I love unusual photographs. Sure, the advent of digital imagery has made it a lot easier folks to play with photographs, manipulate them, make them surprise or delight us. But as someone who used to spend many, many hours in the darkroom when I was in high school, I still have an affinity for just being old-fashioned clever.

That’s why I really like a lot of the shots taken by French photographer Christopher Hibbert, who is clearly very clever indeed. Check out this photo, called "Field Walk" — which he created without software manipulation!

[Click to anthropophotonate.]

How cool is that? You can tell from the stars this is a time exposure, and while the shutter was open he used flashlights to create the human figures. I don’t want to read too much into the photo, but I like the way it ties the light from the stars in with the figures made from light. After all, as Carl Sagan loved to say — correctly — we are star stuff.

This image is part of a collection on Google+ by Christopher called Light is Life, and I highly recommend checking it out. G+ is really attracting a lot of great photographers, since they can post their work in good resolution and can discuss the sets as well. I’m following quite a few now, especially since so many also work in astrophotography.

I’ll note I post things on G+ that don’t fit the blog here, or are too long for Twitter. Follow me there if you’re interested.

Tip o’ the lens cap to Robert Scoble on Google+. Image credit: Christopher Hibbert, used by permission.

Hot on the heels of the amazing image of Pluto and Charon, and the simply cool one of Jupiter through an iPhone, comes one that is just as nifty, and made with an even simpler camera!

New Scientist has the details of this incredible image of the Sun taken over the course of six months with a pinhole camera. Taken by Justin Quinnell, it shows the path of the Sun from winter to sumer over Bristol in the UK. Each arc is the Sun, blurred by its daily motion, and the differing heights of the arcs shows how the Sun’s position in the sky changes with seasons.

Pinhole cameras are very cool; the hole is so small that any light rays from a small object entering it and hitting the film are naturally very close to parallel, and therefore in focus. You don’t need a lens! It’s similar to the depth-of-field issue versus aperture in a regular camera. Anyway, this is a very cool shot, and you should check out the New Scientist page, since it has more info, including links on how to do this yourself.

Image credit: New Scientist and Justin Quinnell.

Tip o’ the lens cap to Science Punk