Shadow Dancers

I think this stunning photo of vicuña, a South American animal closely related to llamas, is one of the most gorgeous, inventive portraits I've ever seen. At first I was taken by fact that the helicopter's perspective emphasizes the flatness of the desert around the animals, and only then did I notice that their shadows show their shapes like cave-drawings. This is photography as Romantic-era poetry: photographer George Steinmetz makes the world new again for us by teaching us to perceive it in an original way.

Wedding Flight

You must watch this amazing short film of the wedding flight of a virginal queen bee. It's from a new film that I'm dying to see -- More Than Honey, which explores the global crisis facing honeybees. As The Guardian site notes, the director Markus Imhoof used mini-helicopters and high-speed cameras to capture this incredible extraordinary video; "it took 10 days to get 36 seconds of footage at Heidrun Singer's hives in Austria." Thanks to their incredible patience, we have this jewel of a video:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2013/sep/06/queen-bee-wedding-flight-video