Norway’s hockey team appears to have a secret weapon in the form of an invisible player! But no, that’s Ole Kristian Tellefsen, getting into a tussle with Finland’s Petteri Nokelainen last May. This strange picture is part of Sports Illustrated’s gallery of Pictures of the Year. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Imago/ZUMAPRESS.com)

Artist Ofra Lapid creates small-scale model homes from photographs of their real-life abandoned, dilapidated counterparts. The original photographs are a series of the buildings in different stages of decay, taken by an amateur who resides in North Dakota.

Link -via Beautiful/Decay

So here’s the legal question: how did the copyright get assigned to Caters? I can’t see how there’s been a legal transfer. The monkeys were unlikely to have sold or licensed the work. I’m assuming that it’s likely that the photographer, Slater, probably submitted the photos to the agency, and from a common sense view of things, that would make perfect sense. But from a letter-of-the-law view of things, Slater almost certainly does not hold the copyrights on those images, and has no legal right to then sell, license or assign them to Caters.

I don’t think anyone is worrying about the monkey filing an infringement suit, but it is an interesting question. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

Update: Caters News Agency contacted Techdirt, and asked them to take down the two pictures. Someone in the comments offered to pay for the monkey pictures with a picture of a spider. Link -Thanks, wernerna!

(Image credit: an unnamed Indonesian Macaque)

Photojournalist Prakash Hatvalne of Bhopal, India took this shot that won the Grand Prize in the 8th annual Smithsonian Photo Contest. You can see the winners in all the different categories, and find out how you can enter the 9th annual contest at Smithsonian. Link

Bob Rosinsky was asked to restore a tintype photograph from the 19th century. On his blog, he walks us through the process of how he did it. No, we don’t watch him change every pixel, but you’ll be surprised at the difference between a scanner image of the tintype and a photograph using an ultra-high resolution camera with a macro lens. Here, you see the before-and-after pictures. Link -via Boing Boing

Most of the time when you go to Cracker Barrel, you expect to find chicken fried steak and giant games of checkers… not your great-great-great grandmother. Sandra, a server at the Owensboro, Kentucky, store, was working and thinking about her recently deceased niece, Cammi Jo. She happened to glance up at one of the old-timey pictures decorating the wall and found Cammi Jo looking back at her. Struck by the uncanny resemblance, Sandra took a picture of the photo and sent it to her sister-in-law, Cammi Jo’s mom. After some research, they discovered that Cammi Jo’s lookalike – the woman holding the baby in the picture – was actually Sandra’s great-great-great-great grandmother, and the baby was Sandra’s great-great-great grandmother.

Cracker Barrel is working on getting the photo back to Sandra’s family.

Link via BoingBoing

Alex Crawford and Austin Nelson get their pictures taken by a Rube Goldberg contraption that includes dominoes! They constructed it for a Multimedia Installation class project. -via Boing Boing

Jeff Martin of 360cities has produced the largest indoor photograph ever: a 40-gigapixel, 360-degree image of the main hall of the 868-year-old Strahov monastery library in Prague, Czech Republic. Almost 3,000 images were shot over five days and then stitched together to make the mega-picture. You can take a tour of the picture, swing all the way around, and zoom in on interesting details. Link to image. Link to story. -via The Daily What

In 1903, he sent 500 prints of his snowflakes to the Smithsonian, hoping they might be of interest to Secretary Samuel P. Langley. These images are now part of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Bentley’s book Snow Crystals, with more than 2,400 snowflake images, was published in 1931. This photomicrograph and more than 5,000 others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike, leading scientists to study his work and publish it in numerous scientific articles and magazines.

See Bentley’s photographs, which are not on display at any museum, online at The Smithsonian Institution. Link

Neatoramanaut lonewolfe13 won a t-shirt in the What Is It? contest. The Support Cloning shirt he selected from the NeatoShop lent itself well to this photography art project. The shirt fits all five of him! Link

Astrophotographer Thierry Legault (featured previously at Neatorama) went all the way to Oman to take a picture of a solar eclipse. The shot he wanted was only available for a split second today, and he got it! Not only is the moon moving across the sun, but you can see other things in the picture (see the full-size version at the link). The small spot towards the bottom is a sunspot twice the size of the earth, and toward the top is something that looks like a TIE fighter. That is the International Space Station (ISS)! The Bad Astronomer explains how rare this picture is:

That’s why Thierry sojourned to Oman; due to the geometry of the ISS orbit, it was from there that he had the best chance of getting a picture of the station as it passed in front of the Sun during the relatively brief duration of the actual solar eclipse. But talk about brief; the ISS was in front of the Sun for less than second, so not only did he have one chance at getting this spectacular once-in-a-lifetime shot, but he had only a fraction of a second to snap it!

