Call it what you will, “the noughties”, “the two-thousands” or something else, the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2009) is now over. Looking back on the past ten years through news photographs, it becomes clear that it was a dramatic, often brutal decade. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks and wars were by far the most dominant theme. Ten years ago, Bill Clinton was ending his final term in office, very few had ever heard of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq – all that and much more has changed in the intervening time. It’s really an impossible task to sum up ten years in a handful of photographs, but below is my best attempt at a look back at the last decade – feel free to let me know what I missed in the comments below. (50 photos total)

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Craig Mod:

The GF1 is a near perfect travel camera.

For 16 days I lived with it strapped to me as I climbed through the valleys of central Nepal up to Annapurna Base Camp at 4,200 meters.

I covered the camera in sweat. I hit it against rocks (unintentionally). The air was often dusty and this dust, by the end of the trip, had worked its way into every nook of the GF1. And yet it performed flawlessly. Never once did it stutter or complain or fail to take an image when I asked it to. And only rarely did it take the wrong image.

The compact combination of Panasonic’s GF1 body and the 20mm f1.7 Lumix pancake lens works with you as a traveler. It’s a light, sturdy, capable, exceptionally well conceived photography kit that demands to be taken on adventures.

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The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) says it expects to restart the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by this weekend after more than a year of repairs. The 27 km (17 mi) particle accelerator was launched last year, but suffered a failure from a faulty electrical connection, damaging 53 of the smasher’s 9,300 superconducting magnets. Repairs are now completed, and the plan is to begin injecting protons into the LHC this weekend, on the path to search for particles such as predicted-yet-unobserved Higgs Boson. Collected below are some photographs of the repairs, and of the LHC and some of its experiments in various stages of construction. (30 photos total)

Fotopedia is breathing new life into photos by building a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web.

A striking triplex penthouse apartment in a clock tower overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and New York Harbor has gone on the market for $25 million. Photos.

Thx, Lex

Tomorrow Last Thursday, August 6th, marks 64 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan by the United States at the end of World War II. Targeted for military reasons and for its terrain (flat for easier assessment of the aftermath), Hiroshima was home to approximately 250,000 people at the time of the bombing. The U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” took off from Tinian Island very early on the morning of August 6th, carrying a single 4,000 kg (8,900 lb) uranium bomb codenamed “Little Boy”. At 8:15 am, Little Boy was dropped from 9,400 m (31,000 ft) above the city, freefalling for 57 seconds while a complicated series of fuse triggers looked for a target height of 600 m (2,000 ft) above the ground. At the moment of detonation, a small explosive initiated a super-critical mass in 64 kg (141 lbs) of uranium. Of that 64 kg, only .7 kg (1.5 lbs) underwent fission, and of that mass, only 600 milligrams was converted into energy – an explosive energy that seared everything within a few miles, flattened the city below with a massive shockwave, set off a raging firestorm and bathed every living thing in deadly radiation. Nearly 70,000 people are believed to have been killed immediately, with possibly another 70,000 survivors dying of injuries and radiation exposure by 1950. Today, Hiroshima houses a Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum near ground zero, promoting a hope to end the existence of all nuclear weapons. (34 photos total)

• Remembering Apollo 11 at The Big Picture
• John Noble Wilford, who covered the Apollo 11 mission for The New York Times, narrates a look back at the historic journey.
• One Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar. The New York Times
• Maps of the Apollo 11 moon walks superimposed on a soccer pitch and a baseball diamond. (Re-link from January)
• Extreme profanity at it’s best: The Onion reports on the Moon landing.
• Apollo 11 40th anniversary at NASA.gov

The Boston Herald reported on the new site today:

Families crowded around black-and-white television sets in 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong take man’s first steps on the moon.

Now, they’ll be able to watch the Apollo 11 mission recreated in real time on the Web, follow Twitter feeds of transmissions between Mission Control and the spacecraft, and even get an e-mail alert when the lunar module touches down. Those features are part of a new Web site from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum commemorating the moon mission and Kennedy’s push to land Americans there first.

“Putting a man on the moon really did unite the globe,” said Thomas Putnam, director of the JFK Library. “We hope to use the Internet to do the same thing.”

