Magical Miniature Worlds by Matthew Albanese

Matthew Albanese creates small-scale meticulously detailed models of outdoor scenes and landscapes using everyday, simple, mundane materials and transform them into an image through the lens of his camera making them look hyper-realistic. Albanese has used ordinary household items such as spices, cotton, colored paper, ink, steel wool and glasses to create his dioramas. We have featured Matthew Albanese’s amazing work in 2010. Here are some of his more recent creations.

Matthew Albanese stumbled upon his Strange Worlds idea by accident one day while in the kitchen at work.

“The first Strange World that I created was Paprika Mars,” Matthew details. “I had spilled paprika in the kitchen and instead of cleaning it, I was playing with it. It was the color and the texture and I just had the inspiration to create Mars out of it.”

And thus began an obsession with miniature dioramas. By day, Matthew is a professional fashion photographer. By night, he’s been creating large dioramas of tiny environments and photographing them.

Ducks Rule at Peabody Hotel, Memphis

Peabody Hotel is not just another luxury hotel in downtown Memphis in Tennessee, USA. This one has a peculiar attraction – ducks. Every day at 11 in the morning, a parade of five mallard ducks makes its way from their penthouse home on the roof of the hotel down to the lobby via the elevator. Red carpet is rolled out all the way from the elevator door to the hotel fountain made of a solid block of Italian travertine marble. The ducks frolic in the waters the entire day. At exactly 5 in the evening, the ducks are ceremoniously led back to their penthouse.

The unique tradition started in 1932, when the general manager of the time, Frank Schutt, had just returned from a weekend hunting trip in Arkansas. He and his friends thought it would be amusing to leave three of their live English Call Duck decoys in the hotel fountain. The ducks became immediately popular with hotel guests, and since then, five Mallard ducks (one male and four females) have played in the fountain every day.

Frozen Air Bubbles in Abraham Lake

Abraham Lake is an artificial lake on North Saskatchewan River in western Alberta, Canada. The lake was created in 1972, with the construction of the Bighorn Dam, and named after Silas Abraham, an inhabitant of the Saskatchewan River valley in the nineteenth century.

Abraham Lake is home to a rare phenomenon where bubbles get frozen right underneath its surface. They're often referred to as ice bubbles or frozen bubbles. This has made the lake famous among photographers.

Photographer Fikret Onal explains the phenomenon: "The plants on the lake bed release methane gas and methane gets frozen once coming close enough to much colder lake surface and they keep stacking up below once the weather gets colder and colder during [the] winter season."

Kelvin Helmholtz Clouds

Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds resemble waves breaking in the ocean. These clouds are formed between two layers of air with different densities and traveling at different speeds. If a warm, less dense layer of air exists over a layer of colder, denser air, and the wind shear across the two layers is strong enough, eddies will develop along the boundary. Evaporation and condensation of the eddies render them visible as wave shaped clouds.

The cloud is named after Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz who studied the dynamics of two fluids of different densities when a small disturbance, such as a wave, was introduced at the boundary connecting the fluids. The Kelvin–Helmholtz instability occurs not only in clouds but also in the ocean, Saturn's bands, Jupiter's Red Spot, and the sun's corona.

Stunning Pictures of Plosky Tolbachik Volcano Eruption

The Plosky Tolbachik volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the far east of Russia, has been erupting since November 27, last year, after remaining dormant for 36 years. The volcano has been spewing lava from two fissures, whose flow have destroyed several buildings including a station of the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, the Leningradskaya research base and a base of the Volcanoes of Kamchatka natural park. The erupting volcano has become a sightseeing hotspot for crowds of thrill-seeking tourists eager to see flows of lava and clouds of ash.

Two Russian daredevil photographers Liudmila and Andrey captured these stunning images while visiting the volcano with a team of volcanologists.

Waitomo Glowworm Caves, New Zealand

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves, located just outside the main Waitomo township on the North Island of New Zealand, is a famous attraction because of a sizeable population of glowworms that live in the caves. Glowworms or Arachnocampa luminosa are tiny, bioluminescent creatures that produce a blue-green light and are found exclusively in New Zealand.

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves were first explored in 1887 by local Maori Chief Tane Tinorau accompanied by an English surveyor Fred Mace. Local Maori people knew of the Caves existence, but the subterranean caverns had never been extensively explored until Fred and Tane went to investigate. They built a raft of flax stems and with candles in hand, floated into the cave where the stream goes underground.