Japanese photographer kiyoshimachine has a quirky set of photographs titled Monster67 that features people wearing the “67 Head”, a giant Pentax SLR.
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To promote its new One X phone (and the camera on it), HTC came up with the bizarre idea of doing a skydiving fashion shoot with photography student Nick Jojola and model (and professional skydiver) Roberta Mancino. During the photoshoot above the Arizona desert, Jojola plummeted to Earth at 126MPH while Mancino whizzed by at 181MPH, giving the photographer a tiny window of 0.8 seconds to squeeze off the shot.
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Artists Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs create homemade cameras out of bizarre objects such as turtle shells and large stones. The large format camera above was crafted out of a stack of photography books. Their experiments are documented in a book titled As Long As It Photographs It Must Be a Camera. You can find a recent interview with the artists over at American Photo.

Turning Turtles Into Cameras With Onorato & Krebs (via Photojojo)

After photographer Bob Carey moved with his wife to the East Coast in 2003, he found that life suddenly flipped 180-degrees from what he was used to. He then did what every sane, middle-aged, male photographer would do: he began photographing himself in a pink tutu to express himself. However, the project wouldn’t stay random for long. Carey writes,

Six months after the move, Linda, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She beat it, only to have it recur in 2006. During these past nine years, I’ve been in awe of her power, her beauty, and her spirit. Oddly enough, her cancer has taught us that life is good, dealing with it can be hard, and sometimes the very best thing — no, the only thing — we can do to face another day is to laugh at ourselves, and share a laugh with others.

Carey has since decided to self-publish his tutu photographs as a book titled Ballerina and then donate all the net proceeds from his work to breast cancer organizations to fight against the disease.
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When Los Angeles resident Hector Siliezar visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza with his family in 2009, he used his iPhone to snap some photos of a pyramid called El Castillo. After snagging a lightning strike in the third shot, Siliezar was surprised to see that he had also captured what appeared to be a beam of light shooting up from the pyramid towards the heavens. Jonathon Hill, a researcher who works with NASA’s mars imagery, tells MSNBC that it’s probably the result of an iPhone glitch:

He says the “light beam” in the Mayan temple photo is a classic case of [image artifacts and equipment errors] — a distortion in an image that arises from the way cameras bounce around incoming light.

It is no mere coincidence, Hill said, that “of the three images, the ‘light beam’ only occurs in the image with a lightning bolt in the background. The intensity of the lightning flash likely caused the camera’s CCD sensor to behave in an unusual way, either causing an entire column of pixels to offset their values or causing an internal reflection (off the) camera lens that was recorded by the sensor.” In either case, extra brightness would have been added to the pixels in that column in addition to the light hitting them directly from the scene.

In an interview with Earthfiles, Siliezar notes that none of the people present actually saw any beam of light when the image was captured, which supports Hill’s explanation that it was simply a camera glitch.

(via Earthfiles via MSNBC via Gizmodo)

Image credit: Photograph by Hector Siliezar

Named after the fact that Google Street View cars shoot with 9 separate cameras, Canadian artist Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes of Google Street View website is an ongoing project that publishes strange scenes photographed by Google’s automated cameras. Rafman writes,

This infinitely rich mine of material afforded my practice the extraordinary opportunity to explore, interpret, and curate a new world in a new way. To a certain extent, the aesthetic considerations that form the basis of my choices in different collections vary. For example, some selections are influenced by my knowledge of photographic history and allude to older photographic styles, whereas other selections, such as those representing Google’s depiction of modern experience, incorporate critical aesthetic theory. But throughout, I pay careful attention to the formal aspects of color and composition.

[...] I can seek out postcard-perfect shots that capture what Cartier-Bresson titled “the decisive moment,” as if I were a photojournalist responding instantaneously to an emerging event. At other times, I have been mesmerized by the sense of nostalgia, yearning, and loss in these images—qualities that evoke old family snapshots. I can also choose to be a landscape photographer and meditate on the multitude of visual possibilities.

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Zurich-based designers Atelier Volvox have a project titled “Outsiders” that consists of various stuffed animals turned inside-out. The toys were purchased from second-hand shops, cut open, turned inside out, re-stuffed, and sewed back up.
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Atlanta-based photographer Theron Humphrey is currently on a year-long trip through each of America’s 50 states, and is using a unique photo project idea to document it: he has his coonhound named Maddie — his travelling companion — balance on various things in the different places they visit. The photoblog has the tagline “a super serious project about dogs and physics”, and features Maddie standing on everything from mailboxes to shopping carts.
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For her project titled Learning to Love the State I Am In, photographer Sam Schubert takes planking to a new level by putting her body in bizarre positions and locations in order to “integrate” herself into the materials and environments found in Baltimore.
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Dame di Cartone (“Cardboard Ladies”) is a project by Swiss-Italian photographer Christian Tagliavini in which he creates portraits of women that mimic the look of historical paintings. The styles include 17th century, fifties, and cubism.
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