Jackie Calmes of the New York Times tells the story today of my all-time favorite presidential photo. The first time I saw it was while walking through the West Wing to a meeting three years ago. A little black boy touching the head of President Obama. The image was so powerful I stopped in my tracks and inquired about the story behind the photo. As Calmes reports, Jacob Philadelphia had a question for the president of the United States. Read full article > >

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Jonathan Capehart: Photo speaks volumes about Obama and race

Instagram, the photo app, has been sold to Facebook for $1bn. But has it sparked a generic wave of retro-looking snaps?

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Has Instagram made everyone’s photos look the same?

Facebook agrees to buy the photo sharing network Instagram a week after the service launches on Android.

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Facebook buys Instagram for $1bn

Facebook agrees to buy the photo sharing network Instagram a week after the service launches on Android.

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Facebook buys Instagram for $1bn

Friday’s front page carried a photograph marking the 30th anniversary of the crash of Air Florida’s flight 90 into the 14th Street Bridge.  The photo was taken using a high dynamic range. Several readers and journalists have questioned its use. On Saturday, Poynter.org ran a story about the photo and some of the reactions to it. Read full article > >

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Post photography and the use of high dynamic range

Okay, smart cookies: Send us humor we can eat. Well, photos of humor we can eat. Every weekend for almost 19 years, the Style Invitational — The Washington Post’s weekly humor/wordplay contest — has brought readers smart, irreverent wit both highbrow and lowbrow, from haughty to potty. And this week, as the holiday baking season gets underway, we’re hungering for more than the Invite’s usual lists of puns and one-liners: We want something we can sink our teeth into. This week: Cleverly depict a person, event or phenomenon of the 21st century — real history as well as scenes from movies, books, videos, etc. — using edible materials, and send us a photo of your creation. All visible parts of your entry, except a backdrop and a base, must be made of something edible — and we mean people-edible, not your-destructive-dog-edible. (On the other hand, it doesn’t have to be tasty; we’re not eating your photo.) If you’re using a piece of produce or a nut, you don’t have to peel it. Read full article > >

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Week 945: Laugh-baked ideas — the Style Invitational edible-art contest

The girl in the photo is young and lithe, a figure skater in a short blue dress, striking a pose on the ice. She keeps her head high as she arches her back, and her right arm reaches up, like a ballet dancer’s in a Degas painting. But who is she? If Army special agents can determine her identity, they believe they’ll be able to solve a mystery that has hung over Arlington National Cemetery ever since a mass grave was discovered there almost a year ago. Read full article > >

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Identity of Arlington Cemetery remains might rest on Army search for girl in photo

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell says that he’d own up if it were his. Jon Stewart says that he doesn’t remember his old friend being quite all that ! And Anthony Weiner, the in-your-face House member from New York whose alleged waist-down photograph has become the talk of the political parlor, shrank from questions about how the photo happened to be sent from his Twitter account to a 21-year-old college student in Seattle. To think, the long hot summer has just begun. Read full article > >

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The danger in 140 characters

AP Photo/Photography Plus via Williamson Stealth Media SolutionsFormer professional football player Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan in April 2004.

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Pat Tillman’s mother calls for McChrystal’s removal from White House post

Introducing a feature that presents the U.S. as seen by its residents, rather than the typical images shown on postcards or TV news backdrops. See below to learn how to submit a photograph. VENICE BEACH, California – A man naps on the grassy patch that separates the boardwalk from the sand. Blurred in the background is an area where anyone is permitted to spray paint one of several walls with graffiti. The policy has spread to neighboring palm trees. This is the first entry in this recurring feature simply because Venice is home for me at the moment. I hope you’ll send in a photograph taken near where you live. Submission guidelines: email photos to whatamericalookslike@gmail.com – doing so affirms that you hold all rights to the submission, and grants us permission to publish your photo at TheAtlantic.com and in any future collection of What America Looks Like photographs. Be sure to include the city and state where the image is taken, and as detailed a description as you’re willing to offer. Also let us know if you’ve got a photo Web site or if prints of your shot are available for purchase.  Photo credit: image by Conor Friedersdorf .

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What America Looks Like

Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee Chair. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz will succeed former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine as chair of the Democratic National Committee, a move aimed at putting a proven television presence and able fundraiser from a swing state atop the organization heading into 2012.

