“ To an observer in space, humanity's footprints on the surface of the Earth are large and varied. They include the regular patterns of irrigated cropland, straight lines of roads and railways running across continents, reservoirs on river systems, and the cement rectangles of ports and seawalls along coastlines. But what about humanity's signature footprint - cities? By day, cities viewed from space can blend into the countryside, or appear as gray smudges, depending on the style of development and size of the urban area.”

Cities at night: the view from space

Fragile Earth, views of a changing world:

Fragile Earth

I have seen these pictures before somewhere, maybe on the BBC:

Pieter Hugo Photography

A selection of the best images from the first four years of the Travel Photographer of the Year competition:

Travel photographer of the year

A photoblog by Ryan Keberly:

The Snowsuit Effort

Faces of Metropolitan Detroit.

“ An annual contest for the best microphotographs of living (or once living) things.”

Microphotographs of Living Things

“ Macro shots of various insects or bugs. All the shots are taken in my garden. ”

Insects macros

The Smithsonian's online exhibition of satellite imagery:

Earth from space

Via Ace Jet 170:

• Science & Society - picture library
• Ken Garland

“ In 1952, Thomas Eisner, a graduate student at Harvard, drove around North America for two months with a fellow student, Edward O. Wilson, to see the country and its insects. For the past half century, Dr. Eisner, now an emeritus professor at Cornell, continued his travels in the fields of entomology, evolutionary biology, chemical ecology and conservation. Some of his best-known research was on the explosive chemical outburst of the bombardier beetle, which he and his colleagues analyzed and photographed.”

Eye-Catching Images of Nature

“ We have compiled a collection of thousands of the most important photographs of the last 150 years; pictures of our struggles, trials, and triumphs. We can only fully understand our history by gazing into the eyes of the people that made that history.”

Picture History

“ The institution of photography in Ceylon was first established in the mid 1840's and was practiced quite extensively towards the end of the 19th Century. During that period there were dozens of local and foreign artist who took up the challenge to record the daily events which took place in the beautiful and mysterious island of Ceylon in the form of a photographic image.”

Images of Ceylon

Nothomyrmecia macrops - Dinosaur Ant - South Australia

Beautiful pictures of insects on myrmecos (and also links to other similar web sites).

“ My heart feels heavy as I present these portraits of the poorest of the poor of India. My father documented these portraits, not for the Internet, not for the money or artistic effort, but with a sense of history in his mind. “In a few years, it will be hard for us to believe that we lived amongst people like these” he once wrote to me. The subjects in this series are mostly uneducated, poor, and never been in front of a camera.”

Never been photographed

Underwater Image Competition 2006
link to a shortlist of ten entries per each of the five categories

SERPENT's permanent gallery of images split into regions: image gallery

Beautiful Earth images:

• Blue Marble explained
• Blue Marble, next generation
• Visible Earth
• Earth Observatory

A web site dedicated to clouds:

I have added some more pics of Shanghai in the photo archive.

I took a few pics of two serpent eagles flying over the house. I have published one in the usual place in the menu column, the other it's here: