Riisitunturi National Park, in Finnish Lapland, is well known for its iconic, snow-laden forests, where trees become “sculptures” under the immense weight of accumulated snow and ice. The phenomenon is known as tykky.
The Mount ZaoSnow Monsters are not real snow monsters. They are an unusual natural phenomenon called juhyo which occurs on Mount Zao in Japan from late December to March. Maries’ Fir trees are evergreen conifer trees indigenous to the central-northern mountain regions of Honshu. They endure blazing summer heat and then bitter winters. Each winter Siberian winds travel across the North Japan Sea and batter the mountain with 6-9 feet of snow which glazes the fir trees with freezing condensation to create these strange creations.
They become a tourist attraction both day via cable car and when illuminated at night.
In the winter, if the conditions are right, you can get a wonderful adventure through some lake-side ice caves. Unfortunately, due to non-existent or unstable ice conditions, the last time you could visit these caves safely was 2015.
Sometimes travel photos get to be sublime. Much better than most influencer photos, Roberta Mazzone captured a wonderful view from Venice’s iconic Hotel Danieli.
The picture gave me a lot of nostalgia of my last visit to Venice. I remember sitting and soaked in almost this same view from the Doge’s palace right nearby. Maybe that’s what’s great about photos like this – they help you recapture the elegance and experience you had when your own photos do not do it justice.
I think the idea of capturing an emotional moment of traveling is much lacking in our influencer/social-media oriented world. Influencer photos seem to be primarily focused on boisterously ‘bragging’ about being in a fabulous place, to give the impression their lives are more fabulous, or even to invoke jealousy. Add to this the lengths and insulting local behavior we read about influencers taking those photos – and it makes these pictures even worse.
Instead, why not capture that feeling of the last day or two of a great trip? Like loving all the things you did but longing to go back home to loved ones. Or the desire to sleep in your own bed again? Or the 3rd day in a new place when the language barrier makes you sit down and take a deep breath to re-collect yourself?
Those are travel photos I think could really make a statement we can relate to – but are much harder to take.
I used a lot of interesting tricks when I was taking landscape photography. You could use a dirty mud puddle to make amazing shots that looked like you were on the beach or overlooking a lake. It works for shooting people too. Epic shots are often all about lighting and focusing on split second shot. A good reminder in the Instagram era where everyone is posting ‘perfect’ pictures.
Looking Glass is now making the Looking Glass Go – a much thinner and mobile version of their glasses free holographic Looking Glass Portrait display. This isn’t new tech, but it is interesting to see people working in the space again.
With their software, you can make your own images and display animated content as well. Viewing angle is about 60 degrees and is created from up to 100 different still images.
It’s not limited to static images. You can even use the Looking Glass API to run this Unity version of Doom on the display and can look around pillars and objects.
Given a single static image and a speech audio clip, VASA-1 is capable of producing lip movements that are synchronized with the audio and capture a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions.
Getting worried you’ll be replaced by AI yet? If this gets perfected (it’s not perfect yet, but the results get better and better each year), then you can pretty much get rid of any ‘talking head’ jobs.
This could also be used to fool people on conference calls where video quality would totally render any minor glitches as unnoticeable or easily ignored as just streaming artifacts.
Just slap the CEO’s face into this, set up a conference call with finance via some very easy phishing, and approve that $1m transfer to your Swiss bank account.
