This beach in Fort Bragg, California, has for decades been a dumping ground for local residents disposing of everything from household appliances to cars. In the 60’s the North Coast Water Quality Board closed the area for a series of clean-ups to reverse years of pollution. Large objects were easily taken away, however millions of tiny shards of glass proved too costly to remove. I’m amazed at how nature has found its own way of restoring ‘Glass Beach‘ to its natural beauty, shaping and smoothing the glass into a bed of sparkling gems.

More images at ThisColossal.com (http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/08/glass-beach/)

Ulric Colette’s seamlessy merged portraits explore the differences and similarities between family members. I also find this a really interesting insight into how much our faces and bone structures change with age, and just how different we all are when you look really closely – even twins.

See more examples on Ulric Colette’s website.

THE END OF GEOGRAPHY from Tatiana Plakhova on Vimeo.

The internet has, by some, been hailed as the end of geography as we know it. Physical distance and location may be becoming ever less significant in society, but the internet has redefined the concept of geography, with its own maps, sites, locations, routes and networks.

The End of Photography, a thought-provoking film and photography project by Tatiana Plakhova, explores the concept of new and old geography.

Richard Mosse has a fantastic body of work, including this great project from the Congo.

Jean Malek’s website shows that great visual impact doesn’t have to be at the expense of simple usability. In fact I think the useability vs design debate is really a bit old hat now, they should just go hand in hand. (Designers and developers unite, it’s a love in!) Anyway, we really like the way they collide on this site. It’s a striking way for him to display his work and the way the menu icon follows your cursor round the screen means you never get lost.

There is also the thoughtful inclusion of quick links to get directly to the previous/next piece of work. Very nice…

How about ‘gigapixels’? All seventeen of them!

This image of Glacier Point is, apparently, the largest known stitched image. Made from 2046 images, it weighs in at a whopping 96.5GB, and covers 59ft x 22ft when printed at 300dpi.

Check out the images and be sure to use the ‘zoomify’ mode to view them. It’s just amazing how much detail has been captured. I could spend all day looking at them!

We’ve seen lots of examples recently of the ‘depth-of-field’ shots that make real life look like small scale models, but I’ve never seen it as a time-lapse animation before… and it’s amazing! See it in fullscreen here

A big thank you to Nick Dunmur for coming in and hosting the last Creative Forum – the experienced photographer had a very interesting take on where the modern photographer fits in to this ever-changing world of stock images and CGI. We touched on some subject matters that provoked a great deal of discussion and could have easily carried on all morning, unfortunately there was work to be done! Find out more about Nick here