Awesome Photos

Similar to a cinema screen that the picture from the projector shines on, Nodesign’s Dia Parrot is a frame with a transparent high-res LCD screen that gives your favorite snaps a retro-modern twist.

After working overtime on Halloween to complete their seasonally mandated mayhem, these ghastly beasts, creatures and slashers need to unwind. Thanks to the wonder that is Photoshop, they can.

If you thought your awkward teenage yearbook photos were bad, just wait until you get a load of these unfortunate subjects. The guys over at Bad Yearbook Photos have curated some of the worst.

Students at Minnesota’s Carleton College decided to dress up their campus observatory in the largest R2-D2 costume we’ve ever seen. C-3PO was nowhere to be found on campus.

A driver in downtown Tulsa must have gotten the D and R mixed up on their shift-lever, inadvertently crashing their car through the 7th floor exterior wall of a high-rise parking building. Brilliant.

The Space Station has had Internet access for less than a month but astronaut Soichi Noguchi is already beaming back tweets and twitpics of Earth from his (very high) vantage point.

Outland Armour strikes back with Steampunk Star Wars, which debuted at Dragon Con 2009; top picks go to a WWI-styled Vader and an epically armored Boba Fett. (galleries: 1, 2).

Watch as Operation Yule Storm takes place on 12/12 at 1212 hours in San Francisco; it tasked the 12th Nutracker Regiment with escorting Santa, Jesus, and other North Pole VIPs.

Inspired by a trip to San Diego Comic Con, Caleb Paullus’ Super Not So Super is a revealing look at the mundane lives of several spandex-suited heroes; done in a flash, huh, Flash?

Literally the most powerful pictures ever, Michael Platon’s World Leader Photographs were a semi-impromptu project taken over the course of five days at the United Nations.

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, Empire has compiled a special birthday portfolio of 27 movie stars including Mel Gibson and Arnold reprising their roles — sort of.

If you were as simultaneously awe-struck and creeped out as we were by LA Without Traffic, Matt Logue’s Empty Los Angeles is an entire 78-page photo book of a City of (no) Angels.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen Harrison Krix’s Big Daddy Costume, but these photos at the Georgia Aquarium are almost a perfect rendition of Bioshock–especially with HDR editing.

Adam Richardson uses humor and irony to address a politically sensitive topic with Invaded Space; taken at face value, it blends Boston.com’s war photography with 8-bit retro goodness.

My Parents Were Awesome honors a generation blessed with social movements, short shorts, and really, really great hair; yes, mom and dad, you were indeed a pair of very cool cats.

Life imitates, copies, and pastes art with this image.jpg Photo Frame; purely analog, the OS X chrome is silkscreened onto a wood frame with included “transparent” grid background.

Alan Jaras’ Light Art is spectacular enough on its own, but most impressive is these are made without any CG: they’re refraction patterns of light passing through transparent objects.

Part playful photoshopping, part social commentary, Indonesian artist Agan Harahap’s Superhero Photographs splice Batman, Darth Vader and others into 20th century wartime images.

And it all started with clay and paper clips: LIFE Magazine gives us a peek at early spacecraft models and tests by both NASA and the Russian space programs in the 1960s and 70s.

After their awesome Fallout reenactment, Russian live-action fans hit much closer to home with this STALKER LARP; over 200 players were involved, albeit in Vyborg instead of Chernobyl.

Shot with a Nikon D3 and composed of 1,200 photos, the Gigagalaxy Zoom Project is an 800 million pixel image of our Milky Way; download a smaller 18 million pixel image here.

We’re still waiting for our own flight to space, but MIT students recently sent a camera 17.5 miles into near-space using a prepaid GPS cellphone, hand warmers and a styrofoam beer cooler.

The Hubble telescope is 19 years old, but you wouldn’t know it from this new set of photos snapped after recent upgrades; it sports a new Wide Field camera and spectrograph.