SeaWayBLOG

World Wide Water

SeaWayBLOG is everything about water. Photo, Video, Art, News, Sport, Environment, Humour, Travel... in just three words: World Wide Water.

PHOTO

SeaWayBLOG is mainly a PhotoBlog, enjoy tens of thousands of amazing pictures from all over the world

ART

Paintings, sculptures, digital art and evrything else meaning creativity and water mixed together...

TRAVEL

Waterfalls, Lakes, Rivers, Icebergs, Ponds... the world is full of wonderful places to travel where the water displays all of his wonders

SPORT

Sailing, Sailing, Sailing with the best images from the best regattas all over the world, not forgetting all the other aquatic sports.

Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009

Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 is one of the best competition for nature photographers, and each year is a wonderful source of very inspiring pictures. It's organized every year thanks to London's Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine and sponsored by Veolia Environment. As I did one year ago with a post about the 2008 edition, I would like to show you here a selection of my favourite award-winning pictures from this edition (as always I've chosen just amongst water or snow related images...). Some photographs are just perfect for the beauty of colours, composition and atmosphere like the one here above (my personal favourite). In some others, like the one here below with a king penguin chick examining footprints in the sand on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, the best part is what you can read "behind" the photograph itself.
Don't forget to visit the official website to see all the other pictures and read the interesting captions.

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The amazing pigeon trio!

Newspix / Rex Features via Daily Mail and The Sun.

This is quite amazing. Imagine a trio of pigeons in need of cooling off during a hot summer day in Brisbane, Australia. Believe it or not the three fellows have worked out a clever system of adapting a water fountain built by humans for their very own purposes!
After waiting for the fountain to be free, one bird jumped on the lever and pushed it down to fill up the bowl, while another kept watch and the third splashed in. What a clever birds! and not only clever.. they are also great team-workers infact according to the passers-by when the third pigeon had drunk its fill and cleaned its feathers, it hopped up to the handle and let his friends have a go! The three birds continued their bathing ritual for ten minutes.

Pigeons have a very bad reputation but on the contrary of what many people think thay are amongst the most intelligent birds. Wikipedia has also a very interesting entry about Pigeon Intelligence (click to read it).

I've found a passage totally awesome. It seems that according to some experiments by Watanabe, Sakamoto and Wakita, pigeons are able to distinguish paintings by Monet from paintings by Picasso! Take a read:

The birds were first trained on a limited set of paintings: when the shown painting was a Picasso, the pigeon was able to obtain food by repeated pecking; when it was a Monet, pecking had no effect. After a while, the pigeons would only peck when shown Picasso paintings. They were then able to generalize, and correctly discriminate between paintings of the two painters not previously shown, and even between cubist and impressionist paintings (cubism and impressionism being the two stylistic schools Picasso and Monet belong to). When the Monet paintings were shown upside down, the pigeons were not able to properly categorize anymore; showing the cubist works upside down did not have such an effect.
In a later paper, Watanabe showed that if pigeons and human college students undergo the same training, their performance in distinguishing between Van Gogh and Chagall paintings is comparable.
from WIKIPEDIA

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Training for the Olympics

I've always wondered how winter sports athletes could train during summer months. TIME has answered to this wonder with this nice video that shows us U.S. athletes of nine different winter sports training for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. In some cases like with the Ski Jumpers, they seem so at ease that you may wonder if the snow is really essential!

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Launching Huge Ships

Working as a sailing photographer I've attended many boat launches but always something smaller than 90 feet (mainly racing yachts). Being curious about how does the launch of a huge ship look like I've found this interesting video. Now i know that big ship's launches are a pretty terrific stuff!

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Chimeras of the digital age (part 2)

Many time ago I've published a gallery of pictures realized with Photoshop. I called theam "Chimeras of the digital age" because they were the fusion of an aquatic animal with a not aquatic one. It's time to add a second part: this time the artists have merged an aquatic animal with a vegetable! The source of both galleries is Worth1000, a famous creative contest community on the web. Every day they run a few different types of creative contests (photo-editing, photography, illustration and more). Enjoy these impossible but pretty funny creatures:

Melon Turtle

Banana Fish

PotaToad

Strawberry Frog

Apple fish

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Greenland, between sovereignty and glacial retreat

Image courtesy of Science

Greenland while being the world's largest island that is not a continent, is as well the least densely populated country in the world with just 57000 inhabitants on an area of more than two millions squared kilometres, That means that each person "has" 40 km2 just for himself...

NICK COBBING/AFP/Getty Images

Nevertheless Greenland has recently got everybody's attention for two main reasons:
First of all it's probably the place where global warming consequencies are more evident: the melting of the massive ice sheet that covered the island is quickly changing the look of greenland, bringing dreadful effects on this delicate habitat and changing dramatically the life and habits of its inhabitants; A change that involve everybody, from Inuit people to the polar bears.

REUTERS/Bob Strong

The other reason of the sudden fame of this wonderful land is that after almost 300 years under Danish rule, the island has just taken a big step toward sovereignty. Greenland passed a referendum last year requesting more powers from Copenhagen, and it was granted, taking effect on June 21st, 2009.

KELD NAVNTOFT/AFP/Getty Images

Internationally, on 21 June 2009, Greenland assumed self-determination with responsibility for self-government of judicial affairs, policing, and natural resources. Also, Greenlanders were recognized as a separate people under international law. Denmark maintains control of finances, foreign affairs, and defense. It is a step towards full independence from Danish rule. Greenlandic became the official language of Greenland at the historic ceremony.

AP Photo/POLFOTO, Jorgen Chemnitz, Sermitsiak

REUTERS/Nick Cobbing/Greenpeace

REUTERS/Bob Strong

Image courtesy of Sarah Das, WHOI

Kim Hansen / CC BY-SA

Slim ALLAGUI/AFP/Getty Images

REUTERS/Bob Strong

Kim Hansen / CC BY-SA

REUTERS/Bob Strong

Uwe Pieper / CC BY-SA

Slim ALLAGUI/AFP/Getty Images

Kim Hansen / CC BY-SA

REUTERS/Bob Strong

Slim ALLAGUI/AFP/Getty Images

Mila Zinkova / CC BY-SA

you can find other picture @ THEBIGPICTURE.COM

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China Cup 2009

©Photo: Carlo Borlenghi/China Cup

China is growing fast and strongly in practically every field, and so is for the sailing. Carlo Borlenghi's pictures lead us in a interesting journey through the third edition of the China Cup.