I'm sure, like me, you've received hundreds of pesty e-mails with these trippy optical illusions attached for your viewing pleasure. I won't go into detail about the characteristics of each illusion but prepare to have your mind expanded, your stomach nauseated and your time wasted!
There is a fun web site called Awkward Family Photos. The name pretty much says it all. Anyone who's either made or been in a family photograph can attest to the awkward and contrived nature of the experience. I thought it might be fun to also include a few of photography's truly great family photographs. 
Paul Strand, Luzzara, Italy, 1953
August Sander, Widower and Sons
August Sander, Brother and Sister
Diane Arbus, Brooklyn Family
Diane Arbus, Jewish Giant at Home 
Diane Arbus, Nudists
I went to the race track on Mother's Day. The place, while eerily quiet, was swimming with gamblers and hustlers.
The small ones proved to be the most ruthless. After bilking me out of two dollars my son won 10 bucks on a bet I placed for him and then refused to pay back my initial investment. I did manage to win five dollars and sixty cents though later on a two dollar bet so all in all it was a pretty good day.
Photo by Todd Heisler
A great profile on the NY Times site of an authentic, old school, New York, newspaper photographer. They don't make them like this anymore.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html
The New York Times ran a recent piece on the efforts to save the now crumbling Long Island laboratory of the renowned scientist Nikola Tesla. Included in the article were a few fantastic, time lapse, photographs of Tesla, boldly and nonchalantly, sitting by his creation, an electric coil, as it discharges millions of volts of electricity. These reminded me of the dramatic and beautiful pictures made by M.I.T scientist and strobe pioneer, Dr. Harold Edgerton.
Dickenson V. Alley/Burndy Library
Dickenson V. Alley/Burndy Library
Harold Edgerton, Explosion of Atomic Bomb
Harold Edgerton, Bullet Through Playing card
Harold Edgerton, Bullet through Apple
Harold Edgerton, Milk Drop Coronet
Pablo Picasso, Femme au chapeau, 1971
"New York’s spring art auctions kick off this week with the impressionist and modern-art sales at Sotheby’s May 5 and 6 and at Christie’s May 6 and 7. The auction houses had disastrous sales last fall—when Sotheby’s and Christie’s lost millions of dollars on art that went unsold or sold for less than they had guaranteed consignees. They stressed that estimates have been lowered—at times back to 2004 prices—to encourage buyers and voiced confidence in the outcome, based on the success of these strategies in recent London sales."
So how much do you think this bad girl will go for? Send in your guesses. Christie's estimates it to sell for between $8 and 12 million. It's a damn good painting. I'm guessing it will sell for $13 million. The reader with the closest guess will win an actual jpeg of the above Picasso painting! Game on!
Google knows. So does Getty Images. Actually it's their search engine optimized meta data tagged pictures who boastfully know that they are "good." After a quick search they they pop up like the over eager hands of school children who are a bit too proud to posses the correct answer to a teacher's query. Getty Images offers you 414,853 pictures when searching for a "good photograph." Which either means that they don't think highly of the 2,415,925 other pictures in their collection or that these other photographs were not key worded correctly for my purposes. Google offers a more carefully curated collection of 990 pictures. To be fair the answer is, of course, an impossible one to answer. It would be foolish to expect a nuanced or thoughtful response from a computer server. But, since search engines, the internet, commerce, culture and consumption are the dominate sand box of the day and the medium where so many of us ask questions, and get them answered, it was an experiment that piqued my curiosity. Here is a very tiny sample of the nearly 3 million photographs that I found in my search.
Purple?... Purple! Really? And lots of other "good" and dubious advice. Enjoy.
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