Tagged: photography

National Geographic last week announced the winners in its annual photo contest. According to the contest website, they received more than 22,000 entries from amateur and professional photographers around the world.

Here's a selection of the winning images, including editors' picks, viewers' choice and honorable mentions. You can see the rest on their website.

It was three, maybe four o'clock in the morning when he first saw them. Grad student Jeff Bowman was on the deck of a ship; he and a University of Washington biology team were on their way back from the North Pole. It was cold outside, the temperature had just dropped, and as the dawn broke, he could see a few, then more, then even more of these little flowery things, growing on the frozen sea.

Small stuff is having a big moment. There's skateboarding for your fingers, cupcake-size lasagna, and now we've discovered photography featuring food as a backdrop for miniature life.

There's nothing like visiting a new landscape to spark the imagination. I just got back from a two-week road trip around the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. and Canada. And though it was my own country (the non-Canadian part, at least), it felt completely foreign to my eyes, which are accustomed to the swampy, lush Southeast.

Today's 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam got us thinking: What if Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner could revisit some of the original sites he photographed? If he used his equipment today, what would the images look like? That is: How have the landscapes changed — or stayed the same?

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