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The Top 50 'Pictures of the Day' for 2011 Every day at 5pm the Sifter posts the Picture of the Day. Below you will find a collection of the Sifter’s Top 50 from 2011. It’s hard to imagine the year is almost over, time seems to fly faster each successive year so it’s fun to take a moment and look back at the year that was. iceland » one big photo Random photo Submit your photo Stumble Thru Compact Cameras for Fashion Bloggers - IFB - Independent Fashion Bloggers Image by Geishaboy500 In my last post I covered three tech tips for blog photos and I noticed that I received a great many comments regarding the use of cameras other than DSLRs. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: in this day and age you simply do not need a DSLR to take great images, especially not if you only intend to post your images online.

The 2012 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition winners Australian based photographer Martin Pugh has claimed the top prize in the Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition for the second time, after originally winning the accolade back in 2009. As well as securing the £1,500 top prize, his image takes pride of place in the exhibition of winning photographs opening at the Royal Observatory Greenwich on 20 September. Pugh impressed the judges in this year’s competition with the depth and clarity of his winning shot depicting the famous Whirlpool Galaxy (M51). The image combines incredible detail in the galaxy’s spiral arms with the faint tails of light that show M51’s small companion galaxy being gradually torn apart by the gravity of its giant neighbour; a closer look also reveals more distant galaxies beyond.

The Top 25 Photo Galleries of 2011 Dec 29, 2011 Below you will find a collection of the Sifter’s top 25 galleries posted in 2011. Often the most popular posts on the site, the galleries not only take our readers around the world, but back in time as well. Some galleries even show us the farthest reaching points of the Cosmos and the thriving microscopic world invisible to the human eye.

Art Renewal Center® Scholarships and Programs with On-Line Museum HE DEATH KNELL OF THE WESTERN EUROPEAN classical-subject tradition could be heard from many directions. It was sounded in scientific "natural selection", religious "higher criticism," economic "international depression" and in militarism's "total war." These demoralizing effects conspired to kill Greco-Roman classical-subject painting. Most of all its demise came through the challenge of the New Art which emphasized anti-idealist vocabulary. The idealistic discourse of Classicists of the first third of the century seemed effete or enervated in the face of these blast-furnace onslaughts. It was the relentless attack from these Modernist forces which overwhelmed entrenched Classical and academic realism.

Dazzling Fireflies Display The magic of fireflies caught by long exposure photographs taken in Japan. As the original source is the Japanese language website Digital Photo Blog we don’t have a lot of information about the photographers, but it seems that these photos were taken in the rainy months of June and July in Maniwa, Japan in recent years - the most recent photos are dated 2011, the earliest 2008. We’ve found some information – and more prosaic photos – about Japanese fireflies at the Tokyo Hotaru website; hotaru is the Japanese word for fireflies.

National Geographic Photo Contest 2011 - In Focus National Geographic is currently holding its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30. For the past nine weeks, the society has been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to vote for them as well. National Geographic was kind enough to let me choose among its entries from 2011 for display here on In Focus. Gathered below are 45 images from the three categories of People, Places, and Nature, with captions written by the individual photographers. [45 photos]

Awesome pictures from around the world Someone sent me these in a chain email, it was horribly formatted. I also do not know who made the comments, or how accurate they are. I take zero credit in the pictures, I just wanted to compile them nicely for all to see. The world’s highest chained carousel, located in Vienna, the height of 117 meters. Thor’s Well – “the gates of the dungeon.” Incredible Space Pics from ISS by NASA astronaut Wheelock Go Discovery! It was October 23, 2007 at 11:40am EST when I had my first ride to space on Discovery. She’s beautiful… just sad that this will be her last voyage. Looking forward to climbing aboard the flight deck when Discovery arrives at the Space Station in November. (9-23-2010). Incredible Photos from Space: Larry Tanner, NASA. Special thanks: Bethbeck’s blog

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