Sunday Stills: Baseball, Baby Galaxies, the High Life, and More

Look: Portraits of Strength View in web browser. Sunday Stills ISSUE 37 Sunday, April 12, 2015 NEWS Fields and Dreams PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD, PAUL THOMPSON, WINFIELD PARKS, AND WILLIAM T. DOUTHITT In spring, young men’s (and women’s) fancy turn to thoughts of baseball. And so in honor of “first pitch” season, we went through our archives to retrieve some of the most iconic National Geographic images of that beautiful game. Though baseball is a global passion and you can find a pickup or professional game from Cuba to Canada to Japan, it’s arguably the most American of sports. And the most nostalgic. It’s “the timeless aspect of the game [that] has helped connect generations for more than two hundred years,” says Jeff Idelson, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.   LOOK PROOF An Afghan Yearbook PHOTOGRAPH BY RUVAN WIJESOORIYA A yearbook is a keepsake for students, teachers, and families. But for a school in Afghanistan, where education is not a guarantee for everyone, a yearbook symbolizes a triumph. “Shooting a yearbook has been something I have wanted to do since I first got into photography,” writes photographer Ruvan Wijesooriya on his project, “Yearbook Afghanistan.” “I knew the format would be an excellent way of documenting the school in a simple and archival way. The yearbook documents the universal experience of being a student, capturing a vast number of faces from a shared experience within a particular time and place. The portraits are unassuming, looking for the best in the subject because they are for the subject. For many of the children it was their first time having their portrait taken.” READ SHORT FILM SHOWCASE A Day in the Life of a Lighthouse Keeper “Lighthouses are not just stone, brick, metal, and glass. There's a human story at every lighthouse; that’s the story I want to tell.” —Elinor DeWire, author On Cabo Polonio, a remote cape located on the eastern coast of Uruguay, a lighthouse has been guiding ships since 1881. In They Are the Last, film production company Kauri Multimedia captures the daily routines of Leonardo da Costa, Cabo Polonio”s lighthouse keeper. As more lighthouses become automated, da Costa is one of the few watchmen who remain.  WATCH PROOF Capturing the First Solo Trek to the North Pole   PHOTOGRAPH BY Ira Block This month, the Japanese edition of National Geographic—the very first of our local-language editions—is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Ira Block was a 27-year-old photographer with one National Geographic assignment under his belt when he was asked to cover legendary Japanese explorer Naomi Uemura’s attempt to be the first person to journey alone to the North Pole. It was 1978, and in those days things worked a bit differently in the magazine’s photography department than they do now. For one, there were no budgets for the stories. Regardless of cost, “You just went out and did them,” Block recalls. And then there was the legendary director of photography, Bob Gilka. “[He] liked to test new photographers—to take them out of their comfort zone, see what they could do,” Block remembers. Block grew up in Brooklyn and was a self-described city kid with street smarts. It was his first trip to the Arctic. READ NEWS Baby Galaxies Could Be a Missing Cosmic Link IMAGE BY ESA AND THE PLANCK COLLABORATION Astronomers have peered into the early universe and spotted a trove of baby galaxies huddled together in what may be the oldest galactic clusters yet discovered. Galaxies like our Milky Way cluster together today, but how they formed these cosmic clubs has remained a mystery until now. Light from these newborn galaxies traveled vast distances—10 billion to 11 billion light-years—to reach the two space telescopes that detected them. So the light we see now shows the galaxies as they were some 10 billion to 11 billion years ago. READ NEWS The High Life PHOTOGRAPH BY DIANE COOK AND LEN JENSHEL France, long the world’s arbiter of haute couture, is taking aesthetics to a loftier level: the rooftop. As it spruces up its green portfolio ahead of global climate talks in December, France approved a law last week that requires the roofs of new commercial buildings to be covered—at least in part—by either solar panels or plants. Green roofs have gained popularity in recent years as more cities worldwide promote their use as a way to save energy. Some, including Canada’s Toronto or Switzerland’s Basel, even mandate rooftop vegetation in building bylaws. Germany has been a global leader in developing green roofs, including the grassy oasis pictured above, which caps the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn. LOOK Show Your Support: SHOP DONATE SUBSCRIBE TRAVEL BECOME A MEMBER You are receiving this email because ignoble.experiment@arconati.us is signed up to receive National Geographic communications. If you prefer not to receive emails from us, please unsubscribe. To ensure that you receive your National Geographic emails, please add ngs@e.nationalgeographic.com to your address book now. Learn how. Contact Us | Privacy Policy | About Us | Customer Service National Geographic | 1145 17th Street N.W. | Washington, D.C. 20036 Copyright © 2015 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.