The explosion that happened last year in the Port of Beirut, Lebanon, has moved everyone. The Port of Beirut explosion on August 4th, 2020, didn’t just make it to the headlines for days, but it also massively impacted the beauty, life, and development of the Paris of the Middle East, i.e., Beirut.
Drone pilots are being held responsible for the destruction of thousands of elegant tern eggs, a bird that nests on the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Southern California. Drones are not allowed in the area, but that did not stop a pair of pilots from flying and crashing into the fragile ecosystem.
The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was built in 1963 and was the world's largest single-unit radio telescope until China's construction of the FAST in 2016. After struggling with structural issues for some time, the dish finally collapsed and the violent destruction was caught on video.
Once Syria's largest city, Aleppo has been the worst-hit city in the country since the Battle of Aleppo began in 2012 as part of the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Now a series of before-and-after photos reveals just how much the once-vibrant historical city has been marred by war.
To highlight human destruction of animal habitats in East Africa, photographer Nick Brandt shot giant panoramas of life-size animal prints in their former habitats. The project is titled Inherit the Dust.
The YouTube channel tesla500 wanted to see what happens when various objects fall into the spinning blades of an upside-down lawnmower, so they set up some slow motion cameras to find out.
In addition to dropping keyboards and mice, they also decided to destroy an old Olympus point-and-shoot digital camera (it's about 2.5-minutes in).
Photographer Craig Boudreaux was personally impacted by the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Among the homes that were destroyed by rains, winds, and flooding were his grandmother's home, his friends' homes, and even his childhood home.
A year after Katrina struck, and after the flood waters had long gone, Boudreaux revisited some ravaged areas in New Orleans, capturing the aftermath of a storm that changed so many lives.
Tyler Shields is back at it again, destroying expensive stuff for shock value... we mean art... actually we're not certain what we mean. In the past, he fed a $100k Hermes handbag to an alligator. This time he’s photographing the explosive destruction a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow.
If it wasn't for the very short behind the scenes video we've embedded below, we would have a hard time believing that the animation above really was just an incredibly intricate mix of stop-motion and long-exposure lighting effects -- it's beyond impressive.
The video above isn't a time-lapse per-se, but it is being reported as such because it allegedly condense a full hour of Israeli Army air strikes on a Gaza Neighborhood down to just one minute of footage. In that minute, you see an entire neighborhood vanish into explosions and massive clouds of dust that clear to reveal only piles of rubble.
Inspired by the beautiful ink-in-water photography of Alberto Seveso -- who, by the way, we've featured many times on PetaPixel, so definitely check that out -- South African artist and photographer Chris Slabber recently put a spin on ink photography the likes of which we've not seen before.
Using his skills as a digital artist, he combined the genres of ink photography and double exposure portraits to create something that, in the interest of avoiding photography word inflation, is both good and beautiful (but not 'stunning' or 'brain paralyzing').
This unbelievable satellite photograph shows the sheer horrifying magnitude of Typhoon Haiyan, the terrible tropical cyclone that caused unimaginable damage to the Philippines yesterday (you can see the full resolution image here).
Susan Dobson is best known for her work on suburban culture, architecture, and landscape. Her photographs have been exhibited across Canada, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom, Belgium, China, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. Her work was included in the Canadian Biennial titled Builders at the National Gallery of Canada in 2012, and she was a contributing artist to the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. Dobson is Associate Professor at the University of Guelph.
Susan Dobson's series "Sense of an Ending" gives us look at architecture, decay and a literal sense of ending -- reminding us that eventually everything around us will become rubble. Through the use of composite imagery, Dobson crafts scenes frozen in melancholy.
As the overcast skies in each piece forebode cold and rain, and as the architectural styles have begun to weather and collapse, these images, while fiction, portray the inevitable truth of not just homes and buildings, but perhaps cities and civilizations as well.
Over the course of 2013, the beautiful state of Colorado has been ravaged by many fires and, most recently, devastating flooding as well. When it comes to capturing this kind of mass-scale destruction in photographs, the best option is to take to the skies, which is exactly what aerial photographer and Colorado resident John Wark has been doing.
As wildfires and flooding took their turns on the Colorado landscape, Wark captured it all from his Husky A1, compiling all of the photos into two series titled Colorado Flood of 2013 and Colorado Wildfires.
In October of 2012, LA-based photographer Sabine Pearlman found herself ensconced in a Swiss WWII bunker photographing 900 different "specimens" of cross sectioned ammunition. Her resulting photo series, AMMO, shows the beauty and craftsmanship that went into creating these destructive little pieces of engineering.
In 2009, Swedish artist Johanna Mårtensson read an article that described how well the Earth would do if humans simply ceased to exist. Within a few centuries, most buildings would be collapsed or collapsing as animals, plants and bacteria re-established the social order in cities once ruled by the curious primate Homo sapien.
The article got her creative juices flowing, and ultimately led to a photo installation called "Decor:" a city built by Mårtensson entirely out of bread, and left to decompose as she took daily photos over the course of 6 months.
If you've ever been in a bad car accident, the images Danish photographer Nicolai Howalt's Car Crash Studies may bring back bad memories. The project is a photographic study of cars that have been involved in severe (and possibly fatal) accidents.
NASA captured this incredible photograph of the tornado that tracked across Massachusetts last …
DigitalRev has posted a followup to the destruction tests video they published last week. After abusing two entry-level DSLR cameras in all sorts of random ways (e.g. dropping down an escalator, using them as stilts and hammers, pouring hot liquids on them, etc...), many of us were left wondering to what degree the cameras were still functional. This video answers those questions.
Expensive camera equipment getting destroyed seems to be a reoccurring theme this month here on PetaPixel. Early in the month there was the story of the 7D getting burned up in an exploding car, and earlier this week we shared a DigitalRev video of DSLRs getting abused tested for durability.
This is a 17 minute video showing Kai over at DigitalRev (the same guy that painted a Nikon D90 pink) putting a Canon 400D and Nikon D70 through various torture tests. The tests include stabbing them with knives, dropping them down escalators, smashing them with elevator doors, using them as stilts, and more.