Bird Photographer of the Year 2026 Awards

Silver: "Majesty" by Åsmund Keilen
A majestic golden eagle drifts in dark silhouette across the face of the moon, its outstretched wings cutting a powerful shape through silver light. Below, winter-clad peaks rise in quiet stillness, their frozen ridges layered through in-camera multiple exposure to shape the visual expression I envisioned. The composition feels both graphic and atmospheric-a meeting of shadow and glow, strength and silence. Suspended against the luminous moon, the eagle becomes a timeless presence in the cold, breathless vastness of the alpine night.
Credit: © Åsmund Keilen / Bird Photographer of the Year Åsmund Keilen

The winner of the world's largest bird photography competition showcases a northern gannet in hunting mode, shot with a full-frame mirrorless camera and fisheye lens. | Credit: © Henley Spiers / Bird Photographer of the Year

This is Bird, and not a Fish! -XOXO jzebraa

Photographer captures species capable of diving at up to 86 km/ph – faster than Olympic divers – his image 'Sunball Rocket' just won the grand prize in the world's largest bird photography competition

Gold: "Alter Ego" by Gianluca Damiani
Great cities are extremely complex habitats. Attracted by the great amount of food resources the yellow-legged seagulls (Larus michahellis) live within Rome from many years. The tall buildings are for the seagulls as the cliffs on the sea and represent perfect nesting structures. I had a seagull colony on the roof of my house, and I had time to study their behaviour and preferred perches in order to get this picture. Moreover, some people of my neighborhood used to feed birds on the roof since COVI-19 lockdown. I had time then to put a removable sticker on the wall, to wait for the arrival of one of the gulls.
Credit: Gianluca Damiani / Bird Photographer of the Year

Gold: "An Ostrich Horizon" by Rahul SachdevAn ostrich makes its way towards the dry lake bed of Amboseli. In black and white, the stark landscape emphasizes the bird's solitary journey across the dust and heat.Credit: Rahul Sachdev / Bird Photographer of the Year Rahul Sachdev

Silver: "Patterns" by Alex Pansier
Captured in March 2025 on Hornøya, this image reveals a mesmerizing swarm of guillemots in flight. What first appears as an Escher-like illusion is nature's own design—organized chaos in motion. The sky becomes a canvas of repetition and rhythm, where the boundaries between order and disorder dissolve before your eyes.
Credit: Alex Pansier / Bird Photographer of the Year Alex Pansier

Gold: "Eye-to-Eye with a Short-Eared Owl" by Ivan Sjögren

A short-eared owl courses over the salt marshes of British Columbia's Fraser River Delta. This was a magical evening, with five owls feeding around me as dusk fell. I witnessed both fights between owls and, later, displays in which they clapped their wings together. I took this photo by positioning myself strategically, hunkering down in the grass after anticipating the owls' hunting routes. I was lucky that the owl turned its head to look at me as it passed silently by.

Credit: © Ivan Sjögren / Bird Photographer of the Year Ivan Sjögren

SILVER - Urban Birds - Deception's Hope. This picture was taken on Deception Island, near the Antarctic Peninsula. Many disasters happen on Deception Island. Home of a fur seal trade leading to an almost extinction of seals, a whaling station, and then many volcanic eruptions leading to the destruction of scientific stations, this island looks like it is cursed. But since then, Nature has taken back its rights, like these gentoo penguins posing in front of a rusty whale blubber warehouse like guards. It gives a bit of Hope in Deception. I took the picture during a sailboat expedition to Antarctica.

