Portent

This is a website that has photos of unusual shaped buildings from around the world. You can vote on which are your favourites or suggest new ones.

http://unusual-architecture.com/Link

Popularity: 1% [?]

Not so long ago, several key cables were accidentally cut and India/Asia lost a lot of connectivity. This picture lets you see why. Ok, so i like this kind of stuff; infrastructure etc! Doesn’t make me a bad guy!

Click the link (or the picture above) and it will take you to the Guardians website and the full size image.

Link to picture on Guardian website

Popularity: 7% [?]

Sol it’s just another boring online product store? Not quite! Just watch it for a few seconds…

Link

Popularity: 26% [?]

I’ve seen this effect used recently in an advert in a newspaper or magazine so I expect to see it happen more over the next 12-18 months before it becomes a clche and advertising agencies look for something else new and fresh.

That said, it’s still pretty clever and must take a fair bit of time, tweaking and adjusting to get just the right shadow you want.
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Popularity: 22% [?]

This is a wonderful set of photos of a climb up the Bay Bridge and showing the views from the top which are just amazing.

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Popularity: 21% [?]

I have no idea what this is about but it’s colourful if rather badly wrong!

It’s just a map of the USA, seemingly as the Japanese (well those who can’t read an Atlas or view Google Maps) perceive the USA.

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Popularity: 38% [?]

Somewhere you don’t expect to find lots of lovely and interesting photos is Wikipedia (well I didn’t!).

Australian David Iliff has travelled to quite a number of places (poor bloke is currently in London- hard luck mate!) and these are some gorgeous photos and panoramas he has taken and put on on his user page in Wikipedia.

Link

Popularity: 17% [?]

It’s easier usually, camouflaging people or vehicles to blend in the background. These photos though show an entire aircraft factory (Lockheed Burbank) being camouflaged by building false fields to make it look as if it was plain country.

Obviously from the ground this probably wouldn’t fool the eye but from a mile above, which is where you would expect Japanese aircraft to attack it should easily confuse them. Clever stuff. There are 9 photos in all.

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Popularity: 17% [?]

Some of these statues are very strange indeed. Some aren’t exactly statues- like the Mini parked up the wall but they are all all a bit odd.

The rhino hanging in mid air is my favourite, followed closely by the women swinging the kid.

Link

Popularity: 47% [?]

This beautiful looking King Cobra is made out of cans all stacked high and is one of a number of photos from some exhibition somewhere.

Of course Andy Warhol made cans of Campbells soup famous in his paintings but I doubt he ever envisaged this use of cans!

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Popularity: 19% [?]

Retro-Futurism is looking back to a time when they foresee the future somewhat differently to how it panned out.

By now of course we should all have flying cars and video phones and live in peace and harmony. TV programmes like Tomorrows World from the 1970s envisaged us living in a plastic furnished world, usually in white. Of course things never turn up quite as people imagine them- we’re not quite in Orwell’s dystopian 1984 or some other’s utopia but somewhere in between and not living in a Bladerunner type world.

The linked site has a number of French illustrations from 1910 on how they thought the world of 2000 might look like. Some ideas seem positively quaint and we now know them to be dangerous- eg heating with radium!

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Popularity: 21% [?]

I never cease to be amazed by the abilities of sand sculptors. This is a set of photos of a competition to build a Sand City in Antalya Turkey.

I know if I tried this, I’d get some kid walking through kicking em over! Anyway, these are pretty amazing.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

I bought a clock made from watch parts once, when I stayed in the Anjoa hotel in Leeds in 1991. The watch parts were arranged around the actual clock face i.e. decorative not functional. I think it cost me £35. The owner was selling them.

These 16 motorbike models are also made from watch parts. They are just exquisite.

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Popularity: 32% [?]

These are quite cute. They say things like “Note to security- I picked this bag all by myself” and “Have fun rifing through my underwear”.

I’m not sure if I’d have the courage to use them though!

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Popularity: 17% [?]

Australian art student Nichola Manion believes “To reduce a city to almost nothing, To render the landscape in two dimensions, To see the world in a sheet of paper…is to see the humanity in everything” and “Money circles the globe, forming links between cities on opposite sides of the world. I must give them a voice and share the stories they tell…”

He uses art to get this message across using city scapes in paper and in money. There are 36 photos here. A nice piece of work.

Link

Popularity: 13% [?]