Caren Alpert takes photographs of food through a microscope.

Here for example is a pineapple leaf.

pineapple leaf detail

Many more including sprinkles, a spooky sun-dried tomato, and chocolate cake.

via: feature shoot

Belgian ads advising you to “Take the Bus” done for the bus company De Lijn. Produced by Creative Conspiracy for the Duval Guillaume agency.

Ants:

Penguins:

via: PaperWalker (which you should look at just for the header art)

Cheeky smile of the day: Mr. McQueen’s Licence Internationale de Conduire. Trials and Scrambles.

would you trust this man with your motorcycle?

via: Gunslinger

A really lovely little sidecar rig. Honda CB550. The rebuild is appropriate for the era and the paint is so sweet.

little CB550 makes a great tug for this little chair

via: BikeEXIF

A look inside the mind of builder Dustin Kott. Cafe Racers from vintage Japanese bikes. By Benedict Campbell.

via: Return of the Cafe Racers

From Emily Carrol who does dreamlike comics and stories. a tale of silvery hair and a covetous crow. Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter.

Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter

Cut paper, pop-up books, and projected lights & images, bring Ice Book to chilling life. This video gives you an idea of what the piece looks like in person and how it is created. Davy and Kristin McGuire.

via: Coilhouse

Villagers! vikings! Castles, swords, and … dinosaurs? Dinosaur Battle Town, Eddie West’s 4th year project will thrill the 4 year-old boy in everyone.Yeah, it reminded me of Howl’s Moving Castle just a little too.

The effectiveness of simple materials used in a clever way. Paper, pens, scissors. Not to mention the charming not quite English of its creator.

Every cup of coffee contains its own soul, extracted from your feeling today.every cup of coffee is like a magic show containing different journey and bringing the unending imagination and surprises.With a sip of coffee, you not only taste your own story, but also change your perspective of the world.

Stop motion essence of coffee :)

Sara Burgess

More papery wonderfulness, insects, leaves, and very special 3-D forms. Sara Burgess works with white paper and an x-acto knife.

via: Oh So Beautiful Paper

Talented dancer, composer, and film-maker. Daniel  (cloud) Campos. “Music Box’  about finding the perfect apartment, the vid featured at the moment will make you smile.

If you can bring yourself to watch “Rain Dodger” you’ll get a giggle but it may be too much for many considering the ridiculous rain we’re having right now.

More environmental sound. A giant xylophone created in the woods by Drill Inc. A slow rolling ball and a gentle incline pick out a familiar tune. Images from the shoot.

Robot happiness. Well used, retro style toys by Cris Rose.

Extreme camera geekiness, with the Girl DP. How to make very custom bokeh filters. hearts, stars, moons, and *words* in dazzling fuzzy light.

… do not read below this line …

And completely, irredeemably, unnecessary: a My Little Pony/Dark Knight mashup. Worthwhile comments on the daily what.

you were warned.

Transportation

I’m not a fan of choppers — it’s a style I just don’t get. But ZZ Chop is true to his roots and does graphics with a distinctive chopper ethos. Great, grungy, retro work.

Making a scrambler out of an older BMW RT is cool. Though I wonder a little about bashing through the woods on anything with that kind of width :) The quote from the Cycle Magazine explaining the 70’s BWM nomenclature and the relationship between the various bikes in the line is priceless.

Planes and bikes. A lovely little blue and white piper cub and an equally sweet blue and white Passport. (Yeah it’s just a nice pic. Soothing even.)

Science

Gyrodactylids. Parasitic flat worms living on fish. Cut paper animation and nesting dolls? As always Creature Cast shows you something you wouldn’t come across in your daily reading of the news. (And provides great examples of amateur animation used as a learning tool.)

Art, Images, and Design

Faces in objects, found and enhanced by Flix. Bright mecha-man goodness.

Swoon is an American girl in Paris and she takes us on a night-time ramble to install one of her wheat paste posters. Her life-size images of people stand up well to the background noise of Paris.

Snippets (SFW) of classical paintings enlarged and pasted into new but entirely appropriate contexts. Zilda.  More (some NSFW.)

