The pride house

On June 27 the White House was lit up in rainbow colors in commemoration of the Supreme Court's ruling to legalize same-sex marriage.

A day to remember

Martin Luther King Jr. is waving to a crowd of over 250,000 people after giving his "I have a dream" speech on August 28, 1963. On this day we celebrate his birthday and all of his achievements as an influential American civil rights leader.

under the sun





picture from national geographic

Photographer Gaby Barathieu had been wanting to take this photo for many years and visited the island Comoros’s Mayotte Island, known for its turtles. 

Tunnel View, Yosemite National Park



picture from national geographic

The tunnel view is one of the most famous views of Yosemite valley. From this picture you can see El Capitan and Bridalveil Fall rising.

This is Alaska northern lights in a time lapse.

South Rim, Grand Canyon

picture from national geographic

Photographing from the Desert View Watchtower, Wilkes made this image of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in 27 hours. This vantage point allowed him to see the scale of the people along the overlook. “When the sun rose I had probably one of the greatest cloud formations you could ever ask for,” Wilkes says of photographing this image.  “[It] was like a ‘dial-a-sky.’ I specifically went and shot this at the end of July, hoping to get the beginning and middle part of the thunderstorm season. We were very lucky at the end of the day to get a capture of a lightning bolt. “You can actually see the rain clouds building. That narrative—the ability to capture the changing of the cloud formations and the sky and how the day evolves that way—is a very profound thing in the parks. Because part of the magic of the parks is that no matter when you go, something really exciting can happen.”

Seronera National Park, Serengeti, Tanzania

picture from national geographic

"There’s such a beautiful message in this photograph,” he says. “The animals essentially were starved for water, and they all shared. I watched them for 26 hours [as they] literally all [took] turns drinking, bathing in this single resource. And they never so much as even grunted at each other. You realize the animals really get it. And we have really yet to understand the idea of water [as] a shared resource.”
Wilkes and his assistant spent 30 hours perched on a platform 18 feet in the air, behind a crocodile blind so the animals wouldn’t see them. The elephant family marched across the frame just as he and his assistant had resumed shooting after taking a break to backup their files (each shoot takes about 20 gigabytes of storage). Had they passed five minutes earlier, he would have missed them.