Life-Size Photo of a Blue Whale

Smivs writes "The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society have posted a navigable life-size photo of a blue whale! It will take a while to look at all of it, but it starts at the eye (which is a great idea). The picture is navigable — there is an insert of the whole picture and you can change the view by moving a cursor around — but if you just let it run, the whale will slowly 'swim' past you. It's a bit like being in a submarine with the whale going past a porthole. Definitely worth a look!"

Comments

For which screen size?

[funfail]

What does "life-size" mean? Isn't it dependent on the screen size?

A 22" monitor has %34 larger area than a 19" one. Since the whale is 3 dimensional, it translates to a difference of %55.

"Cosmic View" and "Powers of Ten"

[dpbsmith]

This calls to mind a wonderful book by one Kees Boeke... who I assume is no longer alive... published in 1957 and entitled (in its English translation, anyway) Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps. The book is a series of more-or-less realistic drawings, starting with a girl sitting in a chair in a Dutch school playground, then zooming outward, picture by picture, each picture drawn on a tenfold smaller scale than the next.

The third or fourth picture shows a blue whale, which, for some reason, managed to beach itself in the school playground.

After ascending outward to show a cluster of galaxies, it then resumes in the schoolyard, zooming inward, tenfold larger each time. I recall that the girl has a small cut on her hand--to give later opportunity to zoom in on blood corpuscles--and, again for no good reason, there happens to be a copepod (of all things) lying on the edge of the cut!

Later, the same theme, with explicit acknowledgement to Boeke, was pursued by Charles Eames and Philip Morrison in a photographically illustrated book called Powers of Ten, and an animated movie of the same title by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. The medium-scale shots are aerial photographs of Chicago's lakefront area, perhaps the Museum of Science and Industry, and I guess are undoctored photographs... no whale in it, anyway. Too bad.

Both books are absolutely marvellous, real mind-openers for nerdy kids of the right age... (Click, click) Can it really be that both are out of print? A shame...