Polish photographer Tomasz Gudzowaty has a photoessay of Shaolin Temple monks meditating and practicing kung fu.

Hat tip to Visual News via Vanderleun.

These photographs by Walter Arnold of the derelict Scranton Lace Company were recently linked on a North East Pennsylvania Genealogy list.

Incorporated in 1897, the Scranton Lace Company in its heyday employed 1400 people, and was the world’s largest producer of Nottingham lace. It possessed the largest looms ever built, each of which stood nearly three stories tall, was 50 feet long, and weighed over 20 tons. During World War II, the company expanded its production line to include mosquito and camouflage netting, bomb parachutes, and tarpaulins. After the war, the company returned to producing cotton yarn, vinyl shower curtains, and textile laminates for umbrellas, patio furniture, and pool liners.

Its factory complex boasted “bowling alleys in the basement, a fully staffed infirmary, a staff barber and a gymnasium, and owned its own cotton field and coal mine. Its clock tower was a city landmark. U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s father and grandfather worked there.”

The Scranton Lace Company closed abruptly in 2002 with an announcement from the company’s vice president, in the middle of the daily work shift, that the company was closing “effective immediately.”

The photo essay is a moving testament to the scale of everything that has been lost as the American economy changed in recent decades to a postindustrial era and manufacturing in most cases moved overseas.

I normally prefer to avoid linking slideshows designed to extort large numbers of page views by playing on readers’ curiosity, but the Telegraph this time came up with a collection of photos of mostly quite interesting curiosities in Venice.

This 7:28 trailer for Human Planet, a BBC Ethnographic Travelogue series scheduled to begin broadcasting in March, has some striking images. Photographer Timothy Allen did the voice-over.

I tend to try to avoid posting unsourced, unidentified photos, but consistency is the hobgoblin and all that. Click on the image for a larger version.

I once learned that rather more of these ancient colonial era fowling pieces survived in New England farmhouses than I ever would have suspected. It was probably the combination of unwieldiness and striking decorative value (once they became obsolete, they were the ideal object to hang over the mantelpiece) that caused them to be preserved.

From Nothing Via by way of Vanderleun.
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Gerard Van der Leun identifies the original source as the Jooney Woodward site, from Britain (!).

From Buzz Feed: “30 Ways (some facetious) That the World Used to be Cooler.”

I make serious efforts to bar my wife from publishing photographs of me at sporting events and in the hunting field, but for some unaccountable reason I do feel a sense of gratification when I find myself accidentally present in a photograph of that kind of event published elsewhere completely independently.

I was, therefore, tickled to find, in the latest Virginia Sportsman, a feature article on last Spring’s Virginia Hound Show, which shows me sitting and leaning on my cane while watching professional huntsman Dennis Downing putting a couple of our own Blue Ridge foxhounds through their paces in the English ring. (My face is hidden behind the elbow of a photographer snapping a picture.)

The LA Times reported recently that a pair of sharp-eyed brothers apparently discovered two previously unknown photographs of Old West legend Wyatt Earp, one as a small boy, in a family photo album that they purchased in an antique shop in San Bernadino County for $50.

They could make a lot of money selling the photos at auction (if experts agree on the identification), but they have expressed the intention of keeping and licensing the images.

Chances are that it would not take them over ten years to rebuild a destroyed landmark.

A nice car interior shot from Rodger the Real King of France via Vanderleun.

The photograph seems to come from Go Moose via Theo.

Hat tip to Curmudgeonly & Skeptical via NothingVia via Vanderleun.

Hat tip to Push the Movement.

Shiv disguised as a wooden crucifix; found in an inmate’s cell in Wolfenbüttel prison, Germany, sometime around 1994; intended for use in an escape or as a general weapon. At that time a lot of crucifixes were fashioned in prison woodshops until jailers finally figured out their true purpose.

More neat and ingenious items.

Hat tip to Marc Steinmetz Photography via NothingVia.

Via Vanderleun. No further sourcing available.

11 more photos

The tidal bore on the Qiantang River in Eastern China is the largest in world, commonly reaching heights of 9 m. (30’) and traveling at speeds up to 40 kph (25 mph).

Tourists travel annually to stand on the dike at Haining and admire this striking demonstration of Nature’s power, but this year an off-shore storm (Typhoon Nanmadol) added a little extra oomph to the incoming tide and last Wednesday more than 20 people were injured.

Looking at the photos, I was surprised that the news reports don’t mention dozens of deaths.

Daily Mail story.

HuffPo report & slideshow

Girl reporter gets wet

The caption for the photo said: This picture was taken in Puerto Rico shortly after Hurricane Irene ravaged the island. Yes, that’s a shark swimming down the street next to a car, and this is exactly why authorities in NYC are warning people not to go swimming in flood waters after a hurricane. Sharks go where fish go, and fish go where water goes, and if that water (and those subsequent fish) happen to be right outside your front door, then guess where that freakin’ shark’s going to be?!

