The photographs of Russian chemist and photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, show Russia on the eve of World War I and the coming of the revolution. From 1909-1912 and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled across the Russian Empire, documenting life, landscapes and the work of Russain people. His images were to be a photographic survey of the time. He travelled in a special train car transformed into a dark room to process his special process of creating color images, a technology that was in its infancy in the early 1900’s. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, after the Russian Revolution had destroyed the Empire he spent years documenting. To learn more about the Prokudin-Gorskii, the process he used to create the color photographs, and see his collection, you can visit the Library of Congress, who purchased his glass negatives in 1948 after his death in 1944.

View of the monastery from Svetlitsa Island, Saint Nil Stolbenskii Monastery, Lake Seliger; 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Peasant girls, Russian Empire. Three young women offer berries to visitors to their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River, near the town of Kirillov; 1909 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Trans-Siberian Railway metal truss bridge on stone piers, over the Kama River near Perm, Ural Mountains Region; ca. 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Cotton textile mill interior with machines producing cotton thread, probably in Tashkent; between 1905 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Man and camel loaded with packs; between 1905 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Three yurts, man seated in doorway of yurt in foreground; between 1905 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Altar side of the Dmitrievskii Cathedral, Vladimir; 1911 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Bashkir switchman; 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Isfandiyar, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva), full-length portrait, in uniform, seated on chair, outdoors; between 1910 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Austrian prisoners of war near a barrack, near Kiappeselga; 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Church in the village of Shaidoma; 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Photographer posing with two others; 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Shuia River; 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

In Little Russia (Ukraine); between 1905 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara, seated holding sword; between 1905 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Log buildings in the Ural Mountain Region; between 1905 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Corner tower of the Trinity Cathedral in the Solovetskii Monastery, Solovetski Islands; 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Boy standing by wooden gatepost; 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Work at the Bakalskii mine; 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Bashkir’s yard, Ekhia; 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Rafts on the Peter the Great Canal. City of Shlisselburg, Russian Empire; 1909 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

City of Cherdyn; 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Old church of Saint Nicholas the Wonder Worker, Nyrob; 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

Church in Vetluga settlement; 1910 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress). <—read more—>

Description:
Stock Photos: Landscape with fresh green grass and trees, with a bit of cloud in a blue sky.
Keywords:
Landscape, Grass,Park, Outdoors, Tree, Green, Blue, Nature, Nobody, Wide Angle, Colour, Empty, Open, Expanse, Horizontal

Also available at one or more of the following excellent stock sites:
www.istockphoto.com/pdtnc
www.shutterstock.com/?rid=59135
www.dreamstime.com/resp131585
www.fotolia.co.uk/p/47653/partner/47653
www.stockxpert.com/?ref=pdtnc
www.bigstockphoto.com/?refid=jqNKkUDsgl
www.canstockphoto.com/?r=16050
www.123rf.com/src_pdtnc
www.yaymicro.com/register.action?referredBy=pdtnc

no kidding…… I was just creating a post and checking my stats first.  I love my stats, even tho they aren’t really big (yet).  While I was running my cursor over the individual days, I wondered it there was a way to see if I posted that day and,  wala….. I come back later and now the cursor shows what post I uploaded that day.  How very, very cool of WordPress.com.

Rainbow over Lama

This space will is reserved for a list of 3d and 2d editing software that I’ll drop in here in the near future, and/or build over time. I don’t have time to list it all right now, but am putting this here as a sort of reminder to myself to come back here later and add more. There’s tons of great 3d and 2d freeware and shareware out there as well as higher end stuff. I’ve played around with quite a bit of it and will post my comments on each one I have some experience with here.
…
Blender – http://www.blender.org/
Gimp -http://www.gimp.org/
Wings 3d – http://www.wings3d.com/
Project Dogwaffle http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/free/index.html
cinepaint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinePaint

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_graphics_editors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_modeling_software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_raster_graphics_editors

Over the last few years, I’ve been an active member of a lot of various forums… I’ll try to post my Profiles for the various forums here in the not-too-distant future. This post might be edited a lot over time as I add more forum memberships to the list. Every forum that I’m in has a fairly highly active community of people that share one or more of the hobbies that I love.