Best Portrait

Gold: "Radiant" by Thomas Deliberto

A male greater sage-grouse during its courtship display. As the sun was rising over the shadowed sagebrush hill behind him, it illuminated the bird's tail feathers such that they appeared to radiate light. I was fortunate to visit a sage-grouse lek, an area in which the birds congregate to mate. Arriving at the lek before sunrise, I crouched behind some rocks, facing east to get a backlit photo of a male. As the sun rose above the hill behind the lek, I was able to capture this male in full display. Greater Sage-Grouse are the largest native grouse in North America. As their name implies, these birds are intimately tied to the sagebrush ecosystems of the Intermountain West. Their populations in recent years have declined precipitously due to a loss of habitat.
Credit: © Thomas Deliberto / Bird Photographer of the Year Thomas DeLiberto

Read More Story Source

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/20-soaring-images-bird-photographer-000100553.html

Two For Tuesday Double Feature

ARCADE the Movie 1994

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106302

and

Ready Player One 2018

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1677720

Two For Tuesday Double Feature This Week is two Video Game movies about how one quarter "money" could change the direction of your life kind of stories, the first movie is from 1994 before the home computer was in every home in the world with our favorite Bryan Dattilo, Lucas Horton/Roberts from Days of our Lives, Peter Billingsley from "A Christmas Story", Seth Green of Robot Chicken and Megan Ward.

ARCADE the Movie 1994

A virtual reality game begins taking over the minds of teenagers! May be the original idea for the Scream movies! -XOXO jzebraa

Alex Manning (Megan Ward) is a troubled suburban teenager. Her mother committed suicide and the school counselor feels that she has not dealt with her feelings properly. Alex and her friends visit the local video arcade known as "Dante's Inferno", where a new virtual reality arcade game called Arcade is being test marketed by a computer company CEO, Difford, who hands out free samples of the home console version and hypes up the game.

It soon becomes clear that the teenagers who play the game and lose are imprisoned inside the virtual reality world by the central villain: Arcade. Arcade was once a little boy who was beaten to death by his mother, and the computer company felt it would be a good idea to use some of the boy's brain cells to make the game's villain more realistic. Instead, it made the game deadly. The game's programmer knew there would be a problem with this and tried to convince the computer company, Vertigo/Tronics, to halt the game's release.

Nick and Alex enlist the help of the game's programmer and head to the video arcade for a final showdown with Arcade and his deadly virtual world. While Alex is able to release her friends from a virtual prison, she also frees the evil little boy, who taunts Alex in the final moments of the film.

In the original CGI version, the film ends with Alex, her friends, and Albert (the programmer) walking away from Dante's Inferno, with the donor's soul seemingly laid to rest.

and this Double Feature Ready Player One 2018 ! A Great look back at what we thought Video Games would become!-XOXO jzebraa 

Ready Player One 2018

When the creator of a virtual reality called the OASIS dies, he makes a posthumous challenge to all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune and control of his world. 

In the 2040s,^[9] the world has been gripped by an energy crisis from the depletion of fossil fuels and the consequences of pollution, global warming, and overpopulation, causing widespread social problems, poverty, and economic stagnation. To escape the decline their world is facing, people turn to the OASIS,^[a] a virtual universe accessible by players using visors and haptic technology such as gloves. It was originally designed as an MMORPG (and so still contains gameplay elements like powerful, unique artifacts), but has evolved into a virtual world used ubiquitously by humanity, with its currency being one of the most stable in the real world. The OASIS was created by James Donovan Halliday, founder of Gregarious Simulation Systems (formerly Gregarious Games). Due to being split into 27 different sectors, the OASIS had its own worlds and zones.

Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune and the game itself. Cline sold the rights to publish the novel in June 2010, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House).^[1] The book was published on August 16, 2011.^[2] An audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton was released the same day.^{[3][4]Ch. 20} 

Short story

"Lacero", a fan-fiction short story by Andy Weir, was published online in 2014,^[29] and later included in the 2016 limited edition of Ready Player One published by Subterranean Press.^[30]

It functions as a precursor to the main novel, and is considered canonical to the Ready Player One fictional universe.^[31][32]

Sequel novel

Main article: Ready Player Two

As early as 2015, Cline had been reported to be working on a sequel to Ready Player One from screenwriter Zak Penn.^[33] Cline confirmed the sequel was in progress by December 2017, and would have a different story-line involving all of the characters, while still exploring pop culture references like the first book.^[34] Penguin House released the sequel, Ready Player Two on November 24, 2020. The plot follows Wade as he embarks on a new quest after discovering a new technology developed by Halliday. Between the weeks of November 29 and December 20 of 2020, it was number one on Amazon's fiction chart.^[35]

A Steven Spielberg movie with Lots of movies and video games references surprises in the movie!

