Swedish artist Anna Halldin Maule spends several months glazing layer upon layer of oil paint to create these stunning works of art that can easily pass for high-resolution photographs to the untrained eye.

Born in Gothenberg, Sweden, Anna took an interest in painting at a very young age, honing her skills under the guidance of her grandfather, celebrated artist Bror Halladin. Today, she is one of the world’s most respected hyper-realist painters, and looking at her breathtaking work, it’s easy to see why. Although she works with a limited palette of toned-down and muted colors, Halladin Maule is able to replicate human features so well, that her oil paintings often pass for photographs.

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31-year-old Mimi Choi, a makeup artist from Vancouver, spends hours turning her face into mind-boggling optical illusions that look photoshopped at first glance.

A former schoolteacher, Choi got into makeup only three years ago, attending classes at Blanche Macdonald, a local beauty school, to learn the basics of the craft. She’s come a long way since then, though, and today she uses her makeup skills to turn her own face into incredible optical illusions.

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Every year, in the second week of October, millions of Roman-Catholic devotees from all over Brazil descend on the city of Belem to attend Cirio de Nazaré, the country’s largest religious festival, and to touch a 400-meter-long piece of rope believed to have the power to heal the sick.

Cirio de Nazaré has been celebrated intermittently in Brazil since 1793. The event revolves around a small statue of Nossa Senhora de Nazaré (Our Lady of Nazareth), an artifact supposedly sculpted in Nazareth that is believed to have performed miracles in medieval Portugal, before being lost in Brazil. Legend has it that a cattleman found it in a canal during the 1700’s, but every time he took it out of the water, it would disappear, only to be found again in the original place it was discovered. The people of Belem believed that it was Our Lady’s wish to remain there, so they built a church there, which would later become today’s Nazaré Basilica.

The celebration lasts two weeks, but the climax of the event is on the first Sunday, when the small statue is taken from the city’s Catedral da Sé to the Nazaré Basilica, on a flower-bedecked carriage pulled by thousands of devotees. The night before the procession about 15.000 devotees queue in front of the cathedral to secure a place near the 400-meter-long piece of rope used to pull the carriage through the city. Men and women align on two separate lines, and by 10 a.m. on Sunday, the human density around the rope reaches an incredible 10 people per meter.

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Justin Salas was only 14 when he lost his sight almost completely and was declared legally blind. Now 22, the ambitious young man is a living example that nothing is impossible – even though he can’t see, Justin is a professional photographer and skilled rock climber.

Justin’s blindness wasn’t the result of an unfortunate accident or a sudden occurrence where he woke up one morning to find that he couldn’t see anymore. His eyesight had always been poor and he started wearing glasses when he was 5-years-old. But it wasn’t until his freshman year of high-school that his vision started deteriorating at a rapid pace. His glasses no longer helped and tests revealed that his optic nerves were dying, although the cause was a mystery for all the doctors he’d seen.

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Unhappy with his high flying career in fashion, New Yorker Foster Huntington gave it all up to live life on his own terms. He is now in the news for building ‘Bro-topia’, an outlandish dwelling made up of two treehouses connected by a swinging rope bridge, on a grassy hilltop in southwest Washington state. 

It all started in 2011, when Foster quit his job at Ralph Lauren, sold all his belongings, and lived in a mobile van for months. He was working as a men’s fashion designer and although he initially found the job exciting and challenging, Huntington realized he didn’t care that much about clothing. “I remember looking at photos of bush pilots in Alaska and their ruggedly stylish world and thinking: ‘I can take photos. I don’t want to live my life in the city. I want to go do something else,’” he told New York Times.

So he pursued photography for a while, making money creating photo books, but in 2014 he decided that he wanted to spend his time fulfilling his childhood dream of building an epic tree house. So he pooled his life savings, got a few friends on board, and started working on the project on his family’s property in Skamania, Washington.

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If you thought spending money on painted firewood logs was ridiculous, you’re not going to be able to wrap your head around this: a man in Paris recently spent a whopping €1,000,000 (over $1 million) on a photograph of a potato, making it one of the top 20 most expensive photos ever sold!

To be fair, it wasn’t any ordinary potato portrait – it was clicked by Kevin Abosch, the hottest photographer in the world right now, according to Business Insider. His claim to fame includes photographing major Silicon Valley bigwigs like Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt, and Jack Dorsey. Some of his other famous subjects include Johnny Depp, Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Hopper, and Malala Yousafzai.

Irish-born Abosch is also apparently obsessed with potatoes – he’s taken tons of photographs of the starchy tuber set against his trademark black backdrop. “Kevin likes potatoes because they, like people, are all different yet immediately identifiable as being essentially of the same species,” his studio said in a statement. “He has photographed many potatoes. This is one of his favorites.”

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A Seattle startup is in the news for investing in divorce – its business model is based on the fact that nearly 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the US end up parting ways. SwanLuv offers to pay couples for their dream wedding, but the money will have to be returned with interest if they ever get divorced.

So if you’re about to get married and you apply to Swanluv, they’ll run your profile through an algorithm, study your relationship, and select you if you meet their criteria. Then, they’ll offer you a loan of up to $10,000. You don’t have to return the money, ever, as long as you stay together. But the moment you decide to get a divorce you’ve got to cough up the original amount, plus interest. And stronger relationships are assigned higher interest rates, so the longer couples stay together, the more they’ll stand to lose if they split.

When you think about it, that’s kind of like the opposite of how insurance works. You’re supposed to get paid when things go wrong, but with SwanLuv, it’s the other way round. 

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It’s a trite saying, but ‘Try, try until you succeed’ does hold true even today. Case-in-point is Scottish photographer Alan McFadyen, who spent six long years trying to get the perfect shot of a kingfisher diving into water. 720,000 tries later, he finally succeeded!

Alan, 46, was adamant about getting the shot in memory of his late grandfather Robert Murray, who often took him to see the kingfisher nesting spot at the beautiful lakeside near Kirkcudbright, Scotland, when he was about six years old. In fact, those childhood treks actually inspired him to take up photography at age 40.

“As a small boy of about six, I remember my grandfather taking me to see the kingfisher nest, and I just remember being completely blown away by how magnificent the birds are,” Alan said. “It was extraordinary how quick they flashed into the water with their brilliant blue colors – they didn’t look real, they were like a bullet they were so quick. So when I took up photography, I returned to this same spot to photograph the kingfishers.”

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It’s rather inconceivable that someone as talented and successful as New York fashion photographer Mark Reay might be homeless. Despite being handsome, well-groomed, and articulate – Mark didn’t actually have a home to go back to, after rubbing shoulders with the who’s who of the fashion world, for six long years.  

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The residents of Beaverton, Oregon, can rest peacefully at night, knowing their streets are being patrolled by their very own real-life superhero. ‘The Guardian Shield’ has taken it upon himself to ensure the neighborhood’s safety after dark, and in true superhero fashion, the masked crusader hasn’t revealed his identity because he wants people to focus only on his mission.

“I want to be taken seriously,” he told FOX 12 Oregon. “Everything I do is legit, as much as possible. I make sure no one is breaking into cars, no one’s fighting, everyone is getting home to their families after a hard day of work.”

The Guardian Shield, or simply ‘Shield’, wears a red costume and is always armed with pepper spray, a stun gun, a baton, a flashlight, a first aid kit, a GoPro camera, and of course, a shield. He says the police are aware of his crime-fighting ways and he’s only had positive interactions with officers. They don’t encourage him to intervene in dangerous situations, but they do appreciate being tipped off when there’s trouble brewing.

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Shridhar Chillal, from Pune, India, hasn’t cut his fingernails in over six decades. He began growing them when he was still in school, and now holds the Guinness World Record for the ‘Longest Fingernails on a Single Hand Ever’. The super-long talons on his left hand now have a cumulative length of 909.6 cm!

Chillal’s thumb nail is the longest at two meters and curls into a tight coil at the end. The middle finger nail comes a close second at 186.6 cm. The ring finger nail measures 181.6 cm, the little finger nail is 179.1 cm, and the index nail stands at 164.5 cm. As you can imagine, his nails have sabotaged every aspect of his life, including work and love.

“I can’t move much, so every half an hour or so I wake up and move my hand to the other side of the bed,” he admitted.

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‘Taxi Fabric’ is an innovative art project in Mumbai, India, that allows upcoming designers to transform the interiors of taxicabs in the city. Ten cabs have been given vibrant makeovers so far, and a Kickstarter campaign is underway to raise funds for more.

“The Taxi Fabric project is all about providing Indian designers with a unique platform to show off their work – using taxi seats as their canvas,” the campaign page reads.  The designers who founded the project also hope to “show Indians the impact good design can have.”

The team added that Indian taxi drivers do pimp their cars to stand out from the competition, but the upholstery usually doesn’t get much attention. The designs are just something drivers pick up from local markets, mostly “dull and forgettable”. The Taxi Fabric project wants to change that by creating bespoke fabrics with designs that reflect Mumbai’s life and culture.

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Over the years, redheads have borne the brunt of many jokes, enjoying very little appreciation in the fashion world. Changing all that is MC1R – the first and only magazine dedicated to gingers.

In scientific lingo, MC1R is a protein that regulates skin and hair color in mammals. A mutated MC1R protein is believed to cause red hair. So it happens to be a befitting title for the magazine, which exclusively caters to people with red hair. It features content on a wide range of topics, including contemporary art and fashion editorials, interviews with musicians and designers, and current events. Every story is related to red hair.

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Jake Harms converts old Apple iMac computers into beautiful aquariums. He spends hours locked up in his basement workshop, giving these old computers a new lease of life. So far, he’s sold over 1,000 aquariums to customers all over the world.

Jake said that he specifically uses 2000-era Apple iMac G3 computers, because of their distinct shape and bright color schemes. The opaque computer frames allow light to shine through them, so that the fish are visible from various angles. He uses iMacs because they’re a lot better looking than the beige and grey models of other brands.

“No one’s ever asked me to make an aquarium out of a Dell,” he jokingly says.

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Thanks to DJ Chris Holmes, celebrities can now ward off those pesky paparazzi and their intrusive photography with ease. They just need to wear pieces from Holmes’ new ‘Anti Paparazzi Collection’ – a line of clothing made from a reflective material completely ruins flash photographs.

The collection currently consists of a hooded jacket, an infinity scarf, suit pants, a blazer, and a hat. While they look like regular clothes, the fabric is actually coated with glass nanospheres. This coating makes the clothes act like mirrors when hit with bright light, so the resulting images are horribly underexposed and the wearer is practically invisible.

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