Sometimes the positioning of the camera is the most important thing
Alexander Alland Untitled (Brooklyn Bridge) 1938
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January 2014 Archives
As an addition to the previous report on the Piaget Altiplano 900p, currently the thinnest mechanical watch in the world, here's a breakdown of the internal architecture
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Apparently Nike needed a bit more than wings
From the New York Times Lively Morgue blog:
Nov. 12, 1939: This photo, published shortly after the start of the Second World War, ran with this caption: "The Winged Victory of Samothrace, another great achievement of the ancient Greek sculptors, packed for removal in accordance with plans for its protection formulated far in advance of the war." A 2009 exhibition at the Louvre showed photos documenting how art was relocated for safety during wartime.
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In 1991 Magdalena Jeelovà took over the Viennese Museum of Applied Art, a ornate neo-Renaissance building in the style of a Florentine Palazzo, for her "Domestication of a Pyramid" Utilizing one of the most antique of architectural forms to overwhelm both the more modern architecture and neo-grecian sculptures that line the colonnade.
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From the exhibition catalogue:
Upon entering the building, the visitor finds himself/herself, surprisingly, in a darkened, curved space: soon he/she discovers that he/she is standing under large, slanted scaffolding. He/she instinctively walks to the right, where there is a way out. When he/she returns to the daylight, he/she finds himself/herself in the Museum hall, standing next to a thirteen-meter high tilted wall covered in red silica sand. The wall slices the inner space of the Museum diagonally across two floors, slashing razor-like through pillars and balustrades up to the ceiling. The wall, tilted at a 45° angle and with a base thirty-five meters long, is a fragment of one side of a pyramid which could continue in the exterior of the Museum building.
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An answer to the often-asked questions about colored diamonds versus other colored precious stones:
Yellow Sapphire Ring (13.96ct, estimate: $15,000-$20,000)
(lot 188)
Yellow Diamond Ring (5ct, estimate: $60,000-$80,000)
(lot 153)
Both are for sale at Sotheby's(see previous) Feb. 4 auction in New York.
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Redoing movie posters seems to be a thing on the internet, however I've rarely seen them done in a style that required such skill and attention to detail as these in the style of Ottoman miniatures by Murat Palta.
| The Godfather | Scarface |
|---|---|
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| Star Wars | The Shining |
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| Kill Bill | |
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From Chopard's (previously mentioned) 2013 Red Carpet collection comes this oak-themed necklace with a diamond and sapphire spider hiding within. The leaves are Tsavorite and most of the rest of the color accents come from fancy-colored diamonds
And a closeup of the spider photographed by Jamie Beck. Unrelated to the jewelry, when people talk about camera lenses having "confusing" or unpleasent bokeh, the background blur of the branch is a good example of what they mean
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I'd love to be rich enough and insane enough to commission a portrait of myself as a corpseless head.
Agostino Carracci (Bologna 1557-1602 Parma) Portrait of Olimpia Luna as Judith and Melchiorre Zoppio as Holofernes
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tcp 0 0 XX.XX.XX.XX:44101 XX.XX.XX.XX:1521 ESTABLISHED That is Java's Oracle driver choosing a source port at random, which is what it does all the time. Only this time the port chosen is used by Java's RMI, so a different app was unable to startup, it failed when trying to bind to port 44101. Of course Oracle connections come and go, so with no user action, the problem went away in about 10 minutes
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Ely and Durham cathedrals
Peter Marlow, a photographer of the storied Magnum agency, recently completed a cycle of photographing all of the Anglican cathedrals in the UK. Originally he was commissioned by the Royal Mail to shoot 6 of them in 2008 for the 300th anniversary of St. Pauls. From that he worked over the next 4 years to shoot all 42 of them, with natural early-morning light, from the entrance looking down the nave. From the large-format negatives large prints, approx 110×85cm, were displayed this past summer at the Wapping Project Bankside and are now available in book form.
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Piaget(previously mentioned) has always taken pride in their ability to make the thinnest possible watch. They lost this crown to Concord's Delerium with the advent of Quartz, but have, in recent years, taken to tilting at the title of "Thinnest Mechanical _____" with some regularity. The new Altiplano 900P, released in time for the brand's 140th birthday is an admirable entry into that competition, at 3.65mm it's currently the thinnest mechanical watch, though not the thinnest mechanical movement. Their solution, which is similar to that of the AP 2870, was to integrate the movement into the case. They have also reorganized components so that parts with required thicknesses, like the balance assembly and the hands, do not overlap but sit side by side. Adding to those architectural changes ultra-thin parts, 0.12 mm for some of the wheels as opposed to 0.20 mm on a standard movement, allowed Piaget to get to the current record.
One problem with ultra-thin watches has always been stiffness, all of the parts have more flex in them than in a normal watch, and this leads to some unusual problems, like the case-flex of the Delerium IV that made it nearly unwearable. Piaget has tried to ameleorate this, at least to a degree, by having the top bridge of the balance wheel the highest part of the movement, so that if the case or crystal flexes inwards, it'll impact a stationary bridge and not the usual victem, the top of the minute hand/canon pinion.
Case is 38mm in diameter and white gold. Power-reserve, another feature that often gets reduced in ultra-thin watches, is a entirely normal 48 hours.
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From a Life Magazine piece on Andreas Feininger comes this 1944 aerial photo of Manhattan's east side.
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