February 10, 2013 by bpwilliams72

The largest wave ever surfed?

I’ve always loved Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow’s surf and shooting action movie in which Patrick Swayze leads the ex-Presidents, a gang of surfer criminals who are infiltrated by rookie cop Keanu Reeves. There’s lots of mystical man-bonding and heroics, but somehow it does manage to capture the amazing power of the ocean and the thrill of hunting for that perfect wave.

On Tuesday 29th January, Keali’i Mamala towed out Garrett McNamara to surf on the monster swells off Praia do Norte, Nazaré, Portugal.

McNamara held the record for the largest wave ever surfed, a 90-foot beast also caught at Nazaré. What he may or may not have known, was that he was just about to break his own record, surfing a Leviathan wave that, as a body boarder more used to Cornish summer swells, I can barely contemplate: 100 feet high.

To give you an idea how tall that is, it’s roughly seven Routemaster buses stacked on top of each other.

This trailer gives you an idea of how the sea looked that day:

And this is the wave in question, with McNamara surfing it:

Extraordinary.

January 7, 2013 by bpwilliams72

The natural world art of Svetlana Ivanchenko

The pictures below blew me away. Blogger Spooky, on the site Oddity Central, gives a brief biography:

Svetlana Ivanchenko is a talented Ukrainian artist who uses overlooked natural materials like sand, seashells, quartz, tree roots and tree bark to create wonderful mosaics that look almost painted by hand.

Born and raised in Yalta, on the shores of the Black Sea, Ivanchenko was always fascinated by the abundance of natural materials that surrounded her. She studied at the Crimean Art School, under the supervision of renowned artist Sergei Bokaeva, and later graduated from the Glukhivskiy Pedagogical Institute. The artist currently based in the city of Dnepropetrovsk uses a variety of sand, shells, quartz and tree parts to create amazing works of art inspired by her place of birth and the warmth of the female body. It’s hard to believe, but every little piece of material used to create the artworks is placed by hand, and no coloring other than that of the composing elements is used.

As Pinar from My Modern Metropolis notes, Svetlana “merges the various textures and colors brilliantly, making it difficult to imagine the frames being made of anything else.” Her natural masterpieces have been exhibited in international galleries, and many of them reside in the private collections of connaisseurs in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Estonia and the Dominican Republic.

Enjoy them.

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October 28, 2011 by bpwilliams72

Otterly brilliant picture

Over the years, the Metro newspaper has had some great pictures in it. Today’s Metro had another example of brilliant wildlife photography with sea otters snoozing off the coast of Moss Landing, California. Beautiful!