Inspired Photography is packed with creative ideas to enable any photographer - from enthusiast to professional - to push their work in new directions. Divided into actions, city scenes, the great outdoors, inspiring images and photographic subjects, the book describes 189 sources of inspiration that stimulate creativity and help photographers get more from their passion. You'll discover: - New subjects to shoot in the city, the countryside, the center, and the suburbs. - Original ideas to build on and personalize. - Long-term projects that will keep you and your photography inspired for months. - Quick ideas for instant photographic fun. - Concepts, styles, approaches and techniques that you've never considered with suggestions to get started and resources for further research. - And much, much more. Filled with practical suggestions and exciting ideas, Inspired Photography helps to keep your explorations in photography fresh, challenging and always creative.

An instant New York Times Bestseller! “Unreasonably entertaining . . . reveals how geometric thinking can allow for everything from fairer American elections to better pandemic planning.” —The New York Times From the New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong—himself a world-class geometer—a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything. How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play Go, and why is learning Go so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry. For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel. Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word "geometry"comes from the Greek for "measuring the world." If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world—it explains it. Shape shows us how.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research. The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe – a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels. There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500–c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods – between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds – and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience. Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: ‘Definitions, disciplines, new directions’, ‘Contexts and categories’, ‘Object studies’ and ‘Material culture in action’. This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.

Dig deep into your family history with the updated edition of this popular, informative guide! Who are my ancestors? What nationalities were they? What work did they do? Kids are always bursting with questions about their family history; they want more stories, more details, more facts. With these research ideas and creative projects, young would-be genealogists can get the knowledge they crave. Find out how to gather ancestry information on the Internet, interview family members, reach relatives through social media, check the National Archives for passenger lists of newly arrived immigrants, and uncover clues in old photos and records. Preserve the material you've gathered in an online scrapbook or create a crayon batik family tree. Keep the togetherness going by planning a family reunion, starting a family newsletter, and more.

On a summer afternoon in 2015, I was driving alone by car along the west coast from Mangalore to Goa. As I revelled at the scenery, I suddenly felt something odd. The next minute, the landscape changed tremendously. A massive wave of emotion took over forcing me to stop. The street was silent. The tree in front of me was ablaze with something I had never seen before. It beckoned. Every leaf, branch, and the trunk lit up with an unimaginable radiance. I was stunned. It was a transformative moment for me. Trees speak. And this Neem tree, growing up along the Margosa Road in the mid-1950s in Malleshwaram, has a story of her own. She develops a special affection for Balu, a child next door. A wonderful relationship develops between them. Till one day, young Balu leaves the city. She misses the little boy. Decades later, she narrates her life, their daily battles for survival, an incredible ‘social web’ that keeps the planet alive. And life in old Bengaluru. What happened to Balu? And to the tree? Did they meet again? What was her life like? What message does she share for humanity? Hear from the whispering tree.

MAKING THEIR LUCK is the personal family genealogy of the Zehetmeier family, and the story of how they immigrated from Bavaria in 1883 to settle first in the coal region of Kansas and then the harsh Oklahoma plains at the turn of the Twentieth Century. It is reflective of the common immigrant experience in America; that of leaving a country with no prospects to voyage to another in hopes of making a better life. Originally motivated to just discover his family’s place of origin in Germany, the author’s genealogical search turned into a lifetime pursuit of his family roots. From their first known ancestors in Germany, it follows their family tree to the author’s great grandfather crossing the Atlantic to settle in Kansas during its frontier times, and to later take a growing family by wagon across the plains to build a homestead in western Oklahoma. It is a journey over a path well-known to genealogists; years of detective work in libraries, archives, vital statistics, church records and family interviews to capture the story of his ancestors. He has added from local histories of the regions his family lived to gain a better perspective of their life and times. It tells of the hard scrabble existence of coal-mining, and surviving a near disaster, to cutting a sod house out of the desolate prairie to make a 160-acre homestead a place to raise a family and prosper. Far from just a ledger of names and birthdates, it describes how they worked and endured to carve out a life in a new country and set a legacy of hard work and integrity that has spanned their generations. The title itself stems from a popular family phrase: “If I only work hard enough, I’ll make my own luck.”

Penguins are, perhaps, the most loved of birds. We've been fascinated by them for just about as long as we've known they existed. When penguins are on land, their actions appear to us so humorous and expressive that we can be excused for thinking we understand them perfectly, identifying with what looks like moods and foibles similar to our own.--