Every week we pick the sweetest, most breathtaking, most interesting, and most grooviest photo we’ve stumbled across on Flickr during the week and exhibit it here for the Fotohacker community to admire. Are you on Flickr? Your photo could be next.

Flickr: petecarr

We’ll be picking the sweetest, most breathtaking, interesting, and most grooviest photos we’ve stumbled across on Flickr during the week and exhibiting it here every Saturday. I ultimately would like to start up a Fotohacker Flickr group and get some submissions, but we’ll see how this goes first. Enjoy!

Flickr: Zuan

Trey Ratcliff is one of my favorite “unknown” photographers. He’s only unknown because he doesn’t really do this for a living, not because he potentially couldn’t. Since he first visited Chernobyl and published Part 1 of his two part photo essay from the hot zone, Trey garnered the attention of the online community and his blog has earned itself a lot of traffic.

For a living, Ratcliff works for a game company… in fact, he’s the CEO. During his travels, he takes along his camera and shoots high dynamic range images of (seemingly) everything he sees or can get close to.

Despite the “fad” impression I get surrounding the hype of “HDR” images these days, it’s tough not to love their rich, hyper-real quality. What’s nice about Trey’s photography is his use of HDR. Very few people who attempt HDR imaging seem to understand when enough is enough, and push their images too far. Trey’s photography could easily be misunderstood for impeccably lit traditional photography, but they still have that slightly processed look which is typical of HDR.

Go visit the two part Chernobyl Adventure over at Trey’s blog, “Stuck In Customs“.

You’ve likely experienced some pretty bad roads in your days of driving, but that’s nothing compared to some of the roads in Russia and east Asia – particularly one that connects north and southern siberia. Dark Roasted Blend gives us a visual tour of the Russian-Siberian road to Yakutsk (as well as some other bad roads and trails).

The absolute worst of the bunch, however, is the Road Of Bones, which is a rough mud road that turns into soup when the rainy season hits, trapping miles of cars and their passengers.

This ‘road’ is a 2000 mile stretch which connects Yakutsk to Magadan, and is notoriously bad. It was built by political prisoners under Stalin’s rule, who were often imprisoned at gulags. Many of these people died trying to construct the road, and their bones became a part of the fixture.

The road is in a state of disrepair and is untraversable by standard road vehicles because of washed-out bridges and sections of road reclaimed by streams. During winter, frozen water actually helps river crossings.

Incidentally, the Ewan McGregor produced short series “Long Way Round” featured Ewan and his buddy Charlie trying to traverse the Road Of Bones on their motorcycles.

For the guys at xRez, it’s all about “extreme resolution”.

We’re not talking megapixels here, we’re talking gigapixels – with resulting images that are so highly detailed, you can zoom in to even the tiniest object in the distance and bring it in with clear and crisp fidelity.

xRez is like a studio, or a collective of photographers who are commissioned for special projects. They have some unique and highly specialized equipment designed for the purposes of gigapixel level panoramic work, high dynamic range photography, large scale “full dome” panoramas, etc. It’s the sort of stuff we all dream of doing, but very rarely get a chance to.

By combining powerful 3d tools and techniques appropriated from the visual effects field, possibilites arise of new imagery and animation that are truly novel and unprecedented. Applications of these new techniques can range from experiencing stunningly large prints in fine art gallery installations, providing a substitute to live-action shooting in feature film backgrounds, and enriching a national park visitors understanding and interpretation, to name a few.

The team currently consists of Greg Downing (who specializes in 3D based imaging), Eric Hanson (a visual effects designer), and Ron Shirley (a film and photography major) and together they have worked on visual effects for numerous outfits and companies. All these guys are teachers as well as professionals, and they’ve got some interesting work in their online portfolio that shows off this gigapixel obsession.