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Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is new DNC chair

‘X-Men: First Class’ – New Photo Empire has revealed a brand new photo from X-Men: First Class that features our first look at Emma Frost (January Jones) and Hellfire Club leader Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) plotting out all sorts of evil deeds, we presume. Check it out; the film arrives on June 3rd. Hopefully we’ll get a another solid trailer soon. Robocop Reboot May Have a Director Now that things over at MGM are beginning to sort themselves out, the long-planned Robocop reboot can start kicking some dust around again. Word from Deadline is that Elite Squad director Jose Padilha is now being eyed to take over the director’s chair on the film, which was once supposed to be helmed by Darren Aronofsky. Those here in the states may not know Padilha… Read More Read Comments

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Sci-Fi News: New ‘X-Men’ Photo, ‘Robocop’ Reboot Director and Summit’s Zombie Love Story

by Bruce J. Holmes Since the early 1980s, I have had questions about an iconic picture depicting a dramatic, crimson wake vortex. This picture, with which my former NASA colleagues and I have a deep connection, provokes a telling of “the rest of the story.” The picture was taken during a NASA research program titled “Aerial Applications Research.” The red smoke screen through which the airplane flew was produced by igniting smoke bombs inside a length of hardware store gutter pipes (cleverly conceived by one of the researchers on the project). It took weeks of trial and error involving different colors of smoke and waiting for the perfect sky and wind to get the photographic conditions just right. I was standing to the right of the flight path of the Ayers Thrush Commander aircraft when the automated camera system snapped many images per second and the airplane roared by. The heritage of the picture starts under Jimmy Carter’s Administration — not a fact that would leap off the page for most of us. Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, brought to Washington D.C. a person who spent some time at NASA Headquarters, advocating for research that could help farmers with a vexing problem involving aerial applications (or crop dusting in the vernacular). The problem was that the flow behind the aircraft wing disrupts the desired even spread of seeds or chemicals and can carry spray to places that cause trouble (streams, for example). The physics of producing lift with a wing creates an aircraft wake which has a large vortex (tornado) generated at each wingtip. The strength of this vortex increases as aircraft weight increases. The flow from a wingtip of a crop duster picks up the seeds or chemicals and sends them far from the area directly below the aircraft. The strong spinning flow in the vortex can also cause a problem for other aircraft under some conditions. NASA and the FAA had done extensive research beginning in the 1970s and continuing today to understand and predict flow behind transport aircraft to determine safe separation distances (spacing of aircraft). We believed that this research could help the “Aerial Applications Research” program, perhaps, if the physics of the flow behind crop dusters could be understood, predicted, and tamed. Because we see computer images on TV of airplanes the size of counties flying over a map of the U.S., we come to think of the airspace as crowded. In reality, the airspace is not crowded. Instead, the runways and the arrival queue of airplanes lined up to land are crowded. The airplanes are spaced in the queue that keeps each safely following an airplane away from the spinning wake vortex of the previous airplane. Before this picture was taken, the NASA researchers involved pulled together all of the known theory and experimental information about the vortex, with the idea of developing a computer program to predict this flow pattern. (This was in the very early days of computing — think magnetic tape.) Along the way we met with a collection of interesting folks including the holder of a patent for “Distributor Wing Aerial Applications Aircraft.” Here is the original patent. The idea in this patent was to blow air and seed or fertilizer through channels inside the wing and use the vortex to spread the materials on a wider swath. This intriguing concept reached a limited level of fruition in Russia in the form of the Polish-built PZL (Milek) M-15, turbofan-powered agricultural aircraft. Our research led to the work with a startup computational methods company in Princeton, NJ, Continuum Dynamics, Inc., to develop a comprehensive CFD code for predicting where spray and seeds would fly behind the wing of a crop duster. That computer work led to the tests at NASA’s Wallops Flight Research Center, where we took this picture, to prove to ourselves that the computer method worked. It did. In the photo, underneath the flight path, plastic pipes are visible on which we rolled out sticky tape to collect glass beads of varying sizes that were released from movable canisters located under the wing. The results of the testing proved that the computer was an excellent tool for the task of designing spray systems on aircraft. That task resulted in the most famous vortex flow picture of all time (perhaps a little over-stated), shown here . This photo shows up virtually anywhere the subject of wake turbulence, wake vortex, and aircraft wakes is discussed. We never imagined the value of the photo back then. And now, as my fellow Minnesotan, Paul Harvey, used to say, you know “the rest of the story.” Bruce J. Holmes, retired from his NASA career in public sector entrepreneurialism, is now practicing the art in the private sector as CEO, NextGen AeroSciences. Image: NASA Langley Research Center.

