Rock Stars and Their Parents

Rock stars have fame, reams of money, and fans willing to do wild, unmentionable things just to breathe the same air — but behind every rock star’s inimitable lifestyles and weird hairstyles is a human being. As the LIFE magazine illustrated in 1971, just like most of us rock stars too are mere mortals, they came from humble backgrounds, with moms and dads who bragged and worried about them every day.

Recently LIFE.com brought back photographer John Olson's nostalgic photos — check out the awesome '70s decor.

Frank Zappa in his eclectic Los Angeles home with his cat, his dad Francis, and his mom Rosemarie.

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Vivid Sydney Festival 2010

Vivid Sydney – the festival of art, music, light, and ideas is the largest international music and light show in the Southern Hemisphere. The festival that is held annually in Sydney brings together large scale light installations and projections, music performances, creative ideas, stimulating discussions and debates, showcasing Sydney as a major creative hub in the Asia-Pacific Region. The festival began on May 27 and will continue till June 21, 2010. Last year’s show attracted 200,000 locals and visitors.

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Cool Movie Illustrations by Josh Cooley

Josh Cooley is a story artist at Pixar Animation Studios. For the past two years he has been working on a pet project called “Lil’ Inappropriate Golden Books” series featuring great art from classic R-rated movies. Part of the Lil’ Inappropriate Book line is Movies R Fun where he has compiled funny drawings of popular movie scenes with quotes as if they were from a page of a children’s book. Films such as Aliens, The Godfather, and Terminator all get their place in Cooley’s book and are a lot of fun to look at. Can you identify all the movies?

 

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1927 Paramount Studio’s Map of Los Angeles

One of the reasons Los Angeles became the center of the worldwide film industry has to do with geography. It’s so diverse that the movie crew could carry their equipments around within an area of 300 miles and pretend to be anywhere in the world. The following map, supposed to be produced by Paramount Studios in 1927 for filming James Bond movies, shows where you could shoot around Los Angles.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ambrosiavoyeur/4257870797/

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16-Year Old Australian Sails Around the World on a Pink Boat!

On 15 May 2010, 16 year old Jessica Watson became the youngest person ever to sail non-stop and unassisted around the world when her Ella's Pink Lady crossed the finish line in Sydney Harbour, three days before her 17th birthday. Jessica set sail from Sydney on 18 October 2009, headed eastbound over the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. Over a period of 210 days she covered 23,000 nautical miles, faced 40-foot waves and seven knockdowns.

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Mesmerizing Yosemite Horsetail Firefall

Horsetail Fall, located in Yosemite National Park in California, is a seasonal waterfall that flows in the winter and early spring. It flows over the east side of El Capitan, so as a backdrop it has one of the most impressive walls of granite in the entire park. Then during February something amazing happens. During middle to late February, when the sky is clear, the very last sunrays of the day selectively linger on the falls, lighting it up with a golden glow that makes the water look like lava.

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Rational Exploration Of The Undersea

Rational Exploration Of The Undersea is a bizarre photo series by French artist Philippe Ramette, depicting what he believes is a rational approach for undersea exploration. Impractical? Yes, but it sure looks rational!

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Incredible Cake Decorations by Karen Portaleo

These cakes are the work of Highland Bakery, based in Atlanta, Georgia. The team of bakers is headed by Karen Portaleo, who was once a clay sculptor. Yeah, I can tell that.

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The Mysterious Manpupuner Rock Formations

The Manpupuner rock formations also known as the Seven Strong Men Rock Formations are a set of 7 gigantic abnormally shaped stone pillars located north of the Ural mountains in the Komi Republic, Russia. These monoliths are around 30 to42 meters high and jut out of a hilly plateau out of nowhere.

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Ghostly Shipwreck Photography by Jan Smith

"Nouadhibou means 'where the jackals get fat.' It is also where ships go to die." So writes the photographer Jan Smith, who captured haunting images of abandoned shipwrecks in Mauritania's Nouadhibou Bay, which is perhaps the world's largest ship cemetery. When Smith attempted to venture into Mauritania in 2008, he encountered no shortage of struggle. "I was turned away at the border, slept in a mine field, and was accused of espionage. No one believed I would travel to the remoteness of Nouadhibou to simply take pictures of rotting ships."

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Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter

Jordan Matter’s Dancers Among Us is a collection of NYC dance photographs featuring members prominent Dance Companies. This is an ongoing project that began in the spring of 2009. There were no trampolines or other devices used for these images, just thousands of hours of training!.

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Yunak Evleri: A Cave Hotel in Turkey

In Cappadocia’s magical landscape of fairy chimneys, in the ancient village of Urgup, is a luxurious hotel carved into a mountain cliff, the Yunak Evleri. This hotel includes six cave houses, 30 rooms dating back to the 5th and 6th centuries and a 19th century Greek Mansion.

Cappadocia, located at the heart of Turkey, is a popular tourist destination for its unique geological, historic and cultural features. The Cappadocia region is largely underlain by sedimentary rocks formed in lakes and streams, and ignimbrite deposits erupted from ancient volcanoes. The volcanic deposits are soft rocks that the people of the villages at the heart of the Cappadocia Region carved out to form houses, churches and monasteries.

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Water Color Illustrations by Geliografic

Geliografic studio is the crew of “on-demand” professional artists, illustrators and graphic designers, who does designs for book covers, advertising and computer graphics. Geliografic’s works are vivid, colorful and attractive as you can see from this small sample gallery. The following water color series was done for author Alexandra Marinina who writes detective stories.

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Ultra Realistic Human Sculptures by Marc Sijan

Milwaukee-based artist Marc Sijan's Superrealistic sculptures are "homages to humanity's fascination with its own forms -- a fascination which has compelled artists throughout the millennia to mirror life in virtually every medium." Sijan's figures are incredibly lifelike, sensuous and graceful. In fact, they are so lifelike, they seem always on the verge of movement, a mere instant away from action. The pores in the skin, the tiny hairs, and veins; even the bald spots, the blemishes, the individual shapes of the faces that make human beings so similar, yet so unique: These are the essence of what makes Marc Sijan's work so arresting.

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The Half: Photographs of Actors Preparing for the Stage

'The half' is theatre language for the 30 minutes before curtain up, in which actors prepare alone for their transition to the stage. ‘The half’ is a private time for an actor; it is the thirty minutes when everyone is cleared out and the actors are left alone to focus on the performance ahead. For the past 25 years photographer Simon Annand has been granted unprecedented access to actors' dressing rooms during the half; the result is a series of portraits that catch the moment in which the daily self is shed and the actor slides their way into a role.

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Henk Hofstra’s Blue Road, Netherland

This news is old but worth checking out. On April, 2007, Dutch artist Henk Hofstra painted a 1000 meter stretch of road in Drachten, Netherlands, blue.

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A Picturesque Tour of Lake Huron

Lake Huron is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is bounded on the east by Ontario, Canada and on the west by Michigan, USA. The lake derives it’s name from early French explorers who named it based on the Huron people inhabiting the region. Lake Huron is the second largest of the Great Lakes, with a surface area of 59,596 km2 (23,010 sq mi) making it the third largest fresh water lake on earth.

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Annual Baby Crying Contest, Japan

When it comes to weird of the weirdest customs, rest assured, Japan is always going to deliver. This time it comes in form of the annual baby crying contest, Naki Sumo. And look who is going to scare the tiny toddlers – 500 pound Sumo wrestlers.

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Bruno Catalano’s Half Sculptured Travelers

The following images look like an optical illusion or a Photoshop trickery. But closer inspection reveals that the upper half isn’t mysteriously floating in air but cleverly connected to the bottom half of the statue. These unusual Travelers statues were designed by French sculptor Bruno Catalano.

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Gorgeous Underwater Photography by Nadia Moro

Italian fashion photographer Nadia Moro, who lives and works in Milan, has built an impressive series of works called "Behind The Surface". Such cool and serene.

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Looking Into The Past

Looking into the past is a Flickr Pool where images are made by finding old photographs of places, printing them out, and then holding the print up in the modern day location that the original photograph was taken. At the time of this writing more than 800 submissions can be found in the group. Below are a few samples.

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Ever Seen Such Cute Paper Sculptures Before?

These incredibly detailed, delicate and colorful paper-based sculptures were done by Russian artist duo Alexei Lyapunov and Lena Ehrlich. Amazing.

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7 Incredible Submerged Forests

Submerged forest is a term used to describe the remains of trees (especially tree stumps) which have been submerged by rising sea level. These forests have been usually buried in mud, peat or sand for several thousand years before being uncovered by sea level change and erosion. Here are 7 incredibly scenic submerged forests from around the world.

1. Lake Kaindy, Kazakhstan

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Fake Swimming Pool by Leandro Erlich

In one of the courtyards of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, is a swimming pool framed by a limestone deck. When seen from the deck, the pool appears to be filled with deep, shimmering water. In fact, however, a layer of water only some 10 centimeters deep is suspended over transparent glass. Below the glass is an empty space with aquamarine walls that viewers can enter.

The Swimming Pool was designed by Buenos Aires artist Leandro Erlich in 2004.

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Art Made From Human Bones

Francois Robert was at an auction in the mid 1990s and took home three lockers. Two of the lockers were empty, but the third one contained a real human skeleton which must have served as a teaching aid in a science class. Robert realized that his skeleton was limited: it was wired together for display. He traded his skeleton for a disarticulated human skeleton online -  a box containing 206 separate bones.

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Exploded by Adam Voorhes

Exploded is an excellent photo series by American photographer Adam Voorhis, that shows the elements and the inner workings of different objects.

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Kissing The Ceiling by Fred Muram

Just one word: Brilliant!

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Breakfast of the World by Oliver Schwarzwald

German photographer Oliver Schwarzwald recently did this series of photographs showcasing breakfasts eaten in different countries around the world. The series was shot for the German magazine Feld Homme and features the traditional English breakfast form the UK, coffee, croissant and cigarette for France and caviar on toast with vodka for Russia. And also the breakfasts from Sweden, USA and an international.

Sweden

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