While you spent the last three months cultivating a sunburn and trying to learn the lyrics to "Anaconda," German photographer Thomas Herbrich was spending every waking moment trying to find the perfect plume of smoke. Twelve weeks and 100,000 photos later, he finally had 20 plumes so exquisite that they were worthy of outward presentation. And we've got to give it to him; he chose the weirdest, coolest smoke plumes we've ever seen.

While you spent the last three months cultivating a sunburn and trying to learn the lyrics to "Anaconda," German photographer Thomas Herbrich was spending every waking moment trying to find the perfect plume of smoke. Twelve weeks and 100,000 photos later, he finally had 20 plumes so exquisite that they were worthy of outward presentation. And we've got to give it to him; he chose the weirdest, coolest smoke plumes we've ever seen.

Yeah, take that, Snoop Dogg's bong.

To get the photos, Thomas had to use camera flash speeds of 1/10000 or faster, capturing thousands and thousands of images to get the few, the proud, the strong.

And within these hordes of smoke photos, he searched for unexpected anomalies, familiar shapes, and fortuitous coincidences to see how the brain tries to make order out of chaos. There's actually a psychological phenomenon to describe that process called "Pareidolia" in which people perceive vague and random stimuli to be significant. It's an example of how we're programmed to "recognize" faces, patterns or other images when none are really present.

So see what kind of crazy shit you pick up in Thomas' photos. We thought we saw a raise in there, but our boss couldn't see it …