Large scale, partial images, hints of a story yet untold. Mesa works up some faces on a ruined wall somewhere in rural Spain.

keep calm and carry on

Transportation

I know a lot of 2 stroke fans. Most of them area little less than sane. All of them would do this in a heart beat. Just to have something for running around on the back roads.  JAWA 350 mods. (Video is loud.)

WTF? Transformer bike for those who hanker for both a cafe racer and a cruiser but have limited garage space. Video demonstrates the hydraulic change over. With seat height, rake, trail, wheel base (duh) and ground clearance all changing to produce two bikes. The V-Rod based Veon by Krugger. It’s also not the ugliest thing in the world. Close but not the ugliest.

Pretty girls on bikes. A little something to bring cheer into your Monday.

Science

NASA makes the best digital toys. Extreme Plant Makeover. Mess about with the Earth by changing it’s size, distance from the sun, type of sun, and age. It’s awfully easy to make a barren waste land or foggy soggy giant. Planet hacking!

Art, Images, and Design

A reminder that art is not without its odd mysteries and ongoing tiffs. We all know Raphael’s self-portrait. The guy with the perky nose and a distant look sitting in front of a brown wall, unstructured hat? But did you know that there’s a second painting? Hiding in a vault, almost identical, and possibly as real as the one hanging in Uffizi? Nice little plot for a novel.

Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, and Kewpie dolls, all madly out of context in 1930’s Japanese postcards. There are also skeletons, and dancing cats. Our cultural mascots must have seemed impossibly odd to the creators of these.

Ferris Plock. Pieces created while in residence. Styled after oriental wood block prints and hanging scrolls but with modern anomalies — the crocodile wears Keds.

Animation and Moving Images

One Wing Fly aka Y & M Nathan, Look under commercial work, there is a whole series of adverts that place a woman (really beautiful) on a floor and have her “walk” through scenes. Poorly explained by me — utterly charming in person. (Really, good enough to warrant a link into a flash-based site.)

Now off you go, it’s a busy week ahead.

Transportation

A concept bike should push an idea out beyond the run of the mill and what’s already on the showroom floor. Built for the imaginary purpose of running (the old version of) the Milan-Taranto endurance race and using such new-fangled components as a turbo diesel engine and carbon fiber wheels. What you get is Paolo di Giusti’s radical single cylinder Moto Guzzi.

I’m not sure I want to hear the word steampunk applied to any motorcycle let alone one that is supposed to be ridable. And in fact I find the brass accents to be all wrong on this bike. But the idea of building a cafe starting with the Aprilla RSV motor?  That makes me happy. And Welsh to boot. Taimoshan.

Science

Murphy is a right obnoxious bastard, but he seems to have let loose of the NanoSail-D solar sail project at last.  And, no, I did not know that the aim of the project is trash sweeping in low earth orbit either.

A video that demonstrates the power of the power of 10. By moving outward from a square meter of an image of a nice couple having a picnic in Chicago and ending up at the every edges of human ability to see into space in an image 100 million light years across.   Old IBM film but still relevant and still fun.

Art. images, and Design

Nice combos of simple graphics and unsophisticated type. Steve Powers explored the glory and gory of relationships on the walls of Philadelphia. I’ve shown you several of them before but this is my new favorite.

And now I’m loving his “Daily Metaltation”

This is as good as any place to start exploring the work of Dan Mountford. Double exposures made in the camera. The world before photoshop.

Animation and Moving Images

Chain-gang tap dance. Okay it’s a little hard to explain why two girls — the Holst Sisters — are tap dancing while attached at the ankle. But they’re good at it.

I have no idea who the band is or what the song is about or any of that — I don’t speak Japanese. But the music is cheery and vaguely jazzy and the animation ranges from lively to over the top.

Transportation

I love this Ducati cafe for no better reason than the brass bezeled clock. le sigh

This one is hard to post. Copenhagen has a lively custom scene with some of my favorite builders. Many of them noted the catastrophic fire that resulted in loss of Frank’s one of their HD go-to parts suppliers. James posts some photos of the aftermath. Sad, haunting, beautiful pictures.

Art, Images, and Design

More for the quality of the photograph of the first piece than the other pieces in the series. String on a wall in Ravenna IT. By Moneyless.