I’ll try to post them all here because honestly, I sometimes forget the urls to some of the places, and/or forget to visit some of them after I leave them a month or many months…. I’m doing this to sort of consolidate all of my online activity to this one blog more and make it easier for people and myself to follow my online identity easier. I’m also doing it to help folks that share some of my hobbies or interests know where to go to find other people besides me that share similar interests. I know, you might say, but that’s just calling for identity theft. I don’t really think so since most of these places are places you can find out about me anyways just with a quick google or forum search.

Entropia Universe Related Forums
http://www.entropiaforum.com/forums/members/mastermesh.html - Entropia Forum is probably the largest and most active communities related to Entropia Universe that exists today. Entropia Planets is trying to take it’s spot, but I highly doubt it can since Entropiaplanets is new, and mostly has content that is being copied from Entropiaforum.

http://www.entropiaplanets.com/forums/member.php?u=145 - Entropiaplanets is another Entropia related Forum. As mentioned above, it’s new. The people that started it are actually members of Entropia Forum. I’m known as mastermesh there.

3d Related Forums
http://forums.cgsociety.org - CG Talk is a highly active community of artists in the 3d animation industry. It’s probably one of the most active members of professional level artists in this field that I’ve ever come across. Over here I used to be known as mastermesh or meshmaster, but one or both of those got banned for inactivity or something – probably because I did not log in for over a year or something at some point in time, so my new account there is known as jeffthomann.

http://www.3dbuzz.com – I’m known as mastermesh on 3d buzz. 3d Buzz is a tutorial and learning website community related to 3d software packages. It’s was one of the first and best places online to offer free 3d training in the form of downloadable videos. I don’t visit here much these days, but do come back occassionally.

Public Domain Related
http://librivox.org/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=7570&sid=dd69261e6f95b53f261932dec392ada3 - I’m on librivox as mastermesh, but have not done a lot of recordings there yet. The goal of Librivox is to have people voice record open source documents off of Project Guttenburg (and possibly other places) so that there is a human voice in these Public Domain documents that is more accessible and easier for people to listen to and relate to. Project Gutenburg has some automated voice recordings that were created with text to voice technology, but that all sounds robotic and messy. The technology is getting better, but has a long ways to go. To bypass that need for the tech to develop, Librivox is just asking people to read, record, and upload… Can’t get more human sounding than a recording of a live human voice.

http://www.pdsounds.org/users/mastermesh - PD sounds is a Public Domain sound archive. It is related to Librivox because some of the folks that set it up are actually from Librivox. The point of PD sounds is for people to record various things and upload them to share with one another. At this point in time, it’s not highly active since there’s not a lot of people in the community there. Perhaps you can help that out by joining and uploading some sounds. All you need is some sort of recording device… a cell phone maybe… maybe a voice recorder… even a tape recorder or mic on your computer would work.

Free-To-Air Satellite Forum
http://www.satelliteguys.us/member.php?u=43610 – I’m mastermesh on satelliteguys.us. I love the forums over there because it’s one of the few free-to-air forums on the interenet that encourages people to use ethics, and not illegal hack their equipment to pull in subscription pay tv channels from Dish Network, Direct Tv, Bell Express Vu, and whatever other pay tv channels are up there in the sky that hackers try to bypass the security on. There’s lots of legit and legal, truly free, satellite channels and feeds up there… no need to hack it and go illegal and take a chance of jail or huge fees just to see a silly tv station. There’s no as many stations as there used to be now that Equity, and it’s Retro TV Network (RTN) stations went under… but there’s still a lot up there, and more will likely come in the future.

Playon.

Digital Painting
http://www.mattepainting.org/vb/member.php?s=a11f3eb93316a2468a96bc19ac4c0d42&u=2739 – I’m mastermesh on mattepainting.org. I have not posted much there, but would like to do that more, and actually learn the secrets of the art of matte painting. It’s a nice, highly realistic art form that combines painting and theater along with computer technology, so it’s right up my alley.

More forum links and descriptions will be added here over time…

Turbosquid

I have over 9000 total published assets at Turbosquid at this point in time. I’m always adding more now and then. I love walking around with a digital camera taking texture photos of wood grain, bricks, concrete, asphalt, and a lot of different things, and taking reference shots of clouds and a lot of other things now and then. I also love taking a camera with me on vacation to various places around the country to shoot as many things as I can. I see the camera as a simple little “light” version of a sketchbook for me. I have always been interested in texture photos and can fondly remember finding out about texture photos the first time by visiting websites way back in the early 1990s when this stuff was all brand new and everyone was using early versions of photoshop that could not do much. Most of my photos on turbosquid are taken directly out of a camera card, without edits. I do sometime edit if I need to remove some copyrighted or trademarked element from a photo, but these days, I’m mainly trying to stay away from putting that stuff in the lens in the first place.

