K. Nicole Kindred – Sustainability Consultant

My most recent photo project – a humorous look at our obsession with new products and technology.

I first thought of it when I didn’t have TV and started laughing at the idea of putting up an iPod instead. I thought it was funny.

After viewing the greatest nature images of all time, head over to the Flickr blog to check out some dangerously cute photos. These are pictures of foxes, skunks, bears, and other ‘dangerous’ animals before they are all grown up.

Caleb Charland is a Maine-based photographer who combines a love of scientific experiments and photography. His artwork combines his scientific curiosity with a constructive approach to making pictures.  By utilizing everyday objects and fundamental forces, Caleb illustrates his own experiences with wonder.


Some examples of his work can be seen below. For more examples, please visit his website. 

Source: PetaPixel

Happy 2010!

I thought I’d start off my first post of the new year by sharing some amazing photographs by Clark Little.

Clark Little is a surfer and photographer based in Hawaii. In 2007, Clark discovered his ability and passion to capture the extraordinary beauty of the shorebreak. With his shorebreak surfing experience in mind, Clark grabbed a camera, jumped in the ocean, and starting snapping away recording the beauty and power of Hawaiian waves for all to enjoy.

“Clark’s view” is a unique view of the waves from the inside out that most people would only be able to experience safely on land while viewing one of Clark’s photos.

Read more at View from the Vortex on the Sierra Club’s website.

Bangladeshi born photographer, Munem Wasif, has created a set of photographs that give insights into the harships faced by the people of Satkhira. The rise in salinity has been caused by a shift from traditional agriculture to commercial shrimp farming. The latter can generate a lot of money for a fortunate few, but for most, its consequences are disastrous. Once-fertile land turns to brackish water and local people lose access to drinking water and their livelihoods.

The image above captures the daily routine of Shajhan Shiraj and his brothers as they drag their boats across the mud in a three hour journey to collect fresh water. Similar journeys are becoming more frequent across the region as accessible drinking water becomes increasingly hard to obtain.

In A tale of lost paradise: Climate refugees, Wasif has put together a series of photographs which aim to tell stories of people who have lost their livelihood and way of living due to climate change. In the last 10 years, farmers have had to disassemble and move their tin-and-bamboo houses five times to escape the encroaching waters of the huge Brahmaputra River in Kurigram. This river is swollen out of all proportion by severe monsoon that scientists attribute to global warming and melting ice in the Himalayas. Bangladesh, with a population of 140 million people all crammed into an area slightly smaller than the state of Illinois, is a target of the most vulnerable to climate change.

Ref: New Scientist

The Guardian online recently posted a gallery of glaciers around the world. As temperatures rise due to climate change, glaciers are retreating at unprecedented rates. Some ice caps, glaciers, sea ice and even an ice shelf have disappeared altogether in this century and many more are retreating so rapidly that they may vanish within a matter of decades.

National Geographic also has their own gallery, Climate Change: Pictures of a Warming World.

By looking at historic photos, it becomes very clear that the glaciers are melting very quickly. The Guardian gallery shows enormous differences in just the past year as seen in their pictures of the French Alps near Chamonix.

However, this is by no means new information, in 2006 NPR released a story of Alaska’s melting glaciers, providing a comparison of pictures taken 70 years ago to the glaciers in 2006.

The pictures are not only stunning, but also outline how climate change is having a real impact on our planet.

A couple months ago I wrote a blog about Gary Braasch’s photography.

Gary Braasch has recently completed the book EARTH UNDER FIRE: How Global Warming is Changing the World. Through vivid pictures and compelling narrative, the book tells of his extraordinary 8-year journey around the world to document changes already underway to people, communities and ecosystems. The book promises to offer an upbeat and intelligent account of how we can lessen the effects of our near-total dependence on fossil fuels using technologies and energy sources already available.

Featuring more than one hundred photographs — including dramatic before-and-after comparisons — EARTH UNDER FIRE records species, cultures, and entire ecosystems at risk due to receding glaciers, eroding coastlines, rising sea levels, and thawing permafrost. The powerful, eye-opening images show glacial retreat from the Alps to the Andes, coastal erosion threatening native villages from Alaska to Bangladesh, and other direct evidence that global warming is happening right now.

April 22 marks the annual celebration of Earth Day. GeoEye is one of the premier providers of satellite and aerial imagery. Headquartered in Dulles, Va., GeoEye is commissioned by various defense, intelligence, urban planning and environmental monitoring groups to keep an eye on Earthly developments.

GeoEye’s satellites have captured the millions of people who were in DC on Inauguration Day to erupting volcanoes and well known geological features such as Uluru in Australia.

Check out their Natural Features Gallery for some amazing shots of our earth!

Learn more about Earth Day and activities around the planet at the Earth Day Network.

There are 28,000 42-gallon barrels in this image. This is roughly the amount the United States consumes every two minutes.

Chris Jordan uses photography to illustrates the staggering scale of human consumption. His series Running the Numbers, is a series of photographs that look at statistics in contemporary American culture.

Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption), etc. While statistics can normally feel abstract and make it difficult to connect with and make meaning of of numbers lik 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, 2.3 million Americans in prison or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month, Chris Jordan’s pictures provide a visual interpretation.

The picture above depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

Greater detail:

New Scientist has selected some of these images for a slide show on their website with links to related articles for more information. It is called Gallery: Putting human consumption into perspective.

Gary Braasch is an environmental photojournalist who uses images to create important documentation about nature, environment, biodiversity and global warming.

The Discovery Channel has put together a “Hot Spot Slide Show” of Gary’s work documenting climate change. The slide show hosts thought provoking images as well as information on how scientists are confronting climate change. Visit the slideshow at discovery.com.

The photographs offer a beautiful and informative look at the global affects of climate change.