The ISS was only in front of the sun for .86 seconds during the eclipse. Link

(Image courtesy of Thierry Legault)

The Photo of the Day at National Geographic is a snorkeler in Thailand -or is it a reverse mermaid? The photograph was submitted to My Shot by Nick Kelly. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

The man your man could smell like meets the most interesting man in the world. Isaiah Mustafa (the Old Spice Guy) posted a picture of his meeting with Jonathan Goldsmith, the Dos Equis beer guy. And somehow the space/time continuum remained intact. Link -via reddit

Neatoramanaut Ivan C. emailed us a photo he found in a photo album several years ago, and thought that it looked like young Abraham Lincoln:

The photo has brought a heated debate for over 5 years now over this photo. I brought a photo album 7 years ago and inside were many photos of well known people. One photo caught my eye. It was a photo on a piece of heavy metal, 2"x3". mirror image. I said to my self this guy looks like Abe Lincoln. The photo had many
other pictures of Abe Lincoln and also of his wife and kids.

Well I started my research into why the photo is not Abe Lincoln. I learned all I could about abe lincoln especially of him being hit in the face by a horse at age nine. I had the photo authenticated. One person who saw the photo in person was Abe Lincoln expert from Denville, New Jersey Dr. Jerome R. Corsi. Also Dave Blanchette and Drs. Thomas Schwartz and James Cornelius. They all agreed and said it was a very young Abe, age 27 to 29.years old. I also had a forensic detective look at it. Mr. Bob Garrett CSCSA, CLPE, FFS New Jersey State Division International Association for Identification. He said all facial characteristics match.

If you see the photo in person you see that Mr. Lincoln was very tall and homely and you can see his mole, crooked lip and disfigured jaw. One eye was smaller and one ear was higher than the other. Abe is wearing his WHIG button and his suit and cravat is of the victoria age.

If you want to see the photo in person I live in New Jersey.

I’m no photo expert, but a cursory play with various images of Lincoln I found online showed a remarkable match in the eyes, nose, and mouth positionings. Could Ivan have found daguerrotypes of young Abraham Lincoln? What do you think?

The photos:

Thanks Ivan!

Fourteen-year-old Kora Wira was fishing in Florida with her parents when a barracuda jumped out of the water and bit her arm! The 42-inch fish landed in the boat and was killed by Wira’s father. Between docking the boat and driving to the hospital, there was one more chore to be done.

Wira and her dad stopped for a quick picture before jumping in the car and heading to the hospital. Wira said she wasn’t in pain at the moment, but she was still creeped out by the fish. Her arm needed 51 stitches, and doctors told her they had never treated a barracuda bite. Her stitches are out now, and she said her arm is healing.

The complete story is a slide show of photographs that include Wira’s wounds, which may be disturbing. Link -via Buzzfeed

This beautiful picture of Earth was taken by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft. Rosetta is on a mission to intercept the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which will happen in 2014. The brightest part of this picture is our South Pole. Link

(image credit: ESA)

The next time you get a bunch of WTF pictures on a viral email, remember this: human’s propensity for making weird (and weirdly wonderful) pictures predates the InterWeb. Take a look at these strangely compelling black and white images of yore over at Black and WTF tumblr blog: Link – Thanks Matt!

Army Reservist Staff Sgt. Brett Bennethum was ordered to Iraq in July. His four-year-old daughter Paige had a hard time letting go, so much that she held onto his hand in formation. No one, including the commanding officer, had the heart to pull her away. The picture of the incident, taken by Paige’s mother, has gone viral and touched people all over the country. Link -via Buzzfeed

(image credit: Abby Bennethum)

‘I think it must be a fairy,’ she said yesterday as she made the picture public for the first time.

‘No one I’ve shown the photos to has come up with any plausible explanation as to what the figure is.’ The photo reminds some of the Cottingley fairies, photographed in a West Yorkshire garden in 1917.

See the entire picture with the story. Link -via Unique Daily

Previously at Neatorama: The Cottingley Fairies in Five Hoaxes that Fooled the World.

Forty years later, the couple in the photo – Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, both 60 – remain together. They married two summers after the fabled weekend, and they still live less than an hour’s drive from the original concert site of Bethel, N.Y., and within spitting distance of where they both grew up.

Nick Ercoline works for the Orange County, N.Y., Department of Housing. Bobbi is a resident nurse at the elementary school in their hometown of Pine Bush.

The two weren’t even aware of the photograph until they saw the album cover. Link -via Boing Boing

(image credit: Harbus for News)

Some one hundred and twenty years after Georges-Pierre Seurat completed his iconic A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, a group of artists called The Human Printer resurrected the art of pointilism by painstakingly recreating a photograph dot by dot using markers to replicate the halftone effect of CMYK printers.

See more here: Link – via Drawn!

“The picture came out in the paper to show the people what hard times was. People was starving in that camp. There was no food,” she says. “We were ashamed of it. We didn’t want no one to know who we were.”

The photograph helped define the Great Depression, yet McIntosh says her mom didn’t let it define her, although the picture “was always talked about in our family.”

“It always stayed with her. She always wanted a better life, you know.”

McIntosh talked to CNN about what her life was like in those days. She now lives in Modesto, California. Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!

(image credit: Gregg Canes/CNN)