As we've demonstrated many times before, sometimes the truth is stranger than Photoshop. For those of you still unconvinced, we present the latest installment in our ongoing quest to show you every picture that has ever looked ridiculously fake, and isn't.
In case you missed them, here's Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five.
And now...
There appears to now be a whole genre of sculpture based entirely on making people scream bullshit when they see a photo of it. Like here, this comic book-style drawing is actually a huge metal sculpture in New Zealand, by artist Neil Dawson. As seen on BoingBoing and elsewhere. The great thing about this 45-foot high structure is that it pretty much looks fake from any angle.
See?
This too-out-of-place-to-be-true Santa is actually just a woman in costume and makeup (if you look close, you can see where some rubbed off around her neck). Otherwise, holy shit, we're thinking we'd call this fake even if it happened right in front of us.
The greyscale Santa herself actually showed up in our forums to explain how she did it. We're predicting there will be half a dozen "Black and White _______" costumes at every Halloween party you attend this year. And we won't complain, because it's really freaking cool.
OK, if that isn't a terrible Photoshop crop job, then it's time to play a game of, "Giant Head Sculpture or Tiny Cars?"
It's the second one. Michael Paul Smith is not a city sized monster, he's just an extreme modeling enthusiast. We're not sure which is scarier. It reminds us a little bit of those Calvin and Hobbes strips where Calvin builds little sandcastle worlds to destroy. Only these worlds took thousands of hours of painstaking, meticulous detailing. Either way, we're certain one day he'll get drunk and stomp around on that shit like Godzilla.
No, it's not a time lapse photo. Right there is exactly what they saw hanging in the sky one December evening in Norway. Can you imagine looking out of your window and seeing that shit in the sky? You'd assume you and everyone you know was about to be sucked into another dimension.
It started as a blue streak emerging from the horizon, which then left that spiral behind before it slowly faded.
It turned out it was the vapor trail of a failed Russian missile test, a Bulava missile fired from a submarine. When they go wrong, they do this:
Here are different shots of the event, and pretty much all of them look equally like a Pink Floyd laser light show.
Hey, a guy with a tiny wife! And he appears to be dribbling her like a basketball! Truly an image like that is too awesome to be true.
Well, sort of. This is one of those forced perspective tricks, the same method by which most movies make actors appear to be bigger or smaller than they really are (including the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings movies). It's all about tricking your depth perception:
Of course in real life there's no way one human could be that much bigger than another, even if you got the world's tallest and shortest men to stand next to each other-
Holy crap. This is the fakest looking photo we've come across in all the work we've done for these articles. It looks like a bad video game cut-scene back from the days when they first had CD-ROMs.
This is a photo from a Scottish festival to honor St. Anthony, which apparently involves riding horses through bonfires.. We don't quite know who St. Anthony is, but based on some of these pictures, we're guessing he's the patron of badassery.
If you're thinking that looks like somebody pulled the plug on a huge cartoonish bathtub drain under a lake.... well, that's exactly what it is. That's Lake Berryessa in California, and the "drain" controls the water levels in the lake. According to the site the photograph is from, the drain is big enough to swallow your house (about 70 feet across) and it goes down almost 300 feet.
Then it all empties out into another lake full of incredibly confused fish.
Some of you are going to point out that they're doing another tricky thing with the depth up there (that is, the guy's feet in the foreground are huge compared to his head) but this is a huge fucking dog from any angle.
That's George, the four-year-old Great Dane. He weighs 245-freaking-pounds and if you could stand him up vertically, he'd be taller than Shaquille O'Neal (he's seven-foot, three-inches long from nose to tail).
Are you all imagining how huge his poops must be? Because we're picturing entire cats lodged in there.
Remember when we said there were artists who spend their lives doing nothing but fuck with people? Well the above hallway was painted by artist Felice Varini, who as far as we can tell has spent his career doing this sort of thing. Though it only works if you're standing in the exact right spot:
While it certainly created a unique work of art, you kind of have to wonder what kind of hoops you have to jump through to get to turn that fancy of a hallway into something like this. Or maybe he just bribed a janitor and snuck in overnight.
What's so impressive about this? Every Nintendo 64 owner has seen dudes like this in every first-person shooter they played.
However, this is real life and the low-polygon head is made of paper. That's the work of artist Eric Testroete, who made it for a Halloween costume, at the risk of a whole bunch of GoldenEye veterans suddenly having an urge to shoot him in the crotch. As far as video game papercraft goes, nobody will ever top-
It looks like the artist was dabbing in snow at the top of that mountain in the upper left at the moment he had a stroke. Just spazzing out with a random zig-zag the whole way down the scene.
Even more terrifying, it's actually a road--Stelvio Pass in the Italian Alps, named one of the best driving roads in the world by Top Gear. Judging from the second picture, some highway guardrail manufacturer stands to make a fortune on this place.
We admit it: We never get tired of stuff that's way bigger or way smaller than it should be.
On that note, this monster bookshelf is Kansas City's main library. It's certainly attention grabbing enough to get kids off the Internet and into reading (just kidding kids, keep reading Cracked!), but we're guessing it also created the rubbernecking accident capital of the world. What would be even more awesome is if you pulled on a certain book, the whole thing would swing around and reveal a secret building.
This would be another example. Or at least we think.
This is a flock of starlings giving you the finger. We're still holding out hope that somewhere there's a bird trainer who has devoted his life to teaching huge flocks to do nothing but this.
This looks to us like one of those awful composite shots of some miniature rocks with a guy shopped in. It's actually a real picture of a frozen river in India, as photographed by Sankar Sridhar, who has all sorts of equally cool photos on his site.
Natives of the area around this river only walk on the ice with padded shoes since anything else would damage the sacred frozen water, and it might refuse to freeze in the future. Boy are these guys going to be pissed when they find out about global warming.
If you look at this one close, you'll see what's going on here. Her left hand, and some strands of hair give away the fact that this is not a painting or a photo run through the Photoshop watercolor filter, but an actual woman whose body has been painted to look like it.
So we guess it is sort of a painting, only they used a woman as a canvas. Then presumably they position her in a window and when people come by to look at the "painting" she reaches out and grabs them and everyone laughs.
This looks like a sarcastic print ad for a car wash, but that is a real car and that is real dirt and a real detailed landscape smeared into it. It's the work of artist Scott Wade and to be fair to the car's owner, he added the dirt himself.
At the very least this looks like a posed shot, or maybe some sort of weird lobbyist advertisement trying to drum up some funding for our troops. But it's actually a real image captured of U.S. soldiers ambushed by the Taliban, and one guy who didn't have time to change into his war clothes. Why do we issue our troops huge, pink comedy boxers? BECAUSE WE ELECTED A DEMOCRAT.
CONTINUE: 17 MORE Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped...
By the way, are you good at using Photoshop in humorous ways? Because we pay people for humorous image manipulation. That link has all the details, you can submit stuff at any time. No obligations. Our cash is real. For more photos that will make you scream "FAKE!" check out The 8 Manliest Images on the Internet and The 15 Most Shameless Fake Photos Ever Passed Off as Real.
Joe Russo
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