I took this last winter in San Cristobal, New Mexico during a very, very cold winter storm.  I had one small feeder up on the porch with just small black sunflower seeds in it.  That day all these little juncos and chickadees as well showed up trying to stay in the lee of the storm under our porch.  So I got busy with my camera

I just added this shot to my site on RedBubble.com.

I will be giving information on these processes on this page http://retrostock.wordpress.com/alternative-printing-processes/

© Pdtnc | istockphoto.com

Description:
Stock Photo: New life from Fern leaf, slowly unfirls with selective focus from sweetspot lens.

Keywords:
lensbaby,sweetspot,Focus,Differential Focus,Nobody,Defocussed,Softness,Fern,Leaf,New Life,Life,Freshness,Nature,Flora,Bracken,Green,Horizontal

Also available at one or more of the following excellent stock sites:
www.istockphoto.com/pdtnc
www.shutterstock.com/?rid=59135
www.dreamstime.com/resp131585
www.fotolia.co.uk/p/47653/partner/47653
www.stockxpert.com/?ref=pdtnc
www.bigstockphoto.com/?refid=jqNKkUDsgl
www.canstockphoto.com/?r=16050
www.123rf.com/src_pdtnc
www.yaymicro.com/register.action?referredBy=pdtnc

© Photographer: Pdtnc | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Stock Photo: Bright eyed white dog looking attentive on grass background.

Keywords:
animal, attentive, black, bright, canine, collar, dog, eyes, grass, green, mouth, nobody, nose, obedient, outdoors, pet, playing, red, tag, toy, white

Also available at one or more of the following excellent stock sites:
www.istockphoto.com/pdtnc
www.shutterstock.com/?rid=59135
www.dreamstime.com/resp131585
www.fotolia.co.uk/p/47653/partner/47653
www.stockxpert.com/?ref=pdtnc
www.bigstockphoto.com/?refid=jqNKkUDsgl
www.canstockphoto.com/?r=16050
www.123rf.com/src_pdtnc
www.yaymicro.com/register.action?referredBy=pdtnc

pdtnc © Photographer  | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free Stock Photos: Old Japanese book from meiji period with chopsticks and Japanese maple leaf.

Keywords:
age, aged, background, binding, book, bound, broken, brown, chopsticks, cover, crease, dirt, dirty, fold, folded, folds, grunge, inside, jap, japan, japanese, kanji, layer, leaf, maple, meiji, mildew, mould, nihongo, old, overlay, page, paper, pdtnc, scan, scuffed, stitched, subtle, texture, thread, torn, wrinkles, writing

Well, the last of this years Christmas themed stock imagery at iStockphoto.com is working its way through the queue.  I think the below two series really came out well and can be used for a variety of different holiday related advertising.

The first was created specifically for the iStockphoto Vetta collection, and the editors agreed with that goal on most of the images (so that means there’s some bargain pricing on the rest ).  I spent hours cutting holes and poking Christmas lights through a red velvet background.  I hired local artist Tamara Tungate to do hair and makeup for this series and she did a great job.  I think it turned out really well, with lots of copyspace for designers.

The next Santa Elf series is more “fun” and these images can be used to accompany, say, newspaper ads with a white background.  Or as borders above a website.   We’ve got themes like, “running out of time”, “stacks of gifts” and “money”.  This 20 something year old model does great expressions and really adds energy to this kind of imagery.

So, that will probably do it for new Christmas imagery this year.  I am shooting a big Christmas set up this weekend, but I’m going to be tucking that away for next August .  You can find the above images in the search linked below.  Thanks!

pdtnc © Photographer | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free Stock Photos: Hand prints made with screen printing ink. Drippy Splatty Goodness made with Ink on coated paper and scanned at high res. Painted elements for your compositions and grungy backgrounds.

Keywords:
background, big, black, borders, brush, brushed, decay, element, fat, frame, frames, grunge, grungy, lines, marks, mono, paint, painted, scrap, shapes, strokes, watercolour, abstract, dabs, daub, evidence, finger, fingered, fingers, forensic, grunge, hand, hands, ink, layer, mono, paint, palm, prints, scrapbook, smear, smudge, touch, touched, white, blobs, border, drip, dripping, drops, element, frame, fuzzy, grunge, ink, mono, paint, paper, splat, splatter, splodge, streaks, texture, wet

I’ve been on RedBubble.com now for less than a year and it’s an awesome site.  It’s free, it’s friendly and it’s easy to use.  They are constantly trying to make using their site to showcase and sell your work, easier all the time.   The card I bought thru them was soooooo thick and nice.  What wonderful quality.   There are over 1700 groups you can add you photographs, artwork, writing and tee-shirts.  Yeah did I mention that you can make and design tee-shirts to sell on RedBubble?  If you are a writer, they have tons of groups for all kinds of your thoughts, poems, short stories.  And the fellow artists are wonderfully responsive to newbies, oldies and everyone in between.  Give them a look and tell me what you think, or better yet go visit and leave me a comment.  (Everyone loves comments).  The  group  called New Mexico has just added three of my photos on the feature page (for that group) at one time.

these are the three that are featured all at the same time in the group New Mexico @RedBubble.com.  Check it out.

© Photographer | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free stock photo: Seaweed on rock at the beach
Keywords:
background, beach, element, growing, natural, plant, rock, sea, seaweed, texture, water, weed

© Photographer | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free Stock Photos of Beijing and the Great Wall of China.
Keywords:
ancient, architecture, beihai, beijing, bowl, bowuguan, building, chairman, china, chinese, city, clear, communism, communist, communists, courtyard, cultural, dynasty, emperor, flag, forbidden, gate, gugon, heavenly, historic, history, imperial, landmark, mandarin, mao, ming, monument, neehow, ornate, pagoda, palace, park, pavilion, peace, peking, peoples, prc, qing, red, republic, revolution, roof, shang, shrine, sky, square, summer, temple, tianamen, tiananmen, tree, water, zedong, ancient, asia, asian, beijing, border, built, china, chinese, east, fronteer, great, greatwall, hike, mandarin, mountains, old, peking, stone, trek, walk, wall

pdtnc © Photographer | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free Stock Photo Cloth wiped watercolour paint on paper, scanned at high res.
Keywords:
background, brushed, element, grunge, layer, overlay, paint, pink, smear, smudge, swirl, texture, watercolour, wipe

pdtnc © Photographer | Agency: istockphoto.com

Description:
Stock Photo: Close-up of Lichen on rocks shot with sweetspot lens, Lensbaby.
Keywords:
lensbaby,sweetspot,Focus,Differential Focus,Nobody,Defocussed,Softness,Lichen,Litchen,Moss,Fungus,Macro,Close-Up,Grey,Flora,Nature,Rock,Stone

Also available at one or more of the following excellent stock sites:
www.istockphoto.com/pdtnc
www.shutterstock.com/?rid=59135
www.dreamstime.com/resp131585
www.fotolia.co.uk/p/47653/partner/47653
www.stockxpert.com/?ref=pdtnc
www.bigstockphoto.com/?refid=jqNKkUDsgl
www.canstockphoto.com/?r=16050
www.123rf.com/src_pdtnc
www.yaymicro.com/register.action?referredBy=pdtnc

© Photographer | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free Stock Photo of ‘Glow Wire’ being shaken and moved in the darkness.
Keywords:
aura,red, beam, black, blue, blur, clean, corona, dark, darkness, energize, energy, expression, fluorescence, fuze, ghost, glo, glow, half, illuminated, illumination, incandescence, inner, layer, light, luminescence, physics, pure, radiation, ray, science, scintillation, signal, source, stick, streamer, swoosh, texture, visible, visual, waved, wire, woosh

© Photographer | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free Stock Photo Bright pinky Orange Sea buoy.
keywords:
beach, buoy, fishing, float, mooring, orange, pink, rope, sand, sea, tether, water

© Photographer | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free Stock Photo: Mono prints created on a glass sheet with watercolour paint, scanned at high res.

Keywords:
background, brushed, coloured, element, grunge, layer, mono-print, overlay, pain,t smear, smudge, swirl, texture, watercolour, watercolour, wipe

© Photographer | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Description:
Free Stock Photo: Polyurethane Scan, liquid print sealer left to try out in drip patterns
Keywords:
background, drip, element, grunge, high, layer, plastic, polyurethane, res, runs, scan, slime