World's Famous Snaps Till Now

Afghan Girl [1984]

And of course the afghan girl, picture shot by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. Sharbat Gula was one of the students in an informal school within the refugee camp; McCurry, rarely given the opportunity to photograph Afghan women, seized the opportunity and captured her image. She was approximately 12 years old a t the time. She made it on the cover of National Geographic next year, and her identity was discovered in 1992.

Photographer: Steve McCurry

Omayra Sánchez [1985]

Omayra Sánchez was one of the 25,000 victims of the Nevado del Ruiz (Colombia) volcano whic h eru pted on November 14, 1985. The 13-year old had been trapped in water and concret e for 3 days. The picture was taken shortly before she died and it caused controver sy due to the photographer's work and the Col ombian government's inaction in the mid st of the tragedy, when it was published world wide after the yo ung girl's death.

Photographer: Frank Fournier

Portrait of Winston Churchill [1941]

This photograph was taken b y Yousuf Karsh, a Canadian photographer, when Winston Churchill came to Ottawa. The portrait of Churchill brought Karsh international fame. It is claimed to be the most reproduced photographic port rait in history. It also appeared on the cover of Lif e magazine.

Photograph from: Yousuf Karsh

The plight of Kosovo refugees [1999]

The photo is part of The Washington Pos t's Pulitzer Prize-winning entry (2000) showing how a Kosovar refugee Agim Shala, 2, is passed through a barbed wire fence into the hands of grandparents at a camp run by United Arab Emi rates in Kukes, Albania. The members of the Shala family were reunited here after fleeing the conflict in Kosovo.

Photographer: Carol Guzy

Stricken child crawling towards a food camp [1994]

The photo is the "Pulitzer Prize" winning photo taken in 1994 during the Sudan Famine.
The picture depicts stricken child crawling towards an United Nations food camp, located a kilometer away. The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat him. This picture shocked the whole world. No one knows what happened to the child, including the photographer Kevin Carter who
Left the place as soon as the photograph was taken. Three months later he committed suicide due to depression.

Photographer: Kevin Carter

Burning Monk - The Self-Immolation [1963]

June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon to bring attention to the repressive policies of the Catholic Diem regime that controlled the South Vietnamese government at the time. Buddhist monks asked the regime to lift its ban on flying the traditional Buddhist flag, to grant Buddhism the same rights as Catholicism, to stop detaining Buddhists and to give Buddhist monks and nuns the right to practice and spread their religion. While burning Thich Quang Duc never moved a muscle.

Photographer: Malcolm Browne

Bliss [~2000]

Bliss is the name of a photograph of a landscape in Napa County, California, east of Sonoma Valley. It contains rolling green hills and a blue sky with stratocumulus and cirrus clouds. The image is used as the default computer wallpaper for the "Luna" theme in Windows XP. The photograph was taken by the professional photographer Charles O'Rear, a resident of St. Helena in Napa County, for digital-design company HighTurn. O'Rear has also taken photographs of Napa Valley for the May 1979 National Geographic Magazine article Napa, Valley of the Vine. O'Rear's photograph inspired Windows XP's US$ 200 million advertising campaign Yes you can.


Photographer: Charles O'Rear

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire [1911]

Picture of bodies at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Company rules were to keep doors closed to the factory so workers (mostly immigrant women) couldn't leave or steal. When a fire ignited, disaster struck. 146 people died that day.

Photographer: International Ladies Garmet workers Union !



JALLIANWALA BAGH MASSACRE - INDIA
The Jallianwala Bagh Gathering: More than 5000 people gathered in Amritsar in Panjab in April 1919 to discuss freedom. On 13th April they gathered at a garden known as The Jallianwala Bagh. No sooner they heard of the meeting, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer reached the spot with sixty-five Gurkha and twenty-five Baluchi soldiers with fifty rifles. He also brought two armored vehicles fitted with machine guns. The garden was an enclosed space with only one exit which was now blocked by the soldiers.
Dyer did not warn the crowd. Nor did he allow them to leave. Rather, he asked the men to fire at the crowd from this close range. More than 1650 bullets were fired upon the bodies of the crowd of 15,000 to 20,000 from close range. The firing stopped only when the ammunition was exhausted. There was death all over, and close to 1000 were killed on the spot and more than 1500 were seriously injured. There was such a stampede that hundreds of people fell into a well in the compound from which more than 120 dead-bodies were eventually pulled out.
Never had such a barbaric order been given in India by a British officer.Though the crowd was totally unarmed, General Dyer claimed that he was attacked by a revolutionary army. He made it clear that he had gone to the place with the with a plan of opening fire upon this helpless crowd.He even said that he would have used the machine-guns on this helpless crowd, but could not do so because he could not move them to position via the narrow passage that led to the place of gathering.
Though it became clear that he had trespassed all norms of humanity, and though he was asked to resign from his position in India, he was greatly honored when he reached Britain. A very large sum of money and much honor was also given to him. This only made the Indians more committed to their cause to get freedom from Britain. Finally on 15th August 1947 India became a nation free from the rule of Britain.
Today Jallianwala Bagh is a national monument and it attracts a large number of visitors. Many marks of bullets fired by Dyer’s mean are visible there even today.

