Colonial plankton organism, Chaetoceros debilis (marine diatom), magnified 250x by Wim van Egmond, of the Micropolitan Museum, Berkel en Rodenrijs, Zuid Holland, Netherlands.  The Atlantic always finds the best pictures. Here it shows the winners of the 2013 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. Started back in 1974, the contest invites photographers and scientists to submit images of all things visible under a microscope.

First place this year went to a 250x view of a marine diatom by Wim van Egmond (above), showing the complexity and stunning detail of its fragile helical chain. Other entries included close-up views of ladybug feet, mollusc radula, dinosaur bones, nerve structures in embryos, and much more. Enjoy a journey into mini things by clicking here. Needless to say, best viewed large!

A 4x image of a worker ant, (Aphaenogaster senilis) by Dimitri Seeboruth, from Paris, France.

On April 12, 2013, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) reached its final orbit, 705 kilometers (438 miles) above Earth. One week later, the satellite's natural-color imager scanned a swath of land 185-kilometers wide and 9,000 kilometers long (120 by 6,000 miles)—an unusual, unbroken distance considering 70 percent of Earth is covered with water. That flight path—depicted on the globe below—afforded us the chance to assemble 56 still images into a seamless, flyover view of what LDCM saw on April 19, 2013. Stretching from northern Russia to South Africa, the full mosaic from the Operational Land Imager can be viewed in this video. Read and view more at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Feat... You'll probably want to stick it on full screen. Make sure you've got some suitable music to hand.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/7Wg7twPVuPg&w=700]

  This excellent YouTube comment by "nhstorrs" puts it in perspective: 

No way. This is amazing! Landsat flew right over the spine of the birthplace of the human species, and at the same time the birthplace of agriculture. This is where we came from, and the environment which might be said to have had the biggest impact on what made us. . . us. There could almost be no other landscape so interesting to see in one large glimpse as this one.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/54105345 w=700&h=390] Muck diving gets its name from the conditions - sediment and mud and so on. Calm and shallow, but low visibility, but then it's the muck that makes it interesting, as it's the perfect habitat for unusual, exotic and juvenile organisms that make their homes in the sediment and "trash" that compose a muck dive. Creatures like colorful nudibranchs, anglerfish, shrimp, blue-ringed octopus, and rare pygmy seahorses.

Lembeh Strait is near Sulawesi in Indonesia.

You're going to want to view this "large" or full screen if you've got the bandwidth.

Khaled Sultani, who made this, says: "Lembeh Strait diving - simply one of the best place in the world for muck diving and macro photo+videography. Shot with Sony Cx550 with Light & Motion housing; with sola lights."

The song is "The awakening of a woman" by Cinematic Orchestra.

[gallery ids="5744,5745,5746,5747,5748,5749,5750,5751"]While attending the International Fireworks Show in Ottawa, Canada earlier this month photographer David Johnson had his camera in hand to document the night. When Spain’s entry into the competition begin he decided to try something a little different resulting in the photos you see here which are unlike any long exposure firework shots I’ve ever seen. Via email David tells me how he accomplished the effect:

The technique I used was a simple refocus during the long exposure. Each shot was about a second long, sometimes two. I’d start out of focus, and when I heard the explosion I would quickly refocus, so the little stems on these deep sea creature lookalikes would grow into a fine point. The shapes are quite bizarre, some of them I was pleasantly surprised with.

What’s interesting is that unlike usual firework photos that seem to make long trails across the sky, Johnson’s photos look like flowers with little triangular plumes coming to a point. Pretty amazing. You can see several more photos here.

(via - Hat tip to Greeny)

Amazing this. Five months, 400 hours of solid work, four cameras, 40 shoots, 640 gigabytes of data and a mammoth 19,997 photographs. I found the car park bit most satisfying to watch.  [vimeo http://vimeo.com/50922066 w=700&h=390]   "Kuala Lumpur: super-modern buildings juxtaposed with various cultural enclaves and with a little of Asia’s chaos thrown in. My time lapse explores how the city changes from day to night highlighting how spaces dramatically alter during the course of a few hours." Rob Whitworth.

Hardware: Nikon D800 Nikon D7000 x2 Nikon D3200 (Backup body) Nikon 16-35 f/4G AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor NIkon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5G ED AF-S DX Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED AF-S VR II Nikon 50mm f/1.4G AF-S Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8G ED AF DX Fisheye

Music: Clams Casino - I'm God

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/50061391 w=700&h=390] Best viewed quite big (nice spot, thank you Adam).