Both are video game movies, but in different directions! 

Love It -XOXO jzebraa

R.I.P. Peter Max @jzebraa

#PeterMax 2026 jzebraa

Gosh, One of my Biggest Inspirations in Life! I remember as a kid asking who did the Beautiful poster from the 1960s for Pepsi co and their reply was Peter Max of course!

Most amazingly is that during my" Jourdan Zebraa Figment / Andy Wahol Museum" period Peter Max followed me @jzebraa on Twitter/X! To my surprise I was in Shocked and Gushed and Gushed to him about how much I loved all of his artwork! Missing you forever, Thanks for all the Inspirations and Lighting up my Life! XOXO jzebraa

We did not know that Peter Max had passed away until today Sept. 21st 2026

 but he had passed on Sept. 14th 2026

His art had a bright, happy vibe

Those dark allegations contrasted with the relentlessly bright, happy vibe that infused his work. “The colors are strong, sometimes loud, sometimes raw and sometimes harmonious, but always powerful, and the images are always on the side of the peaceful nature,” he said. “I don’t discuss in my paintings negative things, I don’t dwell on it in my mind and don’t dwell on it in my canvasses.”

In another interview, he summed it up like this: “I see everything through rainbow eyes.”

Although accounts of Max’s career sometimes lament that he was not taken seriously by the art establishment, in fact his work has been featured in dozens of museum exhibitions around the world. New York’s Museum of Modern Art owns seven of his works.

The art for the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” is sometimes mistakenly attributed to Max, but the design for the album cover and “Yellow Submarine” movie are officially credited to the late Heinz Edelmann. Max claimed in a 2012 interview he did the original “Yellow Submarine” design before handing it off to Edelmann. But the website for New York’s Park West gallery, a longtime dealer of Max’s art, described Max’s involvement in “Yellow Submarine” as “early consulting work.”

Read More Story Source

https://apnews.com/article/peter-max-obituary-1fa0d98b5f1e446d903242355b689062

AI wrote

Peter Max (born Peter Max Finkelstein; October 19, 1937 – September 14, 2026) was an iconic German-American pop artist whose vibrant, multi-colored artwork came to embody the "flower power" optimism and counterculture movement of the 1960s. He recently passed away at the age of 88 in a New York City hospital following a long battle with dementia. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Max was globally recognized for his signature psychedelic aesthetic, which featured bold color palettes, cosmic imagery, and iconic motifs like rainbows, stars, butterflies, and his famous "Umbrella Man". [1, 2, 3]

Life and Career Highlights

• Early Journey: Born in Berlin, his Jewish family fled the Nazi regime in 1938. They lived in Shanghai, Israel, and Paris before moving to Brooklyn, New York, when he was a teenager. He later studied realism at the Art Students League of New York. [1, 2, 3]
• Commercial Success: Max was an immensely successful commercial artist. His distinct designs appeared on massive platforms, ranging from a Boeing 777 aircraft and a Norwegian Cruise Line ship to postage stamps, the Manhattan Yellow Pages, and millions of college dorm room posters. [1, 2, 3]
• Portraits & Public Art: Over his decades-long career, he painted official portraits for six sitting U.S. presidents (including Bill Clinton) and created 235 "Welcome to America" border murals. He also designed works for modern icons like Taylor Swift. [1, 2, 3]
• Official Event Artist: Max served as the official artist for high-profile global events, including the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup, the Super Bowl, and the Grammy Awards. [1, 2]
• Philanthropy & Legacy: He spearheaded massive fundraising efforts, including teaming up with the Reagan administration to raise $350 million for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty, an American icon he painted annually every Fourth of July. [1, 2]

For serious art collectors or fans looking to explore his extensive catalog of graphic prints, posters, and books, you can view the official collection via the Peter Max Studio. [1]

Are you looking to learn more about a specific painting series by Peter Max (like his Statue of Liberty or Umbrella Man), or are you researching the market value and authenticity of his artwork?

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