Whoooosh*. There goes Chris Hadfield, one of my current favourite Tweeters, whizzing round the Earth at 17,500mph, covering 5 miles per second as Commander aboard the International Space Station. Since docking with the ISS on 21 December, the personable Canadian astronaut (or @Cmdr_Hadfield, as he goes by on Twitter), has been engaged in all manner of important sciencey stuff but has also been tweeting and beaming back some spectacular images as he orbits the planet every 90-odd minutes. Well worth a follow. https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield

The pics are…
1ST ROW: Approaching for docking with the ISS / Clouds and shadows on sand
2ND ROW: London / Amazon basin
3RD ROW: Australian outback / Air and pepper suspended in a water blob
4TH ROW: Wind-blown sand formations / The Mississippi entering the Gulf of Mexico

Nothing particularly new, but definitely interesting to play with. 477 hi-res images stitched together to look around the mountain with incredible detail. http://www.glacierworks.org is an interesting site as it compares historical images to present day for environmental issues (another issue not for here). Zoom around the image full screen for maximum impact.

“Private Moon” is a visual poem, telling a story about a man who found the Moon and stayed with her for the rest of his life – brought to life by this wonderfully evocative series of photographs by Leonid Tishkov, in collaboration with Boris Bendikov. Beautiful words and beautiful pictures, together creating something truly powerful.

More images here, and more information about Tishkov and the project here.

Vacationers bask in front of the wreckage of capsized cruise liner Costa Concordia. Twenty-eight people were killed when the cruise ship capsized off the coast of Italy.

A man looks outside his flooded house in the Netherlands.

Fashionistas pose for photographs in front of a homeless man outside Moynihan Station following a New York Fashion Week show in September.

A Virgin Mary is all that remains from a home that was destroyed in Breezy Point, Queens, after Hurricane Sandy.

Nik Wallenda tightroped over Niagara Falls on a 2-inch-wide wire. He’s the first person to ever cross directly over the falls from the U.S. into Canada.

Felix Baumgartner’s 24-mile free-fall from space

Before and after shots of Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy. Nearly 200,000 people lost power in downtown Manhattan for about a week.

View more amazing images here

As part of Dudson’s product portfolio and brand book, we created an image of their products flying through the air conveying the dynamic nature of their business, and this is how we did it. Look out for a full Dudson case study soon.

The Lowry exhibition opened at Nottingham’s Lakeside last week – great paintings and drawings, very atmospheric portraits and a reminder of Manchester and Salford landscapes that have largely disappeared. It’s also free!
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Global fashion brand Benetton has a track record of provocative publicity campaigns featuring striking images unrelated to its products. Remember the shot of the unwashed newborn baby still attached to its umbilical cord that features in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most controversial ad campaign of all time?

Well, it appears Benetton has lost none of its appetite for edginess. Its new campaign features images of world leaders engaged in forging closer diplomatic relationships – such as this (above) of President Obama snogging with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

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This year Linney have been working closely with Yamaha and Ben Spies from MotoGP to create images and a film made in Spain. Targeted at hard riding Supersports riders the marketing collateral was created and edited this summer.

View the website

The light trails of cars have long been a stock library stalwart, but these long exposure images of busy airports are a lovely twist on the tried and tested. I love how the trails ‘hang’ from the sky like threads of string. The collection of 16 photos were taken between July 2008 and April 2010 by photographer Terence Chang.

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Believe it or not, this image has been created, from scratch, using only Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Bert Monroy took over 2,000 hours to create this hyper-real rendering of Damen Station in Chicago (measuring 120 inches wide x 40 inches high and weighing in at just over 1.7 gigabytes), using almost 50 separate Photoshop files containing over 15,000 layers, 500 alpha channels and over 250,000 vector paths. While this undoubtedly demonstrates Bert’s astounding digital skills, someone should really buy the poor guy a decent camera.

You can see more of his work at BertMonroy.com