photography – Coffee Spoons

A Warming Climate Floods All Rivers

Last weekend, the United States’ 4th of July holiday weekend, the remnants of a tropical system inundated a central Texas river valley with months’ worth of rain in just a few short hours. The result? The tragic loss of over 100 lives (and authorities are still searching for missing people).

Debate rages about why the casualties ranked so high—the gutting of the National Weather Service by the administration shines brightly—but the natural causes of the disaster are easier to identify. And the BBC did a great job covering those in a lengthy article with a number of helpful graphics.

I will start with this precipitation map, created with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data.

A map of precipitation over central Texas.

I remain less than fully enthusiastic about continual gradients for map colouration schemes, however the extreme volume of rainfall during the weather event makes the location of the flooding obvious to all. Nonetheless the designers annotated the map, pointing out river, the camp at the centre of the tragedy and the county wherein most of the deaths occurred.

In short, more than 12 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours. The article also uses a time lapse video to show the river’s flash flooding when it rose a number of feet in less than half an hour.

The article uses the captivating footage of the flash flooding as the lead graphic component. And I get it. The footage is shocking. And you want to get those sweet, sweet engagement clicks and views. But from the standpoint of the overall narrative structure of the piece, I wonder if starting with the result works best.

Rather, the extreme rainfall and geographic features of the river valley contributed at the most fundamental level and showcasing that information and data, such as in the above map, would be a better place to start. The endpoint or culmination of the contributing factors is the flash flooding and the annotated photo of flood water heights inside the cabins of the camp.

Overall I enjoyed the piece tremendously and walked away better informed. I had visited an area 80 miles east of the floods several years ago for a wedding. Coincidentally on the 4th I remarked to a different friend from the area now living in Philadelphia about the flatness and barrenness of the landscape between Austin and San Antonio. I had no idea that just to the west rivers cut through the elevated terrain that would together cause over a hundred deaths a few hours later.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC, but the article listed a healthy number of contributors whom I shall paste here: Writing by Gary O’Donoghue in Kerr County, Texas, Matt Taylor of BBC Weather and Malu Cursino. Edited by Tom Geoghegan. Images: Reuters/Evan Garcia, Brandon Bell, Dustin Safranek/EPA/Shutterstock, Camp Mystic, Jim Vondruska, Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP and Getty.

Burning Out the Rohingya

For years the Rohingya people, largely Muslim, in Burma (also known as Myanmar) have faced persecution from the majority Buddhist Burmese to the point that they are not considered citizens. Over the last several weeks, the Burmese government has reacted to assaults against civil authorities by armed Rohingya groups by burning villages wholesale. Burma denies it, occasionally going so far as to say that the Rohingya have in fact burned their own villages.

Sure.

The New York Times had an article on the Rohingya crisis, which if it is not already is now perilously close to being ethnic cleansing. Online, an article offered more, comparing satellite views of villages before and after their burning to the ground.

This week global leaders are meeting in New York at the UN General Assembly. Undoubtedly and rightly they should discuss issues like North Korea’s two programmes, one of developing nuclear weapons and the other of developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. But, hopefully they will not be silent on this issue.

Credit for the piece goes to Sergio Peçanha and Jeremy White.

How Big Was Irma?

Like many Americans I followed the story of Hurricane Irma over the weekend. One of my favourite pieces of reporting was this article from the Washington Post. It did a really nice job of visually comparing Irma to some recent and more historic storms, such as 1992’s Hurricane Andrew.

It can be difficult to truly compare hurricanes, sometimes they are small and compact, other times more dispersed. Irma was just big with lots of potentially destructive power spread out across a wide area, almost the width of the Floridian peninsula. The article uses several graphics—I am also quite partial to the satellite image comparison so check out the article—but this one is perhaps my favourite.

It uses a colour palette that deepens in redness nearer the storm’s centre. This allows the user to compare the geographic area or footprint of the storms destructive winds.

I wonder, however, what would happen if the designers had superimposed each graphic atop the other. It might have allowed for an even better comparison of size instead of having to have the user mentally transpose each hurricane.

Still, a really nice graphic and visual article.

Credit for the piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz, Laris Karklis, Reuben Fischer-Baum, and Chiqui Esteban.

Maintaining Your Photo Library

Well yesterday sucked.

But at least today is Friday. Also Cinco de Mayo. And so in addition to trying to find some mezcal tomorrow—anybody know a good spot in Philly?—we can wrap this week up with something on the humourous side.

My mobile is a few years old now and I’ve been taking lots of the photos the last few years. Last weekend I reached a point where I could no longer take photos. Consequently I have been going back through all my old photos. And so this piece from xkcd seemed rather appropriate.

I'm somewhere in the bottom right — I’m somewhere in the bottom right

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Escaping—or Not—from the Oakland Fire

A few weeks back a fire raged through a communal, creative warehouse in Oakland. The fire claimed the lives of over thirty people. But why? We have the New York Times behind this piece which attempts to explain just what happened that night through a nice mixture of diagrammatic illustrations and photography.

This is one reason why we try to clearly signal fire exits

Credit for the piece goes to Ford Fessenden and Anjali Singhvi.

Putting Things in Perspective

Congratulations, you made it to Friday. So let’s try to put that in perspective. And by that, I mean things like mines and Death Stars. Thanks to my good friend Jonathan Fairman for sharing with me this post on Core77 that uses the power of Kevin Wisbith’s Photoshop skills to compare the sizes of things. And yes, that obviously includes mines and Death Stars. But having lived in Chicago for a number of years, you get the mine photo. Because yeah, that thing must be deep.

Credit for the original work goes to Kevin Wisbith.

Moving on Mosul

If you didn’t already know, the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces are moving on Mosul, a city in northern Iraq overrun by ISIS back in 2014. The New York Times has illustrated a satellite image of the Mosul area to show how the forces are progressing in their assault on the city.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.

Airplanes in Hangars

Today’s post features a simple set of graphics on the BBC, however the creators were actually the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. The background? The increasingly tense geopolitical situation in the South China Sea, where China claims numerous islands and reefs claimed by other countries—and to a smaller extent other countries make similar such claims. Just a few weeks back, the Hague ruled against Chinese claims against islands within the Philippines territorial waters. But as these graphics show, it takes more than a legal decision to effect change on the ground.

Satellite photography shows military installations on numerous Chinese-held islands. But what makes the images potent in the communicative sense is the simple overlay of white plane illustrations. They show how many fighter jets, support aircraft, patrol aircraft, &c. that China can base at the various military installations. It is a simple but incredibly effective touch.

Credit for the piece goes to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative.

Selfiexploratory

New year, new selfies. Thankfully we have the Selfiecity to look at a sample of selfies, the goal to determine patterns and trends in the art of the selfie. Of course you also want to be able to look at the aforementioned selfies. For that they built the Selfiexploratory, an application that allows you to filter the set to see what you want. What I like is the return of data to show what the results of the filter look like against the whole set.

Credit for the piece goes to the Selfiecity team.