Finalists have been chosen in the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photo awards, and can be found here.
I have to say, my favorite is the one that looks to me like a kangaroo performing Hamlet. Although the two squirrels that are giving a credible imitation of Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey's leaping scene in Dirty Dancing run a close second.
In another edition of one of my favorite types of photography postings Neatorama shows the work of Magdalena Vissagio and her transformation of sculpture, paintings and old photographs to modern images. It's pretty interesting to see what Abe Lincoln looks like with a smile on his face. And Frederick Douglass shows even more don't-mess-with-me dignity than in his usual black-and-white image. Although Nero looks like a party animal instead of the psychotic murderous dictator that he was.
People looking at the sky from urban areas often note how power lines, telephone polls and the like obscure their view, cutting it into sections with their dark, crisscrossing lines. Photographer Alex Hyner decided to take that literally, using a telephone poll with several lines that sliced the view into sections. He filled each section with a sky photo taken in a different place, combining their colors and features into an almost stained-glass looking image.
Over at Bored Panda, an artist used an artificial intelligence algorithm to provide possible portraits of what celebrities who have passed away unexpectedly might look like if they were alive today.
Some of them are not bad -- the Freddie Mercury portrait probably has more dark hair than the average 75-year-old sports but other features seem realistic. John Lennon's face seems reasonable for an 81-year-old man, but the amount of hair doesn't really work at all. The Elvis Presley picture is a reasonable example of what an older Elvis might look like (apparently, Lee Majors) but the picture shown doesn't really suggest someone who's 86.
On that front, the James Dean and Marilyn Monroe portraits are complete misses. The way both are shown could very well have been a part of them had they aged past their respective early deaths, but neither picture shows the nonagerians they both would be. And a couple don't make much sense: David Bowie was 69 when he died just five years ago so there's not really much change in his looks. And a few of the others suggest an algorithm that needs some tweaking.
Over at Twisted Sifter, you can find an entry for an artist who takes that figure of speech literally, cutting along the different designs on the back of an ordinary deck of playing cards until he creates a 3-D sculpture of them. An example may be seen below:
Over at Bored Panda, an entry shows what artificial intelligence suggests the offspring of famous TV or movie couples might have looked like if they had been real and had children.
The results are interesting, although a couple of the prospective kids look more like each other than they do the fictional parents. The AI program worked on the photos themselves; I can't imagine we're that far off from the same kinds of programs working on the actual genomes of the people involved and creating an image that might result from the combined DNA. Of course, that would involve obtaining DNA from the principals and that might not be such a welcome request from a random stranger creating an Instagram post.
And, you know, sort of creepy.
After looking around awhile, it would seem that there are so many groups that have photography contests and award prizes that it's like there's a new one to look at just about every day.
But once one adds in the fudge factor of belief in a Creator, one who personally relates to creation and cares for it? Then the mind may turn to a realization that the power which made a universe so large and vast is the same one that tends even the tiny bits of protoplasm that walk around on the surface of a small planet in an unremarkable solar system in an rural stretches of an unremarkable galaxy.
Mindful of us, indeed.
A photographer has made a specialty of blending celebrity facial images using editing software to create hybrids of the two.
He deliberately chooses people with some similar facial features, which is probably why some of the blends just really look like one of the celebrities more than they do an actual blend. Number 29 might be a blend of Idris Elba and Mahershala Ali but it still looks like a picture of Elba. The collection at the link contains a couple male-female blends -- I suppose they might give an impression of what the children of such a couple might look like.
One thing I believe I can say for certain about them, though, is that no matter whose facial features are dominant in #12, the result has either a) never been funny or b) not been funny in a long, long time.
Some more fun with the past, as artist Stuart Humphryes takes some rare old photos -- shot in color via a process called autochrome -- and tidies them up to look modern. As you can see in the pics displayed on his Twitter feed, Humphryes doesn't colorize black and white pictures, he restores color in the faded autochromes. By making them look like modern shots, he highlights how we tend to see the past as fuzzy, faded or a wash of grays when it was really just as bright and colorful as today is.
Some more fantastic images, displayed as a part of the 2020 Macro Art contest of the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition. The pictures at the article at My Modern Met have some fantastic diversity, although they have in common that they are taken very close up and make very small things appear to be very large.
One of the artists who uses photo editing software to post pictures of celebrities with their younger selves has also recently offered a series of them posing "with" some of their well-known roles.
Some of them work better than others; Hugh Jackman and Millie Bobbie Brown do not really look like they are in the same picture as their characters Wolverine and Eleven, and Tony Montana looks more like he's standing next to a cutout of Al Pacino than the actor himself. Johnny Depp does look like he is actually posting for a shoot with his version of the Mad Hatter, but you kind of wonder why the pic doesn't use the far better-known Jack Sparrow.
In any event, it's a fun series and worlds better than I would have managed, so take a look and enjoy.
