Photo: U2.com

This is a really cool image taken at a recent U2 concert in Cape Town where most of the 95,000 fans were captured on an incredible 5 billion pixel camera. Use the controls at the bottom to zoom right in - or around the stadium.

A nice touch is the ability for those in the crowd to identify and then tag themselves.

Very cool and gets me thinking how one of these cameras would work in the field...

Link to the site HERE

It is difficult to know what to say about the colossal events that have unfolded so far and are continuing to develop in Japan.

I had almost completed a blog on the imagery captured by the Space Shuttle Discovery on it's final voyage that ended suscessfully last week. That can wait for another day.

Instead here is a link courtesy of the Washington Post to Satellite imagery of Japan before and after the earthquake and tsunami - revealing the scale of sheer devestation across the country.

Ten years ago the final touches were being put to the very first Richard Hume website which went live in early April 2001. I thought it a good time to have a little look back over the sites evolution and realised in doing so it maps this particular period of the Internets evolution too.

Although a fairly simple HTML site it was actually pretty cool with some great innovations for the time. It was launched around the world on a relatively early wave of this new explosion that was going on called the Internet. Back in 2001 we were not long out of the ‘Ask Jeeves’ era and the enormity of Google and social media were not yet in the mix.

There wasn’t quite the ‘array of offerings’ for very high end photography that is around on the Internet today either. Certainly in the Landscape Photographer arena there were the likes of Ken Duncan, Peter Lik, Ric Steininger, Andris Apse etc. Having long admired each of these photographers works I was pleased to join them on the Internet specialising in what has become known as Fine Art Photography (representing the very finest in all aspects of photography).

It has been interesting for me to note that many of the design decisions and features that went into the very first site and subsequent versions through enhancements and upgrades have remained present and consistent through to today’s site.

Those features include but are not limited to:

Black Site/Background - Nothing like a black background to showcase photographs I have always thought, so the site has always been black

Logo - Top left for natural eye flow and both single and tiered

Front-page - Always featured large panoramic's and thumbnails below and information

Framing/Matt Board and Ecommerce Interchange - Although quite common in sites today this was quite 'advanced' back in the early 2000's

Visual Stories (image explanations) - Very few photographers would tell the viewer anything about the image back in 2001. It was easy for me to decide that I wanted to allow for explanations of the images

Fine Art Photography - From the very first site the purpose has been the same as it is today - as a showcase for Fine Art Photography

There were from my recollection approximately five ‘major’ new site/releases as technologies, platforms, capacity, possibilities, marketing etc have all developed getting us to the Internet presence of today.

The Internet itself has of course become a really exciting space with the advent of blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc all of which were figments in the imaginations of those who created them back in 2001.

It has been an exciting first ten years of richardhume.com and I look forward to the nest ten and wonder curiously where the Internet will develop to also.

Lookout next month as the actual anniversary rolls around as we are loking at some unique ways to mark the first decade.