weird

Bizarre Portraits of People Dressed In the Food They’d Like to Eat

Hunger Pains is a very... different series of portraits by NYC-based photographer Ted Sabarese. For each of the photographs, Sabarese asked his model one simple question: "What are you craving at the moment?" He then took the food described, had them turned into clothing items, and photographed the models wearing the things they'd like to eat.

The Armadillo Camera and Other Wacky Camera Creations

Swiss photography duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs were featured here in April of last year for their DIY large format camera created out of a stack of books. It turns out books aren't the only things the two are making cameras with: they also have cameras that mix the worlds of taxidermy and photography.

For their project titled Camera Collection, Onorato and Krebs created one-of-a-kind cameras out of extremely unusual things -- including an armadillo (shown above).

Headless Portraits From the 19th Century

It's not easy to remember life before Photoshop. When we do, we think of a world where picture were straightforward, always showing exactly what happened to be in front of the lens when the exposure was taken. But that's not entirely the case.

Trick photography has been around for centuries, and even though the folks in Victorian times weren't nearly as concerned with artificially slimming down, they did like to have some photographic fun once in a while. This set of headless photographs from the 19th century is a great example of the kind of 'fun' we're talking about.

Portable Vacuum Cleaner in the Shape of a Nikon 70-200mm Lens

Of all the photography-related novelty products we've seen so far, this one has to be one of the most bizarre. It's a hand-held vacuum cleaner designed to look just like a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR lens. The device can draw its power from either the cigarette lighter socker in your car or the USB port on your computer.

Art Students Become Human Cameras by Eating 35mm Film

Kingston University photography students Luke Evans and Josh Lake wanted to do something unusual for their final major project, so they decided to turn themselves into human cameras by eating 35mm film squares and letting their bodies do the rest. After eating and pooping out the film in the dark, they used fixer on the film and then scanned the film using an electron microscope. They are currently exhibiting massive prints of the images that show every detail of what their bodies did.

Crumpled Faces of Random Strangers

For his project titled "Good Morning!", photographer Levi Mandel shot stealthy photos of unsuspecting strangers, printed out the faces, crumpled them up, and then re-photographed them.

Cremation Portrait: Owner Has Photo Printed with Dead Dog’s Ashes

There's all kinds of things people do to remember their beloved pets after they pass away, but here's a pretty creepy one: a dog owner in Norway had a photo of their Gordon Setter named Susie printed with her ashes. Norwegian design studio Skrekkøgle figured out a way to rebuild a printer to accept dog ashes as "ink", allowing them to print a vintage-looking black-and-white photograph of Susie.

Surreal Photograph of Camel Thorn Trees

Check out this photograph of camel thorn trees in Namibia shot by Frans Lanting. It looks like a painting but is actually a photograph...

Tinted orange by the morning sun, a soaring dune is the backdrop for the hulks of camel thorn trees in Namib-Naukluft Park.

Can your eyes and brain make any sense of it?

This Camera Van Has Rolling Shutters

In 1993, a guy named Harrod Blank had a dream in which he drove around in a camera-covered car taking pictures of people staring at his camera-mobile. When he woke up, he decided to make the car a reality, and spent the next two years designing and building the thing. In 1995 he completed the Camera Van complete with a working camera to capture the expressions of onlookers.

Extra Reach for Shooting the Moon

Now here's a novel way to shoot the moon: stack five separate Canon 2x extenders to boost the focal length of your 800mm lens. Supposedly (and surprisingly) this rig actually captured a decent photograph of the moon.

This was done by the folks over at BorrowLenses, who also did the crazy filter stacking thing we featured recently. When you have as much gear as they do at your disposal, you have a wider range of ways to have fun with gear experiments.

CNN Reports on Professor Wafaa Bilal’s Surgically Implanted Head Camera

CNN recently did a story on NYU professor Wafaa Bilal and the camera he had implanted on the back of his head. The video above gives you a glimpse into what it looks like and how the system works. Turns out it wasn't a working camera that was permanently embedded into Bilal's skull, but rather a baseplate to which the wired camera can be mounted magnetically.

A Photography Book Featuring Work by Cooper the Cat

Here's one of those "I could do that! Yeah, but you didn't" things: a cat named Cooper recently published a book filled with his photographs, titled "Cat Cam". Basically, a couple named Michael and Deirdre Cross decided to attach a micro camera to their cat's collar, automatically snapping photographs every two minutes. The book has received pretty positive reviews from both critics (Good Morning America, People Magazine, etc...) and customers.

Third Eye: A Human Skull Pinhole Camera

There probably isn't a more suitable camera for halloween picture taking than "Third Eye", a macabre pinhole camera created with a 150-year-old human skull by Wayne Martin Belger. Light enters the camera through the "third eye" on the forehead, exposing the film that's placed in the middle of the skull.

Strange Contact Sheet Self Portraits

Remember the contact sheet art we shared a while back? Photographer Karl Baden does something similar -- he creates strange contact sheet self-portraits. These images were all created back in 1980. How a roll of film is exposed needs to be carefully planned out in order to know exactly where each shot will appear on the resulting contact sheet.

Each photo is a pretty normal shot of some area of Baden's face or hands, but when combined into a contact sheet, the resulting image is quite... unique.

Rolling Shutter Causes Plane to Drop Boomerang Bombs

The rolling shutter used by the majority of consumer CMOS sensors can do crazy things to photos and videos. The video above shows what an airplane propeller looks like when shot with a Nokia N95. The rolling shutter makes the plane looks as if it's dropping boomerang bombs that quickly disappear into thin air.

Photoshopped BP Helicopter Photo Becomes Internet Meme

This past week, BP has received a lot of  attention for its release of "official" images that later turned out to be very poorly photoshopped. So far, three badly altered photos have been called out. Aside from the inevitable backlash and disappointment from the public, the photo has taken on a life of its own as an internet meme. People have been adapting their own versions of the helicopter scene, replete with geek jokes and bizarre photoshopping. Here's one amusing example:

I Am Sitting in a Room, YouTube Style

"I Am Sitting in a Room" is one of the best known works of experimental music composer Alvin Lucier. In the piece, he records himself speaking, plays it back while re-recording it, and repeated until the words become unintelligible and simply "the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself".