Oddest Thing You Have Ever Found And Photographed.

Once I went to Mesa Falls in eastern Idaho for a waterfall shot. When I set up, there were three people standing in the river just feet from the drop off (which is about 11 stories). I couldn't figure out why people would do something so reckless. I took pictures but have never tried to sell them since it was such a dangerous activity.

@Greg no kidding, and it's not like the river is slow moving at the brink of those falls!!

One time I found a white faced ibis, every bone was broken, both wings, both legs, I photographed it to post on fascebook, and talked about what the story behind the story could have been.

TL Mair

Maybe this one:



I found this clock in a forest (near a parking lot) hanging in a tree. When I visited this place again a week later the clock was gone.

Oh, nearly forgot this one:



Someone dumped half of the living room in the forest...

I you mean man-made things: Stoneage stilt houses in South Germany. (Ok, I haven´t discovered them myself, but they are old... 😎)

I had been keeping an eye on a bird's nest that's usually built annually under my awning (but over my head). When eggs appear in the Spring, and the mom is nesting, she often flies off when I open the door to come out. Shortly she returns when I'm not disturbing the peace. I took some pics of the eggs on occasion although difficult to do in the cramped space. It's kind of pot luck with an over-my-head point & shoot technique. Sometimes a cow bird will replace an egg with one of it's own, (that's what they do instead of taking care of their own). One year after the hatched chicks got big enough to attempt an exit from their nest I assumed it was all over an thought no more about it.

The trash truck comes early Friday morning so, Thursday nights before I retire I collect the trash from inside and take it out to the barrels and place them on the curb. It was around midnight when I once again took care of this chore. I came up the steps to my awning on my way to enter back into my house and caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. It startled me since the partial image appeared in my brain before my mind could decipher what it was. My first reaction was that it was some unknown nocturnal species of animal that had three tails! I got inside the house quickly without wasting time to gain a second look.

Once inside, I could see out the window and was still a bit puzzled at what I was witnessing . After calming down a little and mustering a bit of courage, I chanced going back out, camera in hand, for a closer look. Once I could study it more closely, I could see that it appeared small and fuzzy until finally it dawned on me there were three small birds huddled together, apparently sleeping on a ledge of my awning near the corner. My mind then made the assumption that the juvenile house finches that had left the nest, had come back to roost that night.

I had never seen this before and doubt if I'll have any future opportunities come my way. :)

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An image of 3 baby house finches huddled together under my awning in Pasadena, Maryland.

I'm going to allow this unofficial image thread (you did read the forum rules?). But the images MUST be unusual and complete with story.

Choco

Please see Abbie's comments directly above that clearly state the posts must be complete with story and resubmit your image WITH a story if you would like.

So there is an abandoned theme park in Harrison Arkansas called Dog Patch USA.

It is typically closed off but was open for a Halloween thing going on so I HAD to go in. Just try explaining to your wife why you needed to go to an abandoned theme park and leave her sitting in a hotel....

The best thing in there IMO was the old razorback statue.



Then of course there is Red. This creepy doll I found in an abandoned farmhouse and treated as my new model until my wife found her in the trunk one day and threw her in a dumpster in Manhattan to finally get rid of something she swore was possessed.

Hot air balloons are not necessarily odd or unusual, but this one in Krakow, Poland, seemed more like a Jules Verne invention. It was tethered to the ground and was used only to raise tourists above the city for a view.

Don't want to post a picture of them in this discussion (as they might not be really odd) but if anyone is interested in stilt houses (Colin mentioned them above):
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/stilt-houses-in-the-water-lake-constance-matthias-hauser.html

JC just explored a partially burned windowless farmhouse the other day, sure enough 2nd floor middle of the floor naked baby doll. Creepy. I'll go back to take pictures when the light is better.

By far, is this Temple of Barbie, obviously, somebody is obsessed with Barbie. Shot in Cherry Grove on Fire Island, NY



Bob
http://bobsphotography.com

I am looking DOWN most of the time for my Urban Abstracts series and find odd things all the time. I'm not interested in anything considered pretty....I'll leave that to the real photographers. I am far more interested in abstraction and compilation.
Here are a few:
Organic roadkill

Drinking fountains, utility meters

Looking into trash cans: ( I got some very strange looks during this phase!)

"Creepy Crawlies" , I was walking in the Adirondack Park in Saranac Lake NY and photographing mushrooms and other nature scenes when I came across this pine tree that had several branches of these things that were moving on the ends. At first I thought it was pine needles blowing in the wind but there was no wind. When I zoomed in "YUK!" There was all of these worm looking things on the end of the branch. I expect they are moth lava of some type. They were too cool to pass up!


In this next shot, "Tourched NYC Thruway", I was Passenger in traffic (not taking pics while driving! just to be clear) on the the NYC thruway looking around and could not believe that a city with so much exposure to the public would leave such a poor image of their city. The damage was rusted so its been like this for a really long time. I was hoping that NYC would fix it if I put it on the internet.

Several live sea creatures. This scene was shot at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey California.

I found this Dudley combination lock on a wire fence in the woods, no reason for it to be there

Again, walking through the woods on an island by Manitoulin, I had to look twice, creepy face in the tree!

This greenhouse was rather odd. Especially the weird cloud formation aboe it. ;-)

When I initially read the title I thought it said oldest - so I was about to post a photo of 1.7 billion year old rocks. I don't have photos of older rocks (2.7 billion year) scanned yet. Then I read the title properly.

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That's cool Edward! Are my eyes deceiving me or is that image identical across the board on the left and right? Really cool image and effect. The sky looks like a kaleidoscope!

Hi Toby, yes its a mirror image. I have a few more - this one is mirrored left and right and up and down with the bottom darkened to appear like a lake -

Brilliant thread - I have no unusual photos - but I think the "Temple of Barbie" is the wierdest so far.

A different type of "selfie" - unique because it is actually a screen capture of a boardwalk webcam image in Ocean City, MD during a (near blizzard conditions) winter nor'easter. I was standing there and looking at my own image on the webcam website - in real time.




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~ Bill
~ US Pictures .com

Maybe this Coke refrigerator in a building that was being demolished.


Or maybe this odd collection of old and new electric utility stuff in a hallway in New Orleans. It includes a business license and a sign the says 'MInd the cat. She bites"



As for natural things I thought this photo of Wood Storks fighting was pretty odd.

A film image of an old abandoned church near Langford Estates on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. On this occasion, it wasn't the oddity of the church from the outside but what happened when I stepped inside. Read further for the whole story...

You could say I have an affinity for old abandoned structures. Thinking back on it now, I feel rather stupid, taking the chances I did, going through these decrepit places when they could have collapsed at any time or had wild animals taking refuge there. Many of these dilapidated structures ceased to exist shortly after I visited them to explore and take pictures.

At the time, my parents lived near this area. There was only one way in and one way out and you had to pass by this old abandoned church on every visit to my parent's house.

Next to this church, near Langford Bay Estates, were some modest headstones in a small neglected, cemetery. Not long after this image was taken, while traveling to my parent's home, I noticed the old structure had vanished.

Exploring the Church...
As I started walking across the floor of the old church, camera in hand, a window on the right side suddenly flew up of its own accord. Don't ask me why I didn't high-tale it out of there pronto, but I'm convinced the vibrations I caused while walking triggered the window. When I looked on either side of the window, hanging inside the walls were ropes with counter-weights which at one time would have helped one to more easily raise the window up. Although an unexpected surprise, the experience proved to be a very interesting excursion into this old abandonment.

The original picture was taken with a Konica SLR film camera many years ago during the colder months. I breathed on the lens, aimed, and waited until just enough evaporation before snapping the shutter to obtain the foggy effect.

On an unrelated (I think) but also strange and unusual occurrence, I left my parent's home and was on my way back out to travel to my own home near Baltimore. It was warm weather and I had the windows of the car rolled down since it had no air conditioning. The Eastern Shore of Maryland is pretty much all country, made up of flat farmland. Traveling to and from my parent's residence consisted of roads between fields for much of the trip.

As I was traveling, and incidentally near the area of the old abandoned church, suddenly something from outside shot through the passenger side window. It hit the headrest and in the next instant there were green feathers floating about in my car. When I checked the back seat I found a small dead green bird!

Two things were very odd about this event...
One, the actual occurrence of a bird flying into an open window of the car while I was speeding down the back road.
Two, I had never seen a green bird on the Eastern Shore of MD my whole life growing up there!

For whatever reason, it seemed appropriate to call this event, an OMEN.

I have it on 2 1/4 transparency film filed away somewhere and never got around to printing or scanning it, but I came across someone's bright red panties hanging off a branch of a bright green bush in a thickly forested area of a local nature reserve one spring.

That cobbler shop is a window back in time. It is very rare indeed to find something that has been virtually untouched for 40 years.

Admittedly I go out of my way looking for the odd and unique structures so I come across a few now and then.

Abandoned churches are not particularly that odd in the deep south but the one below struck me as odd because everything was left in the old church when they moved locations. The pews, the piano, the pulpit, even the window air conditioners. Seems like a waste to me to have left all that stuff to rot.



I spend a lot of time on Google Earth looking for stuff two. Old bridges are especially interesting to me and fairly easy to find if you don't mind zooming in on a river and following it for miles and miles.

This one is completely out of the public eye but accessible without having to trespass. It also brings up the fact that I will do things sometimes that I would reprimand my kids for doing like actually walking across this bridge.



Then there is this one which is also outside the world known to the general public. I really do find these old structures fascinating.

These may not be the oddest I've found and photographed but they are the oddest ones I have uploaded.

This pine tree stood in Bay Saint Louis, MS before Hurricane Katrina blew through the town. Water and storm surges do not twist trees open to the point that you can see the inside fibers of the tree. Cyclonic winds, however will do just that. They will also suck whole trees out of the ground, breaking off the roots that anchor those trees. There was a great deal of physical, scientific proof that Hurricane Katrina's winds did an enormous amount of damage along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This photograph proves that quite a bit of the damage from Hurricane Katrina was due to chaotic winds that preceded the storm surge.


Note: The mirror is buried half way and yet not one piece of the glass part is broken or cracked! At least half of this mirror was buried in mud and debris. The finish on the wood frame is scratched off. However, the unbroken, unscratched glass mirror is in perfect condition and reflecting the reality of the aftermath.
This photo was taken in Bay Saint Louis, MS, ground zero for Hurricane Katrina.


Irony? Hurricane Katrina left this US Weather Bureau Storm Warning Tower twisted and mangled on North Beach Blvd, Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. Even after the rest of the property was cleared, it took years to get this metal removed. The contractors were all afraid to touch it because it was "property of The Federal Government"!

Kathy K. McClellan
http://keppenart.com

For me, it was this toilet, dumped behind a carpentry workshop at Kibbutz Neve Ilan (near Jerusalem).

Another very old car lost in the forest somewhere near French Jura mountain.
When you know the place, you still wonder how it landed there...

A country resident living in the Eastern Shore of Maryland's town of Massey has a sense of humor when it comes to mailboxes.

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Brian Wallace

There's someone on RT 1 in Maine north of Camden who has something similar, but the airmail box is 20 feet up. Haven't been able to get the right angle on it yet.

Thanks for the response David. Some homeowners can be pretty clever and can make a statement and usually just for the fun of it.

My recollection was a bit off on that date stamp near me. The rail was made in 1901, not 1909. And I also heard there'd be a revenue train across it soon. Last time that happened was March, 2001

Joseph,

I've never thought to look for dates on the rails, but this past summer there was some major track work going on, and they replaced a lot of rails. The new ones seem a lot taller than the previous track. Maybe to handle heavier loads? A lot of coal trains traveling out of this area.

