REGULAR VISITORS to The Daily Edge will know that on occasion we’ve tried to keep you up to speed with the various internet memes that have been spilling over into real life.

First of all, there was ‘planking’ – the act of laying oneself rigidly on some kind of furniture, which caused controversy when it claimed the life of an Australian who fell over a balcony while attempting it.

Next came ‘owling’ – the practice of sitting, crouched and alert, in a bird-like manner atop any suitable structure. We also mentioned ‘Leisure Diving’ – the admittedly-very-funny practice of jumping into a pool while posing like a lad/lady of leisure.

Last month we discussed ‘Horsemanning’, the last major fad du jour, in which a pair of photo subjects posed to try and give the illusion of headlessness. (Yes, in hindsight, it is as mundane as it sounds – which is why we didn’t try to say much about cone-ing.)

But now there’s a new one, which is not only quite funny, but also genuinely impressive. It’s called ‘Stocking’.

Conceived by two designers from Austin in Texas, the idea is relatively straightforward: find an image from iStockPhoto (one of the best-known sites for buying stock images for use in print and graphic design) and recreate it.

The trick is that because iStockPhoto is such a massive operation – supplying stock imagery for pretty much any use you could ever conceive – its library is gargantuan. Need a photo of a man holding a banana to his head? You got it. In fact, so large is the catalogue that there’s even a second man-with-banana option in case the first one didn’t suit.

It’s precisely this overwhelming variety that makes the task simultaneously difficult and rewarding. Search iStockPhoto for ‘confusion’, for example, and there’s an instant wealth of images to try and replicate.