Wednesday, 8 June 2011

God's Word: Jonathan Leeman (Reverberation author) Bible Teaching Mp3s

(from 9 marks blog) How should we as Christians view God's Word?  How does God's Word give life to a congregation?  Is God's Word really that important in the local church?  Jonathan Leeman (author of Reverberation) recently had the opportunity to encourage and instruct some church members in Graham, Texas by considering these questions and more.  Jonathan spoke at Graham Bible Church, where he gave four talks on God's Word:

Session 1 - The Power of God's Word:  AUDIO | VIDEO
Session 2 - The Preaching of God's Word:  AUDIO | VIDEO
Session 3 - The Content of God's Word:  AUDIO | VIDEO
Session 4 - The Reverberation of God's Word: AUDIO | VIDEO
This is a great resource for both pastors and church members, as it provides a solid vision for the authority and centrality of God's Word.  Our hope is that this resource will equip you to better serve in you church.

Christianity Explored Website - Introducing people to Christianity

This website is designed to help people explore christianity in their own time. You can access it here.

There are a lot of videos on the site which should be helpful for people in our generation. There's a six minute video on the gospel, then there's a section of videos on Tough Questions with videos from Vaughan Roberts and Tim Keller, and also a section of videos with Real Life Stories from Christians. Finally you can also find a course near you.

Tuesday, 7 June 2011

Beautiful Photographs from the Hebrides from National Geographic

You can see the whole gallery here.

Zoomable Satellite Photographs of Japan Before & After the tsunami

To see the gallery of zoomable satellite images of Japan before and after the tsunami go here.

World's Largest Cave in Vietnam: National Geographic Photos



There’s a jungle inside Vietnam’s mammoth cavern. A skyscraper could fit too. Hear author Mark Jenkins and National Geographic's Boyd Matson talk about what could be considered the largest cave in the world, the 2.5-mile Hang Son Doong, or “mountain river cave,” along the Vietnam-Laos border. 

See the gallery of photos on the National Geographic website here. Or take a look at a selection of the pictures below.


Beautiful Plains Milky Way timelapse sequence to music: Video

I've posted timelapse videos from this guy before. They're really amazing.


Plains Milky Way from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

Photographs with moving elements

otThese photos all have one part of the photo that moves. It's interesting. They're taken from this website.

The world has been entranced by photographs since their invention well over a century ago. When video came along, however, that was even better. Somewhere along the way, we have learned to love both still and moving images. Now, well into the 21st century, a team of artists is combining them in a fantastically unusual way.



Photographer Jamie Beck and her partner Kevin Burg, who has a background in video and motion graphics, take beautiful photographs and turn them into something that rests comfortably between photography and video.


Their creations are called cinemagraphs: still photos with small elements of movement. They retain all of the exquisite composure of still photographs but add a surprising bit of motion that is absolutely mesmerizing.


The effect can be just the tiniest bit creepy when you aren’t expecting it: the eyes of a model moving suddenly or a reflection whizzing by in a storefront window are disconcerting at first. However, these cinemagraphs are exceptionally beautiful once you move past the initial startle reflex.


According to Beck and Burg, their work is just a little more than photographs and a bit less than video. Many of the movements are so subtle that you don’t notice them at first. The bigger movements tend to look almost like video, but it is these subtle movements that make these photos so intriguing.

Creating this movement effect is a rather painstaking process, taking from several hours to an entire day to complete for each photograph. The finished photographs are GIFs, which many of us remember as those annoying animations from the early days of the Internet. Beck and Burg’s artistry, however, have taken GIFs from a distraction to an art form.


Photographer Jamie Beck says of her work: “There’s something magical about a still photograph – a captured moment in time – that can simultaneously exist outside the fraction of a second the shutter captures.”
(all images used with permission of Jamie Beck. Thanks, Jamie!)