There are a few reason why some of us fight over who gets the window seat on airplanes, and the view that Tim Sessler captured in his mesmerizing short film “Drift” tops that list. While on a flight from San Francisco to Philadelphia (with a layover in Salt Lake City) Sessler pulled out his 5D MarK III and shot some of the stunning vistas outside his airplane window.
The panning, of course, took care of itself (thankfully with no turbulence), but the black and white, selective focus and panoramic aspect ratio were all done in post. All in all it’s just three minutes long, but it’s three engrossing minutes that offers a chance to escape for a moment and experience one of the best parts of flying without suffering through all of the worst.
(via Gizmodo via Fstoppers)
Happy Halloween y’all! If you’re planning on carving up a pumpkin for your doorstep this year and are looking for a challenging design, check out this amazingly detailed pumpkin sent in by reader Dan Savoie.
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If you’re a fan of Instagram, then you’ll probably appreciate this neat DIY project by Elsie and Emma of A Beautiful Mess. Their Homemade Photo Filter DIY involves drawing colorful patterns on squares cut from transparency sheets:
To use your filter, simply hold it over your lens when shooting. (with auto focus enabled) Move the filter around over your lens as you frame your shot. You’ll be able to choose which part of your photo is in focus and which part is blurry and colorful!
You can achieve different looks based on things like color, pattern, and how you hold the sheet. The resulting effect makes it look like you spent some time tweaking the toning and contrast sliders in post. Head on over to their blog for the full lowdown and more sample photos.
Homemade Photo Filter DIY [A Beautiful Mess via MAKE]
Image credits: Photographs by Elsie and Emma of A Beautiful Mess
The scary face in this image is actually inundated patches of shallow Lake Eyre (pronounced “air”) in the desert country of northern South Australia. An ephemeral feature of this flat, parched landscape, Lake Eyre is Australia’s largest lake when it’s full. However in the last 150 years, it has filled completely only three times.
Satellite photographs of Earth are often abstract and artsy, filled with strange colors, shapes, and textures. Some resemble the paintings of old masters, while others look like microscopic slides studied in biology classes. NASA’s LandSat has snapped images from space for 40 years now, with many of the images going into a special collection by the U.S. Geological Survey called “Earth as Art“. NASA recently decided to run a photo beauty contest to find out which of the satellite images in its collection are the most artistic.
Over 14,000 people ended up voting on the collection of 120+ images. The image above came in at number 5. It’s titled “Lake Eyre Landsat 5 Acquired 8/5/2006″.
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Filmmaker Ian Gamester created this video of moments collected over the course of several years, inspired by artist David Hockney’s photocollages, his famous “joiners.”
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Photographer Philip Karlberg, whose “33 RPM” project we featured before, shot these images of celebrities wearing sunglasses for Plaza Magazine using carefully arranged wooden pins. Shooting 6 faces required 6 days and ~1200 pins. Can you recognize all of the celebrities?
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The Girl With 7 Horses is a creative project by photographer Ulrika Kestere that shows a girl traveling to various landscapes in search of her “invisible horses”:
Once upon a time there was a girl who had 7 invisible horses. People thought she was crazy and that she in fact had 7 imaginative horses, but this was not the case. When autumn came the girl spent a whole day washing all her clothes. She hung them on a string in her garden to let the gentle autumn sun dry them. Out of nowhere, a terrible storm came and its fierce winds grabbed a hold of all her clothes and all seven horses (authors note: since they are invisible they obviously didn’t weigh much). The girl was devastated and spent all autumn looking for each horse spread around the country, wrapