I was recently turned on to the absolutely killer commercial photography of Mitchell Feinberg. An American working in both Paris and New York, he does some of the best product photography around. Check out these examples.

I struggled to find my favourite examples from his site for this article, as there were tons of them. The most striking ones are these recent pieces of work for Muse Magazine, which are technically advertisements or product photography, for products that have been scultuped out of a kind of mold. It’s as though their imprint was left perfectly inside drying cement, only dozens of times more detailed.

The polo shirt is an especially striking example, and each one from this series gives a strangely satisfying emboss to these handbags, watches, and wallets. I love the fact that each product is entirely drained of colour and essential shape, and the photo is as much about the cracked texture and broken surface of the environment around the indent as it is about the prouduct being represented.

Here’s something I never thought I’d be stunned by: makeup and cosmetics photography. Feinberg makes this stuff look luxurious and entirely alien. Flipping through a fashion magazine, stuff like this might get missed, but when seen as part of his impressive portfolio, it’s some beautiful work.

This red/blue combination is especially beautiful–he’s turned lipstick and… that blue thing (what kind of makeup is that, anyway? I’m clueless) into what looks like an unconventional homage to abstract painting.

And then there’s his food photography, which I’m still unsure about. He approaches it with the same eye he lends to the cosmetics, which means much of it looks alien and interesting, and hits you with a fresh burst of the unexpected. That’s good, but does it make me want to eat what he’s shooting? Not exactly, but I don’t think that one set of criteria is all that matters. A lot of this work is for the New York Times Magazine, which publishes some of the best food writers in the country, and they’re not always writing about how delicious and fun it is to eat things.

For some reason the aesthetics of Feinberg’s embossed series made me think of this model by Hans Op De Beeck that I stumbled upon recently, which is just a rapid-prototyped (unless it’s entirely computer-generated–I can’t tell) model of a modernist, Le Corbusier-styled apartment flat, only with additional touches like satellite dishes on every balcony and the first signs of decay. It occupies the space between real life and Corbusier’s blueprints: a pristine white model of what his famous designs eventually became. De Beeck calls it a “silent witness to the crumbling of modern thought.” Sure, why not?

Millions of people spend the first moments of daylight fighting with their alarm clocks. On a good morning, the alarm clock will win and all those night owls will roll out of bed to face the daylight. Occasionally though, we win (or lose?) and hit the snooze button just enough times so that the alarm clock surrenders and stays silent. The wake-up war aftermath often leaves us with lack of time and sanity, clothes that barely match – if at all, a bad hair day, and on the worst days can even cause loss of job. Yes, war is ugly.

Lucky for us, designers and clock companies have been working around the clock to shake up your wake up routine. Your bedroom will be a battlefield no more! The strategy: New alarm clock designs are meant to get people moving around. Once awake, they couldn’t go back to sleep even if they wanted to.

The new tossable alarm clock by Toyo Trading allows you to throw your alarm clock at anything you want. It has a motion detector on it that puts the alarm in snooze mode when it hits the wall. (Or cat, or picture frame, or whatever.) The catch? It’s just on snooze so you’ll have to get up and look for it if you want to turn it off again. The alarm clock comes in hand grenade, soccer ball and baseball models, and is made of soft PVC material, so you can’t shatter your television screen (or seriously injure your cat,) by mistake.

Wanna feel like an action movie star every morning? Then you may like the DangerBomb from Banpresto. When the alarm goes off, the user has to diffuse it by “cutting” the right wire which is randomly selected each morning by the clock itself. Pick the wrong one and the clock goes “KABLAMO!” If that doesn’t get your juices flowing, you may want to see a doctor.

If all that is just too much excitement first thing in the morning, then you could try the Silent Alarm Clock by Johan Brengesjo. Yes that’s right, silent. The clock comes with two rings for you and your significant other, or you can just put one on each hand. When it’s time to wake up, the rings will vibrate silently. The only way to put them on snooze is to shake your hand around. Every time you delay the inevitable, it takes more effort to shut them off next time until finally you are jumping around and shaking your hands like a monkey. The best part is that each ring can be set to different times so even though you may be shaking your jazz-hands at 6:00 a.m., your lover can rest comfortably until 7:00 a.m.

Is food your primary motivator in the morning? If so, then the Wake n’ Bacon by trio Matty Sallin, Daniel Bartolini and Hsiao-huh Hsu should do the trick. Simply put a frozen slice of bacon into a metal tray built into the side of the clock. Ten minutes before you have to get up the clock will start to cook your bacon, filling your entire room with the smell of a nice hot breakfast. Granted you only get one slice of bacon, but the guys are working on one that gets you an entire meal. Considering that there are no buzzers, bells or vibrations people will have to be EXTREMELY motivated by the smell of food in the morning for this to work.

Morning light is the instigator of many battles, making alarm clocks one of life’s necessary evils, and snooze buttons their wicked minions. Hopefully new technological breakthroughs will help those morning protestors and heavy sleepers find the perfect mix of bells, smells, and vibrations to get them up in time.