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NASA’s Iconic Red Vortex Photo: ‘The Rest of the Story’

I don’t want to set a precedent of becoming a venue for fund-raising appeals. There are too many deserving candidates. But on a one-time basis, the note I received today from Len Edgerly, of the Kindle Chronicles , seems to me so sensible, and so modest in its needs, that it is worth sharing — especially at a moment when many people are thinking about ways to mend the civic fabric. Edgerly writes: > > I’m looking for potential major donors to E-Books for Troops (EB4T), a 501(c)(3) that I co-founded in 2010. It turns out that e-readers are a fantastic technology for support of soldiers in the field, giving them access to virtually unlimited reading material in a lightweight device, for use on duty and for recreation in downtime. Having no military experience myself, I partnered with a former Army artillery officer, Ken Clark, whom I met through my Kindle Chronicles podcast, in order to create EB4T. We have collected tax-deductible donations of cash and used Kindles through our web site, http://EBooksForTroops.org and have so far distributed 20 Kindles to U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our goal for 2011 is to raise $20,000 enabling us to distribute 120 more Kindles to soldiers. I thought you might know of a family foundation or other funder that focuses on support for troops, or perhaps a Kindle enthusiast or two at the Pentagon who might want to contribute and help spread the word.

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A Little Money Can Do a Lot of Good

I have used a lot of different types of social networks. Beginning with several BBSs, I wended my way through ICQ, IRC, email groups, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. If there is a way to connect with people online, I’ve probably tried it. (Except for ChatRoulette: I knew that wouldn’t end well.) So, it was with considerable surprise that I found myself engaged in an entirely new type of behavior while using the photosharing iPhone app, Instagram . It’s a simple service. It allows you to take and share photos with other people through the app. The company’s Stanford-grad founders wanted to solve the ” My mobile photos look lame” problem — and they did. Instagram’s filters make the pictures you take look cooler. Maybe for that reason, it’s attracted a lot of photo people like Laura Brunow Miner, founder of Pictory . And I’ve connected with those of them that I know and I like that. But while I was on vacation with a little time to breathe, I found myself mysteriously drawn (over and over) to the “Popular” tab in the Instagram app. When you click on it, it looks like this: The screen, which apparently aggregates photos that get lots of “likes,” has its flaws. Some subjects do disproportionately well: dogs, cats, pretty girls’ faces, the sky. (I usually tap on the dogs because I am a sucker for that sort of thing.) Also, ridiculous hipster stuff tends to get lots of likes, too (see: the photo of a pair of hip glasses). But I’ve found that none of those sociological details about how people use Instagram interest me; I’m not trying to distill the Instagram experience when I look at the Popular tab. I’m really just finding random users. Then I go through their photo streams to take a peek into their lives. It’s shocking to me that I find this enjoyable. I’ve never been interested in random people on social networks. I always wanted to connect with people I already knew or with whom I had interest-based affiliations. But Instagram is different. Looking at random people’s stuff has become the dominant way that I use the app. Somehow, this cultural voyeurism is just as enjoyable whether the photographer is in Tokyo or the Ukraine or Oklahoma. There is an immediacy to many of the photos that makes you feel like you were really there, as if you’re looking at memories you could have had if you happened to be born somewhere else. Take this user, manjidera. He/she has a cute cat, one of those weird ones with small ears ( a Scottish fold cat perhaps? ) and people love photos of this cat, so they make it to the popular list. Aside from this animal, manjidera seems to be a normal person living in Japan. He/she goes to restaurants and walks around and stuff. I find these walkabouts yield really compelling photos for reasons I can’t quite define. Across languages, geographies, and demographics, the moments that people capture are remarkably similar. Because you sort of know what to expect, the little differences stand out more than in photos where other places seem otherworldly. Think of it like the way Vincent in Pulp Fiction uses the Big Mac’s transformation into the Royale with Cheese to epitomize difference between Amsterdam and L.A. The familiar made slightly unfamiliar can unlock your ability to think about what it would really be like to be somewhere else. Not the Empire State Building but the bathroom in the Empire State Building. Not Tokyo from above but Tokyo at the street-level on somebody’s walk home from work. I don’t know when the novelty of Instagram will wear off. Maybe soon. But it seems possible to me that I might be able to keep up my virtual homestays for a long time. Particularly when users like aldoartoko keep taking beautiful portraits like this one from South Africa. And if *you* need a random person to follow, allow me to suggest jonsnyder. He’s an old San Francisco friend and an amazing photographer. If you ever have the tendency to think that the camera makes the photographer, he will quickly disabuse you of that notion. He is much better with his iPhone than I could ever be with any DSLR.

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Instagram: The App That Made Me Into a Voyeur