Blooming cherry trees are a sight to behold from the ground, but seen from the sky above they become a kind of eighth wonder of the world, turning everything around them into a glorious violet.

Photographer Danilo Dungo took these pictures at Inokashira Park in Tokyo, a place famous for its abundant annual blooms, as part of an annual photographic tradition.

The Tokyo-based photographer has taken to shooting the scene not just from among the trees but also via aerial drone, capturing not just the flowers on branches but also the way they flood the lake below.

Hanami (literally “flower viewing”) is the Japanese traditional custom of enjoying the transient beauty of flowers, almost always referring to those of the cherry (“sakura”) or, less frequently, plum (“ume”) trees.

From the end of March to early May, sakura bloom all over Japan, and around the first of February on the island of Okinawa. The blossom forecast is announced each year by the weather bureau, and is watched carefully by those planning hanami as the blossoms only last a week or two. Other cultures could learn a thing or too from this deep appreciation of nature’s fleeting wonders.

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Pyramidal holographics have become popular fast, with crowdfunding projects offering you ways to get into the game for just hundreds of dollars, but here is a way to put together your own small-scale version effectively for free.

Required tools: a smartphone, compact disc case, graph paper, pen, scissors, knife, tape or superglue. Basically, you cut a partial pyramid from the clear material, fasten it together, set it on your phone, and load up a video that turns those surfaces into four-way reflectors simulating the visual experience of objects moving in midair.

Critics will argue that this is not a true hologram and that is absolutely true, but the effect is nonetheless extremely compelling, and you can use it to animate not just the examples above but basically anything you want as well. The next step: scale things up and turn a television or computer screen into your base and buy a larger surface for the reflection.

Or, for additional easy fun, try this hand-drawn hologram tutorial (above) – it won’t be quite as visually complex or impressive, but it is still a neat trick to show friends or kids.

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While facing the trials and tribulations of first-time space travel, astronauts of the early Apollo space program managed to capture an epic volume of space pictures, many of which were recently released for the first time by NASA and highlights of which you can see here.

The release is in part a product of a multi-year Earth mission to scan and digitize the huge archive of film that exists from the missions, preserving it for NASA and the future.

The rich and variegated cache contains a treasure trove of shots including many images of Earth, the moon, space but also candid pictures of the astronauts themselves in the cramped environs of space vehicles.

As Becket Mufson notes, the images are a mixed bag in terms of content and quality but worth a look: “It can be compelling to wander through more than 2,400 of unadulterated space photos unearthed by a research team, complete with over-exposure, blurriness, and other hallmarks of an untrained film photographer. [They] capture the claustrophobia of spacewalks [and the] the framing is out-of-this-world.”

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Using sections of the International Space Station as stationary points, this incredible photo shoot turns both outer space and our own planet into a series of surreal and otherworldly landscapes.

Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images: “My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”

The results are nothing short of stunning – the Earth’s surface becomes streaked with color and light, punctuated by what appear to be blotches of lightning or blurred cityscapes, but overall looking more linear like (Jupiter or) some other celestial body.

Naturally, only pieces of the ISS itself look static in each shot, creating a stark contrast between a fixed foreground and spiraling set of backgrounds (though, in reality, the station itself is also rotating – it is all relative). Armatures of the station end up open to interpretation, in some cases looking like the needle on a record player hovering above a spinning disk.

The post Star Trails in Space: Timelapse Photos Shot from the ISS first appeared on Gajitz.

The “copy and paste” function is so familiar to computer users that it rarely needs explanation. The common function is breaking into the real world with a design by Jayeong Yoon & Seulki Kim called, appropriately, Copy & Paste.

The gadget is a handheld scanner/printer that can take images from one physical place, record them, and transfer them to another physical surface. One button scans and the other prints.

No special paper or equipment is needed to use the handheld scanner/printer. Simply scan any image and recreate it on a flat surface – both actions are performed by moving the gadget slowly over the image and then the blank surface. The clever handheld device was a 2013 red dot design award: design concept winner.

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