List: '47 photographs from NG's 'Photography Contest 2010'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. With only seven days left in 2010, today’s is the second-last ‘List Friday’ for this year. And the choice of available lists is overwhelming: not only ‘Best of 2010’ lists, but ‘Best of decade’ ones too. It’s all a bit too much. How to decide which one to post today. Aha – a solution: put it out to the universe. Ever customer (or reader) responsive, I decided I’d go with the first list someone sent me – whatever the topic. That ‘someone’ happened to be darling Emily. And the list she suggested is a beauty: from the Boston Globe’s ‘Big Picture’ section, it’s 47 photographs from National Geographic’s ‘Photography Contest 2010’ [1]. The Contest’s open to the public. (Actually the entry deadline was 30 November). The 47 were posted on ‘Big Picture’ before the deadline. Scroll down and see them all here [2]. Which are your favourites? I think they’re all pretty amazing. If you want to see the finalists and the winners in the three categories, i.e. Nature, People, Places, you can access them here [3]. Wow! And to think that all the photographs in the Contest are taken by the public, i.e. not professional National Geographic photographers. They make me want to put my camera away – permanently. But I won’t. I’ll persist. However I know that no photo I’ll ever take will be remotely as fine as any of these. Ho hum.

P.S. Thanks, darling Emily, for sending me this list.

farmdoc's blog post number 600

Today’s ‘List Friday’. And with only 20 days to go in 2009, things are hotting up in listland, because every Tom, Dick and Harry’s putting out a list of the best (or worst) something or other of 2009. A particularly fertile source of 2009 lists is National Geographic. I used to love National Geographic. Mainly its superb photographs of exotic subjects. The advertisers obviously knew people loved the photographs, because most advertisements were for high-end cameras. And still may be for all I know, because I haven’t opened a NG mag for years. But its lists are fascinating. At least the current batch is. I think they were compiled on a ‘most viewed’ basis, but I don’t know if this was paper version [1], online [2] or both. Included are: the top 10 discoveries for 2009 in science [3], new species [4], archaeology [5] and space [6]. Still in space, of 10 most viewed National Geographic photo galleries in 2009 [7], number one is a 1969 photograph (shown above left) of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. It’s a superlative image. At first I was surprised there wasn’t a 2009 photograph that could beat it. Then I realised it was only number one because it headed a NG piece debunking a list of 10 moon landing myths [8]. Be this as it may, next time I see a copy of NG, I’ll flick through it, look at the pics, and dream that one day I’ll take one even 10% as good. Dream on, Farmdoc.