a substitute for longer more formal types of meditation but as ways to extend and augment them.

Find more on Mindfulness here.

How Long Should I Meditate ?

The question “How long should I meditate?” is a question I urge you only to resolve for a given moment and never finally. The question will serve you much better, better than any single answer, if you consider it and reconsider it, over time.
Most questions that start with the word should limit rather than open options, unnecessarily. In point of fact, this question can be misleading, suggesting that there is an ideal duration for meditation, when if fact developing a sensitivity to what different durations contribute to a continuing practice of meditation is much more useful.

Much has been made of longer forms of meditation while only a little has been made of their shorter counterparts. Longer isn’t better than shorter. They’re just different. Both have a role to play in your life. What that role is, is not something to be prescribed by another, rather it is for you to discover.

The question, “How are longer and shorter forms of meditation different?” is a much more useful starting point.
Shorter forms of meditation are more easily practiced regularly and frequently. Practicing this way consistently can more quickly and deeply establish new patterns of attention and awareness. Many people find the downside of shorter meditation intervals is that it may take more time for the mind to settle down and achieve significant depth in an experience. Keep at it. All you need is practice. When the mind knows that it has only a certain amount of time to accomplish something avoidance, procrastination and distraction are often reduced. You can train your mind to change states much more quickly than you might have expected.

Sometimes necessary for more complex forms of meditation, longer intervals of meditation allow for more repetition of a single practice or comparison between different practices in a single session, enabling more direct comparison and contrast as well as immediate refinement with each new cycle. This may lead to a greater depth of experience. It can also lead to different states of awareness, neither better nor worse, but certainly different. I encourage you to experience many states of awareness so that you can make future choices knowledgeably.

You may find that meditating for certain durations of time comes easier for you than others. This is a useful observation. Follow it with another. Ask yourself, “Why?” If it’s working, go with it. At the same time, I’d encourage you to experiment with other durations that may not come as easily. If you do, you’ll make many other useful observations. And, with practice, you’ll develop a more versatile skill set that will offer you many more opportunities to choose from.

This is key. After you finish meditating, follow up with yourself and make some observations about your experiences. Keeping a journal of your experience often facilitates greater clarity about past experiences and future decisions.
Don’t take my word for it … or anyone else’s – and I mean anyone. Confirm observations made by others with your own.
How does your experience of meditation change with changes in its duration? As you become more fully aware of the differences time brings to meditation, you can choose to meditate for an interval that seems right for the moment. After all, it’s your moment.

Find more on Mindfulness here.