Thinking Outside the Box: How I Shot Photos of Lava at Home

Any object can be seen as something else given the right perspective. In this instance, fairly common items have been used to create the effect of lava.

Scroll through to see if you can guess the items used. The final photograph shows how these were created.

Here’s how the photos were made:

Yes, that’s right. It’s a seashell held up to light.

I produced these photographs over an evening after seeing how a seashell’s surface easily changed and reflected different colours in bright light. After holding it up to a spot light I realised just how easy it could be to make it appear as lave due to the semi-translucent shell and the worn textures and patterns over its surface.

I like to capture visual misperceptions of everyday objects appearing as something completely different. The image render, shape and the illusion are the priority, the actual content and subject are there to only achieve the final result, not to be shown in and of themselves.

---

About the author: Richard George Davis is a South African artist, graphic designer and photographer with corporate, agency and freelance experience with specialities in branding, corporate identities, design, prepress and digital art. You can find his work on his website here. This article was also published here.