As a follow-up for our previous post on Richard Barnes’ photography, I wanted to post this link for the AMNH’s photo archive for Exhibit Preparation. The collection is full of incredible old photographs of the diorama and exhibits – including the big blue whale in the Hall of Ocean Life.

National Geographic recently released The Complete National Geographic on Nov. 1st. It compiles the last 120 years of issues, from 1888 to 2008. You can browse and search every single page of the magazine from its inception and it also includes all the maps that come with the issues. The interface looks very cool and it must have been an enormous task to tag and categorize every photo, map, advertisement and article for the search engine. It’s a pretty buy at 70 bucks for the dvds, but I would opt for the hard drive version so you don’t have to swap disks all the time.

The Morning News has a feature on Animals Twice Dead, a collection of great behind-the-scenes photography by Richard Barnes that was recently released by PA Press. It’s so odd to see how they transport and construct taxidermy animals in the exhibits at natural history museums. The entire scene seems so artificial, like the constructed feel of the exhibit creeps out into the world of the installers.

The Visible Human Project was established in 1989 to build a digital image library of volumetric data representing complete, normal adult male and female anatomy.

When I first saw The Visible Human Project back in high school, I was amazed by the cryosections trip through the body. Obtained by freezing and photographing as millimeter thin sections were shaved off, the cryo set totals 1,871 images (there are also MRI and CT sets). To see the body as a sequence of sections from head to toe was so different than textbooks or photographs of single specimens. The gallery link is for an sample of the data, you’ll need to apply if you want the full data set for your own use. Otherwise, there are tools you can use to view the sets in different ways.

So, the main thing I write about on my own blog is art/photography, and I thought it might be fun to showcase a few of my favorite pieces along the way. Behold: The Round-Up of Art/Photography Awesomeness [in no particular order]!:

1. Dirty Projectors album cover
2. Get Wild by Radcastle
3. Knowledge by Barnie Page
4. Joe Ryckebosch
5. Kuba Dabrowski

1. Big Sur by Akasha Rabut
2. Becoming the Lion by Karen O’Bryan
3. Khristian Mendoza
4. Tao Urban
5. Richie Budd

There you go! Consider this a Curation of Awesome. Happy Wednesday, Subbies!

[Erin Loechner is the editor of Design for Mankind and Mankind Mag.]

Zoo York is always representing NYC. Their Sky High deck series features photographs by Alessandro “Zuek” Simonetti. I think I can see our house in one of the photos.

Jen Khoshbin emailed us about some of her new projects, but upon checking out her site I got sidetracked by her Manipulation series – an exploration into the beauty of old story-book scenes. I love the cutouts and the layered scenes she’s created, each one being specific to the book it’s sited in. Photographs of her Manipulation series can be found for sale here.

Keith Morrison is a photographer and skater that I just met because we both volunteer for the skate program through Stoked. I really enjoy the photographs in the shapes gallery. Many of the outdoor ones have an architectural feel to them, natural objects sited and framed as monuments.

Ever since I saw the mockup of this camera a few months ago, I have been very interested in seeing what it really was and what it could do. Well, Olympus finally announced the EP-1, which they are calling the digital PEN. I was really excited to maybe see a digital rangefinder.

Our current photo kit is a Nikon D80, but it is just too big to carry around all the time. And our little Lumix’s are great for snapshots, but just don’t have the control we would like. So I thought the EP-1 would be the perfect in-between for walking around. But then I saw that there’s no through-the-lens viewfinder? Any manual focusing is done through the LCD, which seems a difficult solution. I’ve tried to do this on a Leica D-Lux, but it was pretty much impossible. What is the point of having SLR quality sensors and optics if you can’t control the shot the same way?

I would love to get my hands on one of these to test it out and if it actually fills the gap between our full blown dslr and little point-and-shoots. Olympus, if you’re out there…

As always, some beautiful images at National Geographic. This time it’s Glowing Animals: Beasts Shining for Science. In most cases, the fluorescent protein is implanted into the animals as a marker for a gene to be studied, typically for genetic diseases. A few of the specimens shown have naturally occurring fluorescence, scorpions for example. In the scorpion’s case, scientists are not completely sure what purpose it serves but hypothesize the layer protects them from UV rays or serves as a daylight ‘sensor’.