Music "The Alley" by DeVotchKa. Photographed and edited by Ben Wiggins. Contact: info@timelapseinc.com

Fantastic set of aerial nudes by NZ photographer John Crawford - love the cows and sheep! And the train! Lovely idea, beautifully done. More at his website. (via) [gallery]

French photographer Benoit Pallé enjoys exploring the theme of the Stranger. This project, spotted on the excellent It's Nice That (a glorious soubriquet for a cultural web colander if ever I saw one), sees him wandering the beaches of Mexico allowing tourists to capture themselves, photo-booth style. They are fab. ‘Tourist Stranger Self Portraits’

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Checked in on The Atlantic for the first time in a while, and saw these gorgeous images. Lovely Sky Monsters is a series by Camille Seaman, who partnered with storm chasers to track down and photograph a magnificent cloud type - the supercell. Do definitely make time to look at the original set, and also her pictures of icebergs.

Brighton-born Arnhel de Serra started out doing portraits but then moved on to reportage. And this is my FAVOURITE sort of reportage. There's a wonderfully cheeky side to these observations, all centred around the great British show. [gallery]

(via) © Arnhel de Serra, 2012

These bonkers photos are by Alan Sailer, who likes nothing more than to take some sausages to his garage, set them up with some pretty lighting on a nice background, and then shoot them. He sets up a camera and a high-speed flash (ased off an article from a 1974 volume of the Scientific American), and then shoots them with an air rifle or blows them up. The pictures are taken as early into the impact/explosion as possible.

He has hundreds of images on his Flickr page, where he also chats about the process - which is often very very funny.

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Pretty!

(via)

Düsseldorf-based photographer Rüdiger Nehmzow takes beautiful technical photos, nice and clean, with a sexy take on symmetry and geometry. His cloud images are smashing - could perhaps do with a bit less "shadows & highlights" work in post, but they're rocking nonetheless. Good portfolio on his website.

New favourite tumblr - texts from Hillary Clinton.

Wearing a Chelsea kit, roller skating, whipping AND holding a gun. She could well be the perfect woman. [gallery]

Beautiful campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - series showing musical instruments from the inside to nail the feel of the music they play. Nice bit of CGI and that. Hot.

Copywriter: Mona Sibai Agency: Scholz & Friends (Berlin) Client: Berliner Philharmoniker Photographer: Mierswa Kluska (via)

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BONUS BONUS BONUS! Here, have a pianogasm on the house, courtesy of Lang Lang's encore following his first performance with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2009:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz_BlYlBi40&w=600]

No words.

Good spot by James Pomerantz in the New Yorker, all very WeiJi:

When life give you lemons, make lemonade. When someone breaks into your home and steals your computer, make a collaborative photo project. That’s what Melanie Willhide did.

Willhide dedicates “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” to the individual who broke into her home and stole various things. Her computer was recovered by the police, but the hard drive had been wiped clean. Willhide attempted to recover the erased data but found her digital photographs corrupted. Lemons! Rather than delete the images, Willhide considered these corrupted files a collaboration with her machine. She refined them and made additional ones inspired by the mess. Lemonade!

The series opened on 23 Feb at Von Lintel Gallery, in New York. Go and see it if you can (sneak preview below - click an image to activate the slideshow).

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Photographer Eric Cahan's Sky Series is stunning. Imagine these as 7ft tall prints, each taken at first or last light...such vivid colours. I've only put up a few, simply can't do them justice here, but it's good enough for an idea. Check his edit of the series HERE - and view large. It's worth it. Bridgehampton NY. Sunset. 7.48pm

Fort Pond Bay, Montauk, NY. Sunset 8:10pm

The Dunes, Amagansette, NY. Sunset 6:47pm

Zuma Beach, CA. Sunset 6:36pm. Plate 1 – 2

ps - two short videos by him here as well.

Inspired by a video of a chain-smoking two-year-old from Indonesia, photographer Frieke Janssens took a series of portraits of kids smoking.

She says: "The aesthetics of smoke and the particular way smokers gesticulate with their hands and posture cannot be denied, but among the different tribes of "Smoking Kids," - Glamour, Jazz, and The Marginal - there is a nod to less attractive aspects, on the line between the beauty and ugliness of smoking."

You might like to know that none of the kids are actually smoking fags. She used a combination of sticks of chalk, bits of cheese (as cigarettes) and joss sticks (smoke) to comp the effect. Do click the sheet below to link through to the series as it will show the images in much better quality than they are here. If you like the photos (and I do), be sure to check out her website, which is fab.

There's also a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot here - also well worth watching.

Amazing set of WWII bomber jackets from Flickr, collected by D. Sheley. Just imagine getting home in one piece, and very carefully painting another white bomb on your jacket with your buddies, or the very visual pecking order that you'd get seeing a crew of veterans next to a newbie. Click the image to go the fully linked gallery page.