The photographerusa.com website has a nice tool for calibrating your monitor. View the page and set the contrast, brightness, and color depth of your monitor and display settings so that you see the test patterns as described. It’s not good enough for professional graphic artists (try a Spyder if you want the best results), but for most of us it will help make sure you’re not missing significant details while viewing online photos.

Fine art, master artist, and Crayola Crayons are not usually closely associated, but Don Marco bills himself as the Master Crayon Artist, and you can see from the self-portrait shown here that it is pretty impressive work. Don grew up in Northern Minnesota, and he started coloring with crayons in early childhood like most of us do. The difference is that he never stopped, and when he retired he took it to a new level, creating fine art drawings with Crayolas. Browse through the gallery for a very interesting glimpse of what he can do.

Demographic information is something that we in the U.S. are very good at collecting. The national census every ten years collects enough data about citizens to keep analysts busy until the next one comes along. Much of the data is in the public record, and Zipskinny.com has put together a website to help us digest and understand it. See how your zip code stacks up against the neighbors, or try out some other interesting comparisons. Since they are in close proximity, I found the comparison of Compton CA (90222) to Beverly Hills (90210) pretty interesting.

Though the Photoshop skills required to pull this trick off believably are enviable, the end result is downright creepy. Check out the entries in this Photoshop contest titled “Double Vision Pictures” at FreakingNews.com. At first it seems like something isn’t quite in focus, but then when your eyes adjust, you realize that it is just downright strange. Some entries are definitely better than others, but almost all of them are enough to give you the shivers.

The dark roasted blend blog has a collection of the world’s most interesting bridges. There are actually so many entries that it was broken up into part 1 and part 2. One of my favorites is the Nanpu Bridge over the Huangpu River, located at the South Dock in Shanghai, China. I wouldn’t be too happy about having that much concrete right in my backyard, but the picture of the bridge at night does look impressive.

The term internet meme is used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads in a faddish way from person to person via the Internet. I ran across one such concept on flickr for creating the cover art for a non-existent CD. Check out the cover I created, and then read through the rules and create one of your own.

CD Cover Meme rules from flickr.com

1. The first article title on a random wikipedia page is the name of your band.
2. The last four words of the very last quote on a random quotation page is the title of your album.
3. The third picture on the recent interesting images page on flickr, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.