Dew drop flies

Gros plan!

David Chambon is a French photographer who captures insects covered in hundreds of tiny water droplets.

« Amateur photographer for 10 years, I started with a Panasonic FZ-30 Bridge that made me really love photography. Then I bought my first digital SLR. I started reading on several photo forums and understood the importance of good material and especially good technique! So I learned the basics on the net. Today I am truly passionate about nature and spend my free time face down in the wet grass to capture what mother nature has best to offer. Over time I specialized in wildlife macro photography.» –David Chambon

Sorry for the translation, which is a bit wobbly, and thank you to Google translate.

Lentilles de contact

Morning dew

Mouche

Mouche à m...

Robber fly

Sans titre

The fly

 

Two famous sites (!) have also featured David Chambon's insects covered in water droplets: This is colossal and Enpundit. The selected photos are different from here though. And see David Chambon's flickr gallery page.

Collier de perles

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
he who would search for pearls must dive below.

Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas (1544–1590)

Topographicity

With rudimentary tools, Matthew Cusick reconfigures roads, rivers, highways and municipal transit systems into intertwined landscape works of art.

Born in 1970 and originally from New York USA, the Dallas-based collage artist Matthew Cusick uses the topographical and the temporary, constructing his works from book pages, Folger’s coffee, ink and acrylic on wood and aluminum-based panels.

His intricate style of work is based on the articulate construction of bits and pieces of maps, ultimately revealing well composed and detailed images when viewed from a slight distance.

He draws up extraordinary use and placement of technical outlines of roads, rivers, municipal transit systems and district outlines in his art work, creating a fine collage of art created purely from his strategically assembled map cut outs.

He states that topography (ie the detailed mapping or charting of the features of an area, district or locality) is his primary source of inspiration, as can clearly be seen in his work.

Matthew Cusick describes that his unique style of work revolves around his keenness to catalog, archive and arrange information and then dismantle, manipulate and reconfigure it.


Nida Ezdi @ pelfusion.com…

Motion blurry waterfall

Alex Lenkei -source- 

Brian Auer -source- 

Chris Kavanagh -source- 

ckocur -source- 

ForeverKnight -source- 

Jules3000 -source- 

lauripiper -source- 

martyn smith -source- 

Naimash -source- 

Phillip Evans -source- 

SouthernBreeze -source- 

Zeb Andrews -source- 

Gems on branch

Blue Morpho Butterfly (c. 1864-1865)

Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) was born in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, USA, a small hamlet along the Delaware River.

By 1839 he had painted his first portraits. After two trips to Europe in 1841 and 1848, he became an itinerant artist.

Around 1857 his attraction to landscape painting was growing, partly through his meeting of the established artists John Frederick Kensett and Benjamin Champney in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Heade wrote to his friend John Russell Bartlett, I find landscape painting not quite so easy as I supposed.




Autumn in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (2013) Denis Tangney Jr

He moved to New York City in 1859 and took a studio in a building that housed many of the famous Hudson River School artists of the time. He became socially and professionally acquainted with them and particularly with Frederic Edwin Church, who depicted spectacular tropical forests, waterfalls, volcanoes and icebergs (take a look at his gorgeous landscapes here).

Heade's interest in the tropics was piqued at least partly by the impact of Church's Heart of the Andes (1859), a monumental painting.

He traveled to Brazil from 1863 to 1864 to paint an extensive series of small works depicting hummingbirds. He returned to the tropics twice, in 1866 journeying to Nicaragua and in 1870 to Colombia, Panama, and Jamaica. These works combine traditional features of both landscape and still life along with elements of ornithological and botanical illustration.

Martin Johnson Heade continued to paint tropical birds and lush foliage into his late career.

 Fort-Tailed Woodnymph (c. 1864-1865)

 Golden Marguerites

 Hooded Visorbearer (c. 1864-1865)

 Hummingbirds and Apple Blossoms (c. 1865)

 Orchid and Hummingbirds Near a Mountain Lake (c. 1875-1890)

 Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds (c. 1870-1883)

 Red Rose with Ruby Throat (c. 1875-1883)

 Ruby Throat of North America (1865)

 Snowcap (c. 1864-1865)

 Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds (1870)

 Two Fighting Hummingbirds with Two Orchids (1875)

 Two Hooded Visorbearer Hummingbirds (c. 1864-1865)

 Two Hummingbirds Garding an Egg (1864)

 Two Sun Gems on a Branch (c. 1864-1865)

White Brazilian Orchid

http://www.martin-johnson-heade.org/

We all have our own talents.

Take a look inside Fabre's Book of Insects. It is a non-fiction book that is a retelling of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos' (1865–1921) translation of autodidact Jean-Henri Fabre's Souvenirs entomologiques. It includes 12 color plates by artist Edward Detmold (1883–1957). The original retelling was published in 1921.

The book talks about insects in real life, mythology and folklore.

 The Sacred Beetle

The Cicada

 

 The Praying Mantis

 The Pelopaeus Spirifex

 The Psyches

 The Spanish Copris

 The White-Faced Decticus

 Common Wasps

 The Field Cricket

 The Sisyphus

 Italian Locusts

The Anthrax Fly

Original illustrations and age toning removed versions by John (the ones presented here) can be found @ old book art dot com.

 

View the complete virtual book here.


It begins like that:
« We all have our own talents, our special gifts. Sometimes these gifts seem to come to us from our forefathers, but more often it is difficult to trace their origin.

A goatherd, perhaps, amuses himself by counting little pebbles and doing sums with them. He becomes an as toundingly quick reckoner, and in the end is a professor of mathematics. Another boy, at an age when most of us care only for play, leaves his schoolfellows at their games and listens to the imaginary sounds of an organ, a secret concert heard by him alone. He has a genius for music. A third, so small, perhaps, that he cannot eat his bread and jam without smearing his face, takes a keen delight in fashioning clay into little figures that are amazingly lifelike. If he be fortunate he will some day be a famous sculptor.»