Catwoman. (SFW) Yum. Bengal’s version is both coy and dark. Excellent combination. More of Bengal. (NSFW)

Okay — these are just cute. And a little silly. They’re all examples of creating a purpose-built device for what is a common household improvisation. Orange rinds on the radiator, a small dish of coffee in the fridge… but the designs are minimal and straight forward.

Animation and Moving Images

Nick Cross’s Pig Farmer. Violent and tragic. (Video 5:05 NSFW or Children — realistic violence and squealing)

Transportation

The 2 door station wagon (or is that 3 doors?) has always been a bit of an odd fish. But Ferrari thinks that it’s the answer to the demand for a four seat super-car, the FF. And Pininfarina can make just about anything beautiful. I think 12 cylinders is all the justification it needs. With Ferrari-in-the-snow video goodness Woot!

I’m a total sucker for Nick Clements videos. Pretentious as hell and too hip for their own cool. Still… pretty scenery, pretty bikes, and gorgeous cinematography. Featuring Cro Custom’s BS1.  (Video)

Chopcult  provides a fine set of images and info on the BS1 and the builder, Cro Custom’s, site has a couple of other more typically chopper bikes.

Arty interior shots featuring motorcycles, and the bikes are for rent to use in your own shoots. The carefully distressed Crossbones is, well… actually, a really appealing piece of rolling sculpture. Gentry Dayton is creative director of EvaGentry.

Art, Images, and Design

Ray Caesar is one of the many painters currently doing pallid, big-headed girls in peril. Much of a muchness, except that once in a while he does something that stops me dead. Like the sleigh and courtier in  Homecoming. (Pardon the hellish URLs — they are shortened ;)

View the full show, A Gentle Kind of Cruelty, at Jonathan Levine Gallery’s website. (Some NSFW when zoomed)

Elaborately composed photographs can go either way for me. Some are just noise, others like the first two of these from Simon Proctor’s Daystar series captivate me. The videos created from the stills and other elements I’m very much on the fence about.

I’ve always loved the Burr puzzles. Now there’s this… Burr tables!

More about the Burr puzzles. (oh lordy that’s one seriously ugly website but it’s all I’ve got…)

Moving Images, and Animation

Did you know that there was a Japanese version of the Flintstones produced in the 1980s? Nope, neither did I. It’s a giggle.

Dancing robots… I said, Dancing Robots. New ident spots for (UK) Channel 4’s, T4 programming. (Video and loud music)

Transportation

Limits produce the best design. The Metamorfosis Masiva is a Spanish customizers challenge that begins with SR250 and limits the cash outlay to 1000 euros. No limit on time. The wrenches detail is beyond cool. You can get more Metamorfosis coolness at their blog.

What to do with a wrecked Hypermotard…

Sales brochures have always been a part of automotive marketing. And collecting those brochures is a sub-hobby all its own.  Charlie White has helped a collector put up scans of a complete binder of the materials sent to Porsche dealers for the 1955 line-up. 43 pages of Continental, Speedster, and Spyder lust.

Art, Images, and Design

Crucial news for photography enthusiasts. Alan Taylor is moving to the Atlantic and launching a new photo blog there. The Big Picture will continue to be published by the Boston Globe but Alan’s particular eye and vision will be moving on. He talks about it here.

Bright, bold, and full of life. Danni Xi’s paper collages put my in mind of Mattise’s later work, but with a strong hint of tribal vitality.

Low relief paper sculptures by Cheong-ah Hwang aka: Papernoodle. Birds, still-lifes, sea creatures, Red, and Alice. The flickr stream is full of process shots as well. And you can buy the prints at the etsy shop.

My nominee for best eyebrows on an imaginary creature. Phlegm’s sea mammal.

Animation and Moving Images

You may be having a bad day but not *this* bad. Part  2 of a highlights reel from a Tamil film called ROBOT.  Wait ’til you see the cobra… and the drill… and the mega-robot.  Cartoon violence and insane robot mayhem. (Video 9:49)

There’s a part 1 as well. More comedy but less insane robot awesome. And heaven only knows why the Borg cube is there. (Video 9:49)

A bit more soothingly. Beach sand as a medium for stop-motion animation. Sea turtles, mermaids, and a monster. (Music video 3:43) Yuval and Merav Nathan