In hills in back of Los Olivos, California, as you head to Solvang, this monster tree greets travelers as you come around the bend. However, he is anything but scary and is quite cooperative in posing to have his picture taken and allow kids to pet him and climb on his back.

Greetings Thomas, fascinating discussion, I just uploaded this image this woman's ivory sewing kit part of my private collection. My parents actually found this when they were young both have been deceased for many years. I just recently took a new photo of this extraordinary antique circa 1867 150 years old. The oldest of my personal collection which I purchased for 25.00 hanging outside a bookstore for sale, It was a small framed lithograph and viewing it new immediately it was an original lithograph circa 1830's not a reproduction.

I wanted to share this rare collectable with everyone...see photographers notes for the extraordinary and its remarkable story.....

I'm often blown away by petroglyphs and pictographs that I stumble upon unexpectedly. Some of them literally raise the hair on the back of my neck. I do photograph them when I can but haven't posted many here because there are hundreds to sift through and many more that I'll never share publicly.

Many sites come to mind but I'll share the story of this one because it gives me the willies each time I go there:
There's a massive sandstone cliff that runs for miles along a canyon. I'm guessing it's about a thousand feet high, give or take. The cliff face is sheer and looks like one solid, unbroken wall along its entire length. The base of the cliff starts way up high above the canyon floor. But there's a path winding up through steep talus to the bottom of the wall. It's a hard climb. That trail ends beside a Volkswagen-size boulder where a nasty little faded midget lives. That evil sucker guards his territory with a vengeance!

Behind his boulder an odd panel stretches quite a distance over the cliff face. They are definitely Fremont glyphs but not the more common ones. Near there, if you look carefully, you'll find a narrow slit in the rockface where an enormous spall separated from the mother rock, leaving just enough of a slit for a human to step inside between the slabs.

Once inside, you find you're stuck between a pair of ginormous, naked anthropomorphs - female on the right wall, male on the left wall. They are huge and creepy and all kinds of menacing, stretching from the floor to way over your head. You have to pass between them to keep climbing up, and no one with any common sense would see those things and venture on anyway. As if that rattler with a bad attitude wasn't enough warning to get the heck out of there!

But if you do hold your breath and run past the guardians, the floor angles up sharply, becoming a stairway that leads to an opening onto the top of the mesa. That's where the old village sat. The views from the top are incredible and there's plenty to explore so I love to spend a day up there roaming around but when it starts to get dark it creeps me out big time to have to re-enter that chute and pass between the guardians. They are always waiting and they do not like me one bit.

Different place entirely, but this one spooked me the first time I stumbled onto him -

Albany Shoreline, CA. At the edge of the Albany shoreline overlooking a picturesque San Francisco skyline is a stretch of makeshift artwork sculptures made of washed-up junk, created by passing starving artists, some of whom has made it their homeless encampment.


Shoe Tree



Lady Liberty



2 Story Tall Dragon



Face in a Fireplace


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..................and then there was this! ..............WAIT f o r it ........................

JC I would not be caught crossing those bridges, I would surely fall through. LOL

I've photographed several things that are unusual, however, I'm enjoying this thread too much to upload my work.

We had a couple of warm days in February a few years ago up in Canada. By warm I mean a few degrees above freezing. Really nice instead of -30!
So I'm out shooting birds at Francis point. A nice stretch of trees with some feeders in it. I look down and there is a big ole Wolf spider walking across the snow! Click click click!

I love to photograph unusual things and, hopefully, present the art I see in them. Here are three simple images from my collection.

The first, "Feather Rock", is a chip out of the crack in a sidewalk our five-year-old granddaughter picked up on a walk around the block with me. She asked me to put it in my pocket so it wouldn't get lost. Once home, I laid it on a piece of black fabric and photographed it front and back; then I put the two together.

