William Landay

Official website of the author

landscapes

Van Gogh Museum

Detail - Wheatfield With Crows

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has a beautifully designed web site with, apparently, the entire collection available in eye-popping high resolution. It is amazing what detail you can see in these high-res images, right down to the brush strokes and globs of paint. It is as if the museum guards all turned their backs and allowed you to press your nose right up to the canvas. Above is a detail from “Wheatfield With Crows” (1890), one of the last pictures Van Gogh painted before his suicide. The complete picture is below, and you can click the image to see it a little larger. But to get the full effect, go download the insanely huge image at the museum’s web site.

In May, the Met in New York posted 400,000 high-res images from its collection, so this seems to be a trend.

Van Gogh - Wheatfield With Crows (1890)

Orange sunrise

orange sunrise

This photo, by Frans Lanting for National Geographic, has not been Photoshopped or retouched in any way. It shows a place called Dead Vlei in Namibia in the early light of dawn. Details about the making of the photo are here. (Via PDN.)

After the forest fire

Burn

Burn #75 by David Nadel.

David Nadel has photographed the remains of burned-down forests in Northwest Montana for much of the past four winters. A resident of the state, he hikes up mountains and treks through trail-less terrain while lugging a large-format camera. He shoots color, though many of his images look like black-and-white etchings. His exhibition, “Burn,” is on view at Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York through March 26.

Via.

Mannahatta, 1609

Manahatta 1609

Mannahatta, 1609, as Henry Hudson found it. Reminds me of this:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

More about The Mannahatta Project here and here.