Festival of lights marked the world (outside INDIA)

In each legend, myth and story of Deepawali lies the significance of the victory of good over evil, and it is with each Deepawali and the lights that illuminate our homes and hearts, that this simple truth finds new reason and hope. From darkness unto light — the light that empowers us to commit ourselves to good deeds, that which brings us closer to divinity. During Diwali, lights illuminate every corner of India and the scent of incense sticks hangs in the air, mingled with the sounds of fire-crackers, joy, togetherness and hope. Diwali is celebrated around the globe. Outside India, it is more than a Hindu festival, it’s a celebration of South-Asian identities. If you are away from the sights and sounds of Diwali, light a diya, sit quietly, shut your eyes, withdraw the senses, concentrate on this supreme light and illuminate the soul.

Fantastic Natural Phenomena

The classical natural wonders are huge and hard to miss - vast canyons, giant mountains and the like Many of the most fantastic natural phenomena, however, are also least easy to spot. Some are incredibly rare while others are located in hard-to-reach parts of the planet. From moving rocks to mammatus clouds and red tides to fire rainbows, here are seven of the most spectacular phenomenal wonders of the natural world.

1) Sailing Stones
The mysterious moving stones of the packed-mud desert of Death Valley have been a center of scientific controversy for decades. Rocks weighing up to hundreds of pounds have been known to move up to hundreds of yards at a time. Some scientists have proposed that a combination of strong winds and surface ice account for these movements. However, this theory does not explain evidence of different rocks starting side by side and moving at different rates and in disparate directions. Moreover, the physics calculations do not fully support this theory as wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour would be needed to move some of the stones.
2) Columnar Basalt

When a thick lava flow cools it contracts vertically but cracks perpendicular to its directional flow with remarkable geometric regularity - in most cases forming a regular grid of remarkable hexagonal extrusions that almost appear to be made by man. One of the most famous such examples is the Giant's Causeway on the coast of Ireland (shown above) though the largest and most widely recognized would be Devil's Tower in Wyoming .. Basalt also forms different but equally fascinating ways when eruptions are exposed to air or water.


3) Blue Holes

Blue holes are giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation that get their name from the dark and foreboding blue tone they exhibit when viewed from above in relationship to surrounding waters. They can be hundreds of feet deep and while divers are able to explore some of them they are largely devoid of oxygen that would support sea life due to poor water circulation - leaving them eerily empty. Some blue holes, however, contain ancient fossil remains that have been discovered, preserved in their depths.


4) Red Tides

Red tides are also known as algal blooms - sudden influxes of massive amounts of colored single-cell algae that can convert entire areas of an ocean or beach into a blood red color. While some of these can be relatively harmless, others can be harbingers of deadly toxins that cause the deaths of fish, birds and marine mammals. In some cases, even humans have been harmed by red tides though no human exposure are known to have been fatal. While they can be fatal, the constituent phytoplankton in ride tides are not harmful in small numbers.


5) Ice Circles



While many see these apparently perfect ice circles as worthy of conspiracy theorizing, scientists generally accept that they are formed by eddies in the water that spin a sizable piece of ice in a circular motion. As a result of this rotation, other pieces of ice and flotsam wear relatively evenly at the edges of the ice until it slowly forms into an essentially ideal circle. Ice circles have been seen with diameters of over 500 feet and can also at times be found in clusters and groups at different sizes as shown above.


6) Mammatus Clouds

True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system. Typically composed primarily of ice, they can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction and individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. While they may appear foreboding they are merely the messengers - appearing around, before or even after severe weather.


7) Fire Rainbows

A circumhorizontal fire rainbow arc occurs at a rare confluence of right time and right place for the sun and certain clouds. Crystals within the clouds refract light into the various visible waves of the spectrum but only if they are arrayed correctly relative to the ground below. Due to the rarity with which all of these events happen in conjunction with one another, there are relatively few remarkable photos of this phenomena.

Have u Seen day and night at the same time ??

The photograph attached was taken by the crew on board the Columbia
during its last mission, on a cloudless day.
The picture is of Europe and Africa when the sun is setting.
Half of the picture is in night. The bright dots you see are the cities' lights.

The top part of Africa is the Sahara Desert .

Note that the lights are already on in Holland , Paris , and Barcelona,
and that's it's still daylight in Dublin , London , Lisbon , and Madrid .

The sun is still shining on the Strait of Gibraltar . The Mediterranean Sea is
already in darkness.

In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean you can see the Azores Islands;
below them to the right are the Madeira Islands ; a bit below are the
Canary Islands; and further South, close to the farthest western point
of Africa , are the Cape Verde Islands.

Note that the Sahara is huge and can be seen clearly both during
day time and night time.

To the left, on top, is Greenland , totally frozen.

optical illusion : 1

Animals snaps in the news - 2010