The second is the edge of the hem of a navy blue windbreaker with red lining. It was hanging on a hook in the garage and it caught my eye because of the way the light was falling on the red as it rippled over the elastic. I darkened the blue to black for the presentation you see here.

Finally, I have chosen the top of an ordinary street light, turned on its side. I had to over-expose to get the detail in the light, so a white background was the result. I love the simple lines and shapes of this one.

An image of the sky at dusk, taken over the Oak Point Harbor Marina in Pasadena, Maryland on 4-24-11 showing an atmospheric phenomenon caused by the setting sun and cloud formations.

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Fascinating subject Thomas. I look forward to carefully reading through each and every post. You have challenged me to write something others hopefully will find interesting.

Most people when seeing new construction in a shopping area are curious to see what the soon-to-be-opened retail store will become. We want to size it up and see how it fits into our lifestyle and needs. I see construction sites (at least in shopping malls) a bit differently now. No longer as to only my somewhat finicky fashionista shopping ideals but with an artist's eye.

What I really desire as an artist is to see it up close and examine each raw material for its aesthetic artistic value! Realizing the scene before me is only temporary and will never appear at that location again (at least for approximately the next 50 to 75 years) it becomes rare and unusual (for me anyway since I also never considered these materials as art worthy except for seeing my mentor, Marlene Burns work; you can go to her gallery here and see her wonderful work).

Construction materials are full of rich visuals that only an artist can appreciate. I set about the business of sizing up each piece. It becomes not only lumber stacked high with a striking white line running through a red background on the ends but a contrast of color and texture. At this juncture only I can appreciate this colorful display, what to others only seems perfunctory, markings construction workers understand. Huge round heavy metal sewer lids embossed with designs and lettering intended for practical purposes I see as texture that translates into good art. Bright orange flood webbing with see-through openings making repeating design a wonderful play to the other textures lying close by. I set about the business of analyzing each pile...an artist's playground of varied texture and color!

These building materials lying around everywhere set my mind agog and artistic juices flowing! The images below are from my first and only (at this juncture) construction site, a Taco Bell. I do take photos of other industrial subjects but not at construction sites. A smaller one such as this enabled me to wander around in comparative freedom (the workers were long gone by then) hoping the shopping center guards wouldn't drive by in their rounds and stop me from photographing this visual feast. I carefully examined and sized up each piece realizing its aesthetic potential and tried to take the best photo I could, excitedly seeing its potential once manipulated in the photo editor and magically transformed! It will never again be recognized as just a piece of raw material making up the building of the local fast food restaurant but (hopefully) a work of art hung in someone's home to be enjoyed and admired for years to come.

Yeah some bridges I will walk but have found most I will not.

It seems this thread is becoming so popular it needs dividing!

"Oddest Thing You Have Ever Found And Photographed."

A selfie

So maybe this isn't the oddest thing I've ever photographed, but can you imagine some poor soul climbing down from a second story window in the middle of the night to use the comfort station?

The landscape is part of the Compass Point Golf Course in Pasadena, Maryland. Shown is an Image of a tree and reflection, that branches off at the base to form an "X" shape. I processed the image as a "color select", with an added border to simulate a picture resting on top of another picture, drawing attention to the Tree symbolizing an "X" as a landmark. The phrase, "X marks the spot" seems an appropriate title.

Ironically, not far to the left of this tree is another that also reflects in the pond to simulate the letter, "O". The two together form the word, "OX".

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Inside an abandoned aircraft engine testing facility, Pacific Airmotive Corp., a perfectly good ladder was left behind. What made this odd, was that the taggers and scavengers hadn't been there yet, and this was left for me to photograph. I spent quite a bit of time shooting in this place, and the light was so low that some of my exposures were measured in minutes.

Airport Security at Burbank was not as accommodating as I had hoped, but I did get a lot of work done before I was escorted out.



-YoPedro
Twitter@YoPedro