These days, thanks to Photoshop, any guy can photoshop his head on Collin Farrell's body and pass it as genuine. But trick photography isn't a new art form. The article "How To Make Incredible Pictures" was printed back in September 1955, before the time of Photoshop and Farrell. But what the people lack in technology then, they made up with creativity.

Making the photo of a boy holding up the oversized fish or the woman smelling a rose bigger than Gary Bonds took more than a few clicks of a mouse. In a nutshell, the finished product are composite photos. The boy and the woman were photographed pretending to hold the whale, er, fish or smelling the giant flower, respectively. The fish and the rose were added later manually (you do remember what "manually" means, right?) by cropping pics of fish and rose and putting them in place on the previous photographs. A third picture was taken to create the amazing photographs.

Crude and amateurish by today's standards. But less pathetic than guys with fake Collin Farrell bods.

When it comes to having my sister's photo taken, she only has one look. We call it the passport photo look. You know, the one - her eyes are like the eyes of a dead fish staring at you from a bed of ice cubes. Her facial expression is more at home in a mug shot. By the way, the image shown here is not my sister but Nick Nolte but the resemblance is uncanny! Unfortunately, the passport photo look runs in our family. So her photo problem is also ours.

Is being photogenic genetic? While looking great on cam comes naturally to some people, we were told it's something of a skill. And if it's a skill, even a monkey can pick it up, right? So if you're tired of looking like crap in every pic you're in, these tips may help transform you from ugly duckling to something less ugly.

• Wear the right clothes. Certain colors complement certain skin tones, others tend to bring out the worst. If you have no idea what colors look good on you, do some research or perform a trial-and-error using a digital camera.
• Hide your blemishes. Photographs can easily hide certain features you don’t like. If one side of your face looks unappealing, try the other side. If either side registers poorly, try the back of your head. Just joking!
• Determine your best angle. Jennifer Aniston said everybody has a good and bad side. But she's freaking Aniston. What the hell does she know about bad sides anyway? But beyond hiding your blemishes, finding the right angle for your face can be tricky. Again, experiment and look for your most flattering angle. Then stick to that angle if that means threathening the photographer with physical assault for not accommodating your request. The classic pose is to place your body 3⁄4 toward the camera with one foot in front of the other and one shoulder closer to the camera than the other. This won't work for everyone and every photo op, though.

More tips on being photogenic after the jump!

Everybody goes through a "I-Want-To-Be-A-Spy" phase, although not every one gets over it. If you still get a kick out of holding bottle of shampoo like a gun in front of a mirror (while introducing yourself as 007 with matching clipped British accent), you're not over it. Nothing wrong with it, of course. But then again, we still put a goldfish bowl over a head and pretend we're on the moon.

Anyways, if you like spy toys, we got a great big small gadget for you. It's the world's smallest color spy camera (1"x1/2" ) with a 434 MHz transmitter. If you think it's a toy, it's not...considering its $259.99 price tag. This gadget can transmit color video up to 1,000 feet in the line-of-sight directly to TV Channel 59. The littlest spy camera from Spyespionage can work up to 10 hours non-stop on a 9V battery. There are so many ways to have fun with this spy cam, but right now we can't think of any that wouldn't get you into legal troubles.

When we think wildlife we don't usually think about the six-legged creatures that literally surround us. Insects may not have the cute factor of pandas or the heart-melting eyes of a puppy but they are quite fascinating creatures. Did you know that for every man, woman and child on earth, there at least 250,000 insects? And that they make up more than 95% of all the species on the planet? All in all there are 925,000 known insect species. Here's a quick checklist of the number of insect species:

• 5,000 dragonfly
• 2,000 praying mantis
• 20,000 grasshopper
• 170,000 butterflyand moth
• 120,000 fly
• 82,000 true bug
• 350,000 beetle,
• 110,000 bee and ant species

The total number of current and unknown species range from two to thirty million! Insects are found in nearly all environments on the planet and the combined weight of all the insects on earth plus their larvae is greater than the weight of all the other animals on earth put together? In fact, the combined weight of all ants on the planets would total more than the combined weight of all the humans. So the next time you stomp on an insect, take off your hat as a sign of respect for our under appreciated co-inhabitants. And take a peek at this insect gallery to give you an idea of how beautiful they look before you turn them into goo.

