Not sure why this is suddenly up on Kotaku - a gamer site that I read fairly often -- but now they seem to have discovered Chinese artist Liu Bolin, who is famous for almost perfect painting ON himself so that he appears to blend into the backgrounds of photos like camouflage. No Photoshop. Yes, these are self-portraits. Imagine the difficulty of doing this when you are painting on someone else. Now think about how difficult it is when the subject is yourself.

Ian Martens of the Lethbridge Herald was on the scene when a CF-18 fighter jet practicing aerial acrobatics at the Lethbridge airport in preparation for an airshow flew into the ground and exploded. Amazing luck and timing for Martens to photograph the jet what must have been a fraction of an instant before it impacted (a later shot shows the fireball after its crash). His photo also shows the pilot's ejection and his chute in the process of opening. The pilot is in hospital and his multi-million dollar piece of equipment is now a lot of blackened evidence waiting to be examined by investigators.

This is the first actual photo of an alien planet taken by the Gemini Observatory. 1RXS J160929.1-210524 is identified as a planet "only about eight times the mass of Jupiter".

Previously, planets were confirmed through other data that inferred the existence of them. But this is the first direct image of a planet using the observatory's "high-resolution adaptive optics technology". I don't know what that is but I don't think you can get it at BHPhoto. The photo was actually taken in 2008 but only now was it confirmed as an actual planet.

Now this tickles my fancy in two areas: history and photography. This ridiculously beautiful starfield photo was taken in front of the ruins of Alamut, the fortress of the assassins in Iran.

Every couple years or so I like reading a bit of medieval history so I know a bit about the assassins. The word assassin has a root word in ḥashīsh, which was what this cult used to indulge in before they went forth on missions of murder. The cult of the Assassins (thought to be derived from Hashasheen, or users of Hashish) were feared throughout the medieval Middle East and Europe because their agents were fearless -- through use of hashish -- and because their mountain stronghold was said to be inaccessible and impregnable. Their leader, the Old Man of the Mountains, built their organization up to be a latter day secret network selling their services to the highest bidder yet remaining untouchable. That is, until the Mongols finally laid siege to them and wiped them out. There's always a bigger dog.*

A little while ago I wrote about encountering the huge installation of Stan Douglas' Abbott and Cordova, which depicted the 1971 Gastown Riot. Today I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Vancouver Sun had posted a gallery of photos taken during the riot. The photos were taken by Glenn Baglo, who I believe is still a photographer with the Sun.

Another great gallery from Boston.com's The Big Picture, showing a retrospective of iconic images from the Vietnam War.

Well-known images include:

- General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon by Eddie Adams (but with before and after images).
- the self-immolation by Buddhist nun in protest of the South Vietnamese regime
- the aftermath of the Kent State massacre
- fleeing villagers after a napalm strike including the terrified, naked Kim Phuc
- and released pilot Robert Sim being greeted on the tarmac by his family.