The Washington Post spoiled all the fun by identifying the shark photo used for the pranked image.

Real source of shark.

Hat tip to Vanderleun who found the Mircea Costina photo via Dmitry.

Wikipedia says that it is perfectly safe to swim in the immediate vicinity of Whale Sharks, Rhincodon typus, the largest extant species of fish which can reach a length of over 40’.

Whale Sharks are docile, only eat plankton, and the worst thing that can happen is the Whale Shark might accidentally bump you with his majestic tail.

Still, the diver in the Daily Mail photo looks concerned about getting sucked into that enormous gaping maw with all the plankton and finding out the hard way what those more than 300 rows of tiny teeth can do.

Who knows? The occasional diver may go nicely as an accent with one’s plankton.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

From Eiknarf via Push the Movement.

From the Telegraph:

Pictured above is a saltwater crocodile named Brutus, missing his right front leg, who regularly performs for tourists on the Adelaide River, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Darwin.

Adelaide River Cruises specially advertises jumping crocodile cruises, and the crocs (compensated with free meals of buffalo meat) obligingly perform. Brutus is estimated to be 5.5 meters (18’) long.

The photo has made a sensation, and NT News ran it past a number of experts who basically agree that it has not been Photoshopped.

I want to see the bigger one that took off that front leg.

Fred Lapides posted this with a joking comment that sometimes it’s better not to take the stairs.

He got it via CJDurrek, who made the same kind of I’ll-wait-for-the-elevator joke, and who also did not identify the actual location.

I researched a bit, but could not find a version of the photo with identification of the locale. My guess is that this is a photograph of the Huangshan steps.

Kyle Reed has a photoessay with shots that look pretty close.

I could be mistaken though.

William Koch (one of the notorious conservative donor Koch Brothers) bought the 2×3” ferrotype taken by an unknown photographer in Fort Sumner, New Mexico in late 1879 or early 1880 at a Denver auction last Saturday.

This carte de visite image, commonly referred to as the Upham tintype (named for its longtime owner Frank Upham, a nephew of the original owner Dan Dedrick, one of Billy the Kid’s outlaw friends) is the only image of the famous Western gunfighter believed by experts to be authentic.

Wikipedia article on the Kid, which discusses the photograph.

New Mexico Tourism’s detailed discussion of the photograph.

Karen’s photo essay (771 photos!) of the Second Day of the Bryn Mawr Hound Show was uploaded yesterday. Day 2, Saturday, is the show itself, the hound classes and the pack trials.

The Friday Night, Day 1, preliminaries are here.

Karen just got her photos of the first day of the Bryn Mawr Hound Show loaded on her web-site in time to coincide with the appearance of a few of her later photos in an article by Sarah Montague on the New York City NPR web-site.

Sarah’s article includes a recording of the horn blowing competiton.

The Bryn Mawr Hound Show, dating back to 1914, held on the grounds of the Radnor Hunt Club, is the oldest hound show held in the United States.

Karen’s first day photos are here.

The eruption of the Puyehue volcano in Chile, 870 km. south of Santiago, over the weekend sent a cloud of ash 10 km (6 miles) high complete with volcanic lightning. The combined spectacle provided a field day for photographers.

Toronto Star story.

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Herald Sun photo slide-show

ABC slide-show.

MSNBC photoblog.

I had not ever hear of the abandoned city of Ani until seeing Boogie Man’s photoessay.

Ani, located in Eastern Turkey, was in the 10th Century the capital of an Armenian principality. In its prime, the city’s population was similar in size (100,000—200,000) to Constantinople, Baghdad, and Cairo. It became the seat of the Catholicoi, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church in 992.

Ani was sacked by the Seljuk Turks in 1064, and by the Mongols in 1236. The city declined over subsequent centuries, ceasing to be a dynastic capitol around 1400, and losing the Armenian Catholicosate in 1441. Ani gradually dwindled to a small settlement within the walls of the former city, and was completely abandoned by the 18th century.

The site was excavated and documented by the Russian linguist and archaeologist Nicholas Marr 1892-93 and 1904-17.

Hat tip to Fred Lapides.

Frank Oscar Larson was an auditor from Flushing, Queens, who late in life developed an interest in street photography. He would travel to Manhattan early in the morning on weekends with a Rolleiflex camera to record images of the Bowery, Chinatown, Hell’s Kitchen or Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, and the Cloisters.

45 years after his death, his collection of negatives was discovered in an old cardboard box, resulting in an exhibition earlier this year at the Perfect Exposure Gallery in Los Angeles.

Hat tip to Fred Lapides.