More images of our under appreciated co-inhabitants after the jump!

We thought taking mega-extreme close-ups of squirmy critters and fuzzy molds required expensive lenses or adaptors. It doesn't! Ordinary digital cameras can take pictures directly through a microscope lens. The secret is to use the "macro mode" feature (may also be called "macro focus") which is found virtually in all digital cameras today.

How does it work? The macro mode is for taking closeup photos of objects only a few inches away from the lens. That works great with images seen through a microscope. Can your digital camera capture videos? That's even better! You can take microvideos of insects racing running around a petri dish. Download that to your PC, add music and you got yourself a mini-music video.

You can use a tripod if you got shaky hands syndrome but otherwise, aside from a microscope, you don't need anything else.
Oh, yeah one more thing. Your microscopic models!

PS. This technique also works with telescopes!

It may be lonely at the top but the view sure is breathtaking! The image comes from the Pegasus High Altitude Balloon - a project run by a student based in the UK. The project takes payloads using helium weather balloons to to near space between 60,000 ft or 12.5 miles (20km) and 325,000ft or 61.5 miles (99km) high. The baloons are designed to burst at certain heights returning the payload to earth via parachute.

The project has already launched two missions; Pegasus I (highest point: 66,000 ft) and the still to be recovered Pegasus II.  Currently, Pegasus III is on the planning stage. This mission will explore different approaches to a flight computer and will test a much simpler overall design over the "slightly overcomplicated Pegasus II." Don't take forget to take more photos!

While not big with American audiences, soccer is the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world. The FIFA World Cup is aired in 213 countries and the 2002 games in Korea earned a total cumulative audience of 28.8 billion viewers. The stats for the ongoing games in Germany isn't in yet but we have a feeling these photographs by Steven Young will draw its share of fans. Originally featured in a Japanese magazine, the series of images shows soccer's more feminine side.  But don't pooh-pooh these women field warriors, they took off their kid gloves (and almost everything else) when they took on each other on the field. 

    

There's no such thing as too much memory. Ask Kingston Technology. Already known for their 512MB, 1GB, 2GB and 4GB CompactFlash Elite Pro cards, the company took another step forward with its elephantine-grade high-capacity 8GB CompactFlash.

The mega-memo card holds more images and helps content management making it the perfect digital storage for commercial photographers. The new 8GB card improves the performance of even advanced imaging applications with ultra-fast transfer read speeds up to 8 MB/sec. It's write speeds can go as fast 6.75 MB/sec.

Kingston’s 8-GB Type I CompactFlash Elite Pro card retails for about $399.99. All Kingston CompactFlash products come with a lifetime warranty and free technical support.

Put down your digital cameras, yes the one equipped with Artificial Intelligence, and take  a look at what you have to put up with if had you been born at the wrong time. The technology is called the Synchronizing Photo Flash Lamp With a Camera Shutter.

The "contrivance" is actually a flat type pocket flashlight battery mounted between two pieces of wood. A porcelain socket, which holds the photo flash lamp backed by an aluminum reflector, is fastened on top of it. Mounted on the base is a pair of contacts that are pushed together by a loading lever when the shutter clicks.

The flash lamp unit is secured to the head of the photographer by an elastic band, leaving the hands free to operate the camera, making the photographer look like he just had what Oprah Winfrey calls "a lightbulb moment".
 
Now that we have described the "contrivance" we'll tell you what it's for. In the good old days, synchronizing the flare of a photo flash lamp with the click of the shutter was as easy as juggling three porcupines. It required rhythm and timing. This gadget took care of that. Synchronization is achieved by the simultaneous clicking of the shutter and the shutting of the photo flashlamp circuit through the silver contacts. So what's your excuse for those crappy photos you keep taking?

Proof that people with no life are more useful than party animals is a new type of tuneable liquid-crystal lens whose focus can be changed by applying voltage to it. Created by US physicists, the new device is said to be better than current liquid-crystal lenses because it only has small astigmatism and does not scatter light. We don't know what they meant by that but they say their new invention could be used for zoom lenses and other microphotonic devices.

Why are they better? Most liquid-crystal lenses exploit the fact that liquid-crystal molecules can change the way they point in an electric field. Now, if the field is big enough, they all line up like meek, lobotomized sheep in the direction of the field. This changes its refractive index and the focusing power.

The full article awaits after the jump!