animals

Warning: This post contains strong and disturbing photos of euthanasia and animal suffering.

Every year in North Carolina, over 250,000 animals are euthanized because there is no one willing to adopt them and care for them. This averages to nearly 700 animals killed daily. NC-based photographer Mary Shannon Johnstone has been on a mission to draw public awareness to the issue of animal overpopulation. Her gut-wrenching project, titled "Breeding Ignorance," offers an brutally honest look at the conditions inside animal shelters and the tragedy of beautiful (and often healthy) animals being put down.

Photographer and master Photoshopper Agan Harahap has an interesting new project called Garden Fresh. Each of the 'shopped photographs shows wild creatures exploring the inside of a grocery store.

Seattle-based photographer Annie Marie Musselman has a series of photographs that are sure to tug at your heartstrings -- especially if you're an animal lover. Titled "Finding Trust", the photographs show injured wild animals being cared for at a wildlife rehab center.

Remote cameras can give photographers perspectives they ordinarily wouldn't be able to capture, and these photographs by photographer Anup Shah show just that. For his project titled Serengeti Spy, Shah traveled to the African savannah in the Serengeti and the Massai Mara and photographed the wild animals using a remote camera.

After receiving worldwide attention for his photographs of dogs and horses in projects titled Dogs Gods and Equus, London-based photographer Tim Flach turned his attention to more exotic creatures. His latest project, titled More Than Human, consists of intimate studio portraits of various wild animals, from various monkeys and apes to specially-bred featherless chickens.

Be careful not to leave your camera unattended when animals are nearby -- you never know what might happen. We've shared a number of videos in the past of animals such as monkeys, octopi, sharks, and seagulls "borrowing" cameras for their own purposes.

Dogshaming is a website where dogs around the world (or their owners) can submit photographs in which they confess all the bad things they do. Pet owners are asked to submit photos of their disobedient dogs containing signs that give the dogs a healthy dose of Internet shaming.

Photographer Emma Kisiel's project At Rest is both beautiful and morbid. On one hand, they show animals lying serenely inside a ring of rocks and flowers, but on the other hand, each one is of an animal that was stuck and killed by a car. What's startling is the variety of roadkill she manages to find: everything from a squirrel to an owl (when's the last time you saw an owl as roadkill?).

"All the Wild Horses" is a photo series by South African photographer Andrew McGibbon that consists of beautiful studio portraits of horses. McGibbon writes,

For thousands of years the horse has been mankind's closest ally. The horse made travel and development possible. We tethered, weighted and reigned them. We captured, stabled and trained them.

Ever willing, the horse was the magnificent tool of man’s ingenuity. The Horse is a beast of legend, taking on its own character, personality, emotion and mythology. However, with the advent of the steam engine the horse was made obsolete, and now they are resigned to the realm of shows and races, a world of equestrian sport, a mere shadow of the beast’s former glory.

McGibbon says painstakingly lit each shot in a manner reminiscent of the portraiture of the rich and famous.

UK-based wildlife photographers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas got the Internet's attention a couple years ago with the BeetleCam, a special remote controlled DSLR that allowed them to capture close-up photos of animals in the wild that photographers would have difficultly strolling up to. After the success of that experiment, they decided to return to Africa last summer with upgraded (and armored) versions of the BeetleCam in order to photograph lions in Kenya.

Zurich-based designers Atelier Volvox have a project titled "Outsiders" that consists of various stuffed animals turned inside-out. The toys were purchased from second-hand shops, cut open, turned inside out, re-stuffed, and sewed back up.

Mark Rober — the guy behind the gaping-hole-in-torso costume — recently came up with a creative way …

For her project titled "Elderly Animals", photographer Isa Leshko found and photographed various animals in the twilight of their lives.

Evolution is a series of photographs by photographer Ted Sabarese showing people with fish they resemble.

If you’re a vegan film photographer, you might want to think about switching …

Photographer Daniel Fox captured this beautiful (and spooky) photograph of dozens of pairs …

In this video, photographer Julie Johnson offers some helpful tips and tricks for …

Real estate agents make it a point to have homes look attractive in photographs, knowing that good photography can make a huge difference, but the people at animal rescue shelters often settle for second-rate photographs of the dogs they're trying to find homes for. Professional pet photographer Teresa Berg of Dallas, Texas realized that countless dogs are likely euthanized each year simply due to bad photography, and decided to make a difference. Several years ago she started doing shoots for a pet shelter free of charge, and helped increase the adoption rates there by 100%

Last year we featured the work of Matthew and William Burrard-Lucas, two brothers who mounted their Canon …

Wanna know how to capture a wide-eyed and wide-mouthed photo of your dog? It's easy! First, set up your camera on a tripod and point it at your dog. Then, simply throw it some tasty treats with one hand while snapping photographs with the other. There are all kind of expressions you might capture using this technique, but this one by Andrea Sillem is pretty priceless.

While we’re on the topic of high-speed cameras (and slow motion videos), here’s a beautiful slow-motion video of an …

For her series "Shake", pet photographer Carli Davidson photographed curious portraits of dogs shaking off water. Use a fast shutter speed and you can capture all kinds of strange expressions on your dog's face.

How do you get a silverback gorilla to put a GoPro HD camera up to its face? Stuff the case full of raisins, of course!

Did you know that flatbed scanners make fun portrait cameras as well? Just place your cat on the glass, do a quick scan, and you'll have a strange looking portrait shot from below! Apparently this is pretty popular among cat lovers -- a Flickr search for "cat scanner" returns thousands of results! This gives "cat scan" a whole new meaning!

We've featured this creative style of photography before where the subjects were neighborhood children and a baby, but what about dreaming up scenes with a cat and a dog on the ground instead of a person? That's exactly what Theresa Knudson did with her cat Fluffy, arranging paper props in the scene and using the ground as the backdrop.

Photographer Martin Usborne shot a series of photographs of dogs patiently waiting in cars for their owners for his project "MUTE: the silence of dogs in cars". He managed to capture their longing expressions quite well.

For the BBC documentary “Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice”, special hidden cameras were designed with unobtrusiveness …

There's an increasingly overwhelming sense of frustration coming from the Gulf region, but this time, it's coming from photographers and journalists. Media access has been tough since the beginning of the oil spill, whether on land, on beaches, or in the air. 

The above is a beautiful slow motion video (1000fps) shot of dogs jumping for dog treats flying through the …