I guess that hands down the image of week was taken on on April 30, 2014 and shows Hong Yaoming, who is  deputy headmaster of Xianning Experimental Primary School, fulfilling a promise to his students by kissing a pig. The previous week at the school’s weekly flag-raising ceremony Hong promised that he would smooch the porcine provided students stopped littering on campus. Hong said the inspiration came from the story of an American teacher who promised to kiss a pig if more than 80 percent of his pupils passed their math exam.

So the next question where did the piggy come from. The 40 kg porker was provided by one of Hong’s friends.  There are undoubtedly lots of jokes about a whole variety of movies, starting with Charlottes Web.  The pig could not be reached for comment as to whether Hong was a good kisser – which is just fine since she’s not a swine to kiss and tell.

BBC News has a weekly feature or photo challenge.  A recent one was called “Different Angle,” and it challenged readers, or photographers, to put a different perspective or spin on their images.  I am always amazed at some of the entries.  And this week I was struck by this wonderful image by Edward Diaz which he calls “Zippity Do Da.”  Diaz very cleverly created a zipper out of a pencil sharpener and his grandchildren’s colored pencils.  Indeed, when I looked at the thumbnail, I didn’t realize that it was anything more than a colorful zipper. So when I blew it up I took a double take.

Diaz relates the fact that it has been a long hard winter in the United States and one day he was playing with his camera and the pencils.  I can certainly relate both to the weather woes and the photograph.

I think that this points to the value of challenging yourself photographically with seeming mundane subjects.  Cold winter Sundays can be emotionally challenging.  At some point you start to feel like you’ve photographed way to much ice and snow.  It clearly testifies to the harshness of this past winter that it is May and we are still thinking and talking about it.

For some reason this past month I’ve seen an unusual number of photographs that I love.  So it’s been difficult to pick which ones to write about.  Today I’d like to point my readers to this great photograph by Clive Rose for Getty Images of swimmer Nail O’Leary competing in the men’s 200 m backstroke at the British Gas 2014 Swimming Championships in Glasgow, Scotland on April 14.

The image is appealing on several levels.  First, there is aqua blue pastel coloration.  Then there are the combined distortions of the aqueous refraction and the stretching due to the swimmer’s motion.  These give the image another worldliness where O’Leary looks almost like and alien.  This is turn puts a big question mark on the image.  What is it about and what exactly does it mean?  I think that it is a wonderful example of what can be accomplished with sports photography, where the goal is to give a sense of power and seeming effortless motion.

I don’t usually post fresh news stories.  However, I am going to make an exception today with this photograph of a plane that rolled off the runway and into a small pond in Valusia County, Florida,

The Cessna 525 rolled into a Florida pond this past Saturday morning, after going off the end of the runway, the Federal Aviation Administration reports.  Since the three people aboard got out safely, we can point out that somebody was having a bad day.  Indeed, I am reminded of the children’s story, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.”  And maybe this is an example of where a photograph makes us pause and take stock of our lives, where it puts things in proper perspective.  You think that you’re having a bad day?

A few days back I blogged about the Apple Maps image of the Loch Ness Monster.  Well, thanks to reader Champ and some intrepid computer scientists it is indeed a misinterpreted image.  You see that I am not saying a fraud, which would imply deceptive intent.  The deal here is that Apple Map images are typically formed from composites.  Images from multiple days are combined to create a single image.  In this case the image of a ship was washed out by the addition of the non-boat images.  The result is a ghostly, monster-like image of a faded boat and boat wake.     The Loch Ness Monster Fan Club apparently doesn’t buy it.  I guess that the rest of us need to chalk this one up to the experience and the view that you can’t trust every photograph that you see.  I fear, ah well, that we must heed the words of 19th Century biologist Sir Thomas Huxley, who said:

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion… or you shall learn nothing.”

It is the end of the week and time for my weekly search of the “best of…” images.  I came across this dramatic image by David Cerny of Reuters.  I usually like to describe what exactly we are looking at.  However, it struck me that the sweet and angelic little girl wnd the graveyard crosses are so self explanatory as symbols of death and innocence, birth and resurrection that they seem to defy the need to explain.  They could be equally from anywhere and any time.

With implicit symbolism the risk is always one of being cliche or hackneyed.  I think that for several reason Cerny has avoided these pitfalls.  It is the coloration, the perfect composition, the out of focus cross in the background that so make this image.  And then I look at the little girl’s face partially obscured by the cross and I am struck by  the way that her eyes look up and away from us. This can be seen in classical images and implies her interaction with other or greater worldly purpose.  This is truly a wonderful image.

We’ve spoken a lot here about Barbie and even about Legos but never about the Intrepid Lego Photographer. Photographer Andrew Whyte of Caters reveals the fantastic world of the Lego Photographer, also referred to as the “Leg Ographer.”  (Get it?) This is a Lego character who has traveled across the U.K. lego camera in hand taking pictures of the sights. Lego man goes wherever Whyte goes, safely secured in his pocket.

The net result is a collection of pretty clever images.  The Leg Ographer encounters many dangers during his quest for the perfect image.  Not the least of these are killer crabs and dangerous bananas. Whyte carries the Lego man in his pocket wherever he goes, just in case the perfect picture opportunity arises.  The Leg Ographer is diverse in his subject matter.  Need-less-to-say this includes the occasional selfie. Indifferent to personal dangers, for the sake of art the Leg-Ographer ventured onto thin ice to capture the frozen beauty of cracking ice.

Figure 1 – Apple Maps image possibly showing the Loch Ness monster.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a huge argument with my teacher over the existence of the Loch Ness monster.  She declared me to be argumentative – I still have the report card.  I declared her to be close minded.  And I was determined to visit Inverness and its famous Loch – which I did a few years back. For me, a budding scientist then, it really was a lesson in open-mindedness and the importance of evidence.

Well, the years have past, and I will even more vehemently defend the scientific method.  Nessie has gone through a lot in the intervening years: including a serious argument against based on biomass and the publication of a photograph of a “fin” in the scientific journal Nature, which led to its being declared a protected species.  Then there was the sorry news that the clearest and most convincing photograph ever was indeed a fraud.  I had, and pretty much still do, or is it no longer, hold out much hope for the erstwhile plesiosaur.

Now here’s the thing.  Yesterday it was announced that 27 year old  Andrew Dixon claims to have been scanning Apple Maps and on zooming in seeing an image of the Loch Ness Monster.  Now wouldn’t that be lovely!  I am posting that picture as Figure 1.  I have unfortunately become just a bit jaded with age and suspect that it will be shown to be a fraud.  I will keep you “posted.” It is, after all, the age of Photoshop.  However, some people have independently found the image on their IPhones and IPads.  So for now we cannot be exactly sure what this is.  It is the spitting image of the plecostamus cat fish that I had in my  office aquarium.  However, that was not fifty feet long.  I remain hopeful that there are fifth grade teachers out there who will learn a lesson from all of this – probably not!

As we have discussed I love cute cuddly animal pictures as much as the next guy.  However, I try not to fall into the trap of posting them.  Today I’m going to come pretty close. Yesterday, I came across this picture by Sutanta Aditya of AP/Getty Images of a veterinary staff member of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program center examining and treating an orangutan on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, on April 16.

This big guy had been shot with an air-gun, and pellets were still lodged in his body when he was rescued by local forestry officials from a nearby plantation. The center has cared for over 280 rescued orangutans and has returned more than 200 animals to the wild.

What is so appealing about this image is its incongruity.  One expects a person to be lying on the examination table, not an orangutan.  And the expression on his face is, after all, so very human.  You start to wonder whether this is a scene from “Return to the Planet of the Apes.”  Is this really an orangutan or is it merely a person in an orangutan costume?  It is a great example of how dynamics can be created in a photograph by adding the unexpected or incongruous.  It is a classic example of the genre of incongruity developed by photographers like William Wegman. I suppose that there is a whole greeting card industry based on images of animals dressed as people.

The other question that this image of the orangutan raises is, why he is so calm.  Is it anesthesia?  Is it trust?  Why doesn’t he strike out and kill the woman examining him.  We are left, perhaps, with the famous quote from the movie classic “King Kong,” and certainly this photograph reminds us of that movie.

“And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.“