The Web site — WeChooseTheMoon.org — goes live at 8:02 a.m. Thursday, 90 minutes before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It will track the capsule’s route from the Earth to the Moon, ending with the moon landing and Armstrong’s walk — in real time, but 40 years later. Internet visitors can see animated recreations of key events from the four-day mission, including when Apollo 11 first orbits the moon and when the lunar module separates from the command module, as well as browse video clips and photos and hear the radio transmission between the astronauts and NASA flight controllers.

The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. I actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90’s as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of my home town. I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.

(via treehugger)

Mark C. Lee in 1992 in the first untethered spacewalk in a decade. NASA.

The Lens blog, just a few weeks before the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11:

“You can’t bring back anything tangible besides those photographs as a record of where you’ve been and what you’ve done,” he said. (Souvenirs like moon rocks are strictly against protocol.) “We’re given this god’s-eye view, so we need to learn how to capture it and bring it back home.”

What started modestly has become part of every mission. Though digital cameras have replaced film cameras, many early photographs taken by astronauts have become iconic — such as an Apollo image of the earth seen behind the moon’s horizon in 1968 and Buzz Aldrin’s photo of his landmark footprint on the surface of the moon. Mike Gentry, a photo researcher and librarian at the Johnson Space Center in Houston since 1969, said that a photograph of the framed iris of Earth from 1972, known as the “blue marble,” is quite possibly the most reproduced image ever taken.

NASA has lots more in its archive.

Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.

On Monday, May 11, after months of delays and preparation, NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from the Kennedy Space Center on the final servicing mission to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The seven crew members left Florida for low Earth orbit at 2:01 pm, for a scheduled 11-day mission, including 5 days of Extra-vehicular activity (EVAs) to work on the Hubble. 31 photos total.

A quick search for “1979″ turns up nearly 150,000 snapshots from the year I was brought into this world by the best parents any son could ask for. Thanks Mom and Dad. And happy birthday to me.

It’s history in real time. It’s a glimpse into one of the most open and most private homes in the world. And best of all: the photographs are made by official White House photographer Pete Souza who also shot the president during Regan’s years. He knows where to be, how to be there, and knows history when he sees it.

Great signature, too.

As winter begins to wind down, we are still in the middle of sled dog racing season. The Iditarod in Alaska had its ceremonial start in Anchorage last Saturday (the 7th), the Yukon Quest race from Canada’s Yukon Territory to Alaska took place back in mid-February, and the Can-Am Crown races were held in Maine only a couple of weeks ago. The most well-known of the races, the Iditarod Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, covers 1,868 km (1,161 mi), and takes anywhere from 8 to 12 days for mushers and their teams of 16 dogs to complete. Collected here are several photos from recent sled dog races and training sessions around the Northern Hemisphere. (28 photos total)

The Big Picture:

The state of Victoria in southern Australia has recently been hit with hundreds of bush fires during a record-breaking heatwave – temperatures well above 38°C (100°F). Unfortunately, these fires have proved to be the deadliest in Australian history, with at least 166 deaths reported so far. The fires mostly appear to have been started by lightning – however a few appear to have been arson, and are under investigation – entire towns being declared crime scenes. Twenty-four fires are still burning, and authorities warn that the death toll will likely rise. (36 photos total)

Today we are releasing the new official portrait for President Barack Obama.

It was taken by Pete Souza, the newly-announced official White House photographer.

It is the first time that an official presidential portrait was taken with a digital camera.

EXIF data:

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, taken 2009:01:13 17:38:39

No flash, 105.0mm focal length, 1/125 exp, f/10.0, ISO100

(via DF)

NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour recently returned to the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after its successful mission to the International Space Station. The shuttle, being a reusable spacecraft, has a cycle of preparation, execution and recovery – Endeavour has been through this cycle 22 times now, since 1992. Here is a look at one full cycle for one space shuttle, starting with the landing of Endeavour from its previous mission (STS-123) on March 26th, and ending with its return to Florida 9 months (and 6.6 million miles) later, after mission STS-126. (31 photos total)

(via Matador Pulse)

On October 30, 2008, “Snowstorm Leopard” was named best overall photo in the 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, which is organized by the Natural History of London and BBC Wildlife Magazine.

“This is the hardest story I have ever done because of the altitude and the steepness of the mountains,” the U.S. photographer told National Geographic. “At night it was 30 below zero [Fahrenheit].”

Over ten months Winter’s 14 “camera traps” shot more than 30,000 frames in pursuit of the endangered cat.

(via Inman)