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September 8, 2005

And Speaking of Photoshop...

...which I was mere days ago, Boing Boing links to a new Photoshop contest on Worth 1000 -- Extreme Rides!

Woo-hoo! Extreme! So extreme they're X-Treme!

If you aren't familiar with the genre, Worth 1000 will announce a contest topic -- in this case, "Bizarre Attractions," and then all of the industrious little Photoshoppers out there grab pictures of actual rides and merge them into strange new concoctions.

Like this one:

which is quite pretty. Obviously, the idea here is that the loop is sooooooooooooo ginormous that even commercial aircraft have to fly through it. I'm guessing the line for that one would be massive.

Then you've got more... original entries, like this one:

Not sure how long the line for this one would be, but it does seem to capture the contest theme pretty succinctly: this photo does indeed reveal a "bizarre attraction."

Not, I should hasten to add, that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.

Photoshop contests are all over the place. Worth 1000 hosts them all the time, as does Fark. Here's a fun Fark photo from their contest for posters for new movies based on old TV shows:

Supdog masterfully puts Bea Arthur in the tux and allows Estelle Getty to showcase her powerful athleticism.

In contrast to that earlier post in which I decried the death and irrelevancy of realism in photography, Photoshop contests reveal the playful possibilities of the technology. This playfulness, of course, is something that postmodern theorists have been insisting exists for decades now, although it's often been hard to spot it in postmodern lit.

In any case, I love these things. And I think that it's a slippery slope to solipcism. I'm complex.

(Via Cory at Boing Boing)

Posted by reparent at September 8, 2005 10:11 AM

Comments

Posted by: Hope Greenberg at September 14, 2005 6:17 PM