distorted

"The Ugly Truth" is a bizarre series of portraits by photographer Rut Mackel. Each photo features a not-very-pleasing photo of a face that looks flatted and disfigured. No, the subjects don't actually look like that, and no, Mackel didn't use any kind of digital manipulation for the photos. She simply asked her subjects to hold a pane of glass and then press their faces against it.

For the past couple of months, Albuquerque, New Mexico-based photographer Wes Naman has been working on a lighthearted personal project called "Scotch Tape," a series that features bizarre portraits of subjects who have their faces wrapped tightly with strips of Scotch tape.

Diving is one of the most popular Olympic sports among spectators, and arguably one of the most graceful. The faces of the divers as they perform their acrobatics? Not so graceful.

ShortList Magazine took Getty photographs of divers and then cropped out their distorted faces. G-forces have quite a negative effect on beauty...

For his project titled Back Yard, Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota applied the musical ideas of echo, delay, and reverb to photography by shooting, developing, printing, and re-photographing the same image over and over. In an interview with American Photo, he states,

[...] first I used a compact digital camera, and printed the image out. Then I photographed that image with a 6x7 film camera, using color film, even though the image is later black and white. I developed it at home, in a way so that imperfections or noise will appear—I make the water extra warm, or don’t agitate the film. Even before that, I let some light hit the film; I’m developing in my bathroom, so it’s not even a real darkroom, which helps, but I’ll hold a lighter up to the film, or whatever is around. I’m always experimenting—the goal is to not do it the same way twice. So then, to produce more and more variations in the final image, I re-photographed the image about ten times.

Basically, Yokota is introducing distortion through what's known as generation loss.

If you ever create a slideshow of portraits, you might want to avoid showing them aligned side-by-side with a gap in between. The video above shows a crazy optical illusion that researchers have dubbed the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect". By flashing ordinary portraits aligned at the eyes, the human brain begins to compare and exaggerate the differences, causing the faces to seem hideous and ogre-like. Researcher Matthew Thompson writes,

Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive.

Fashion photographs are generally shot to make the clothing and the models look attractive, but British photographer Neil Bedford chose not to go that route when shooting a series for clothing label Neighborhood's lookbook. He had his models press their faces against invisible panes of glass, resulting in quirky and humorous fashion photos featuring smeared faces.

Photographer Tadao Cern has an awesome project titled, ahem, Blow Job that consists of portraits of people having their faces blown by extremely strong blasts of air.

You’ve probably seen videos showing the rolling shutter effect turning airplane …

Yesterday we shared some fun portraits of dogs taken while they shook of water, but you can take similar portraits of people too. It's called "jowling", and is far less adorable. Here how Urban Dictionary defines "jowling":

The violent shaking of one's head side-to-side in order to obtain a photograph of one's face distorted from the intense side-to-side motion.

One useful thing you can do with this technique is to simulate a heavy punch to the face.

If you use a Mac, you’ve probably taken strange photographs of yourself using the fun house distortion effects that …