NEW! The official Barry Goldberg store is now open for business! Much of what you can see on this site is available for sale there, including many of my best Photoshop creations (available on a wide variety of merchandise such a t-shirts and calendars), some of my amazing nature photographs (available as prints and calendars), my favorite sayings (available as illustrated bumper stickers), etc. Click HERE to order!

So, anyway, there's this little website called Drew Curtis' FARK.com. It's mostly a place devoted to posting links to weird, funny, and/or otherwise interesting news items from around the Internet (some of which is of an adult nature and definitely Not Safe For Work, so don't even think of going there if you are under 18).

Something else they have over at FARK.com is regular Photoshop Contests. Typically, they provide a link to a humorous photograph from somewhere on the internet and/or provide a theme, and people are invited to manipulate the image (or, if only a theme was provided, create a new image) and post the results for all to see. Everybody can then vote on which entries are their favorites (you can vote for as many entries as you like, but you can only vote for each entry once), and the number of votes that each entry receives is listed on a separate "show voting" page.

Well, for whatever reason, I really enjoy entering these contests. My image manipulation skills are not particualrly advanced, but I do pretty well using a combination of Adobe Photoshop (Version 6.0) and, believe it or not, good old Microsoft Paint. I have found that "winning" a Fark Photoshop Contest is a combination of skill, originality, and luck. Plus, it is crucial to enter the contest as early as possible -- most people do their voting within the first few hours that a contest has started, and it's almost impossible to get votes after a day has passed. Sometimes, entries that I worked long and hard on and was sure would win got relatively few votes, whereas some of my obvious (to me) "rush jobs" ended up get rave reviews (and even winning on occasion).

Got all that? Good. On the left are some of what I consider to be my best entries. Click on a thumbnail image to display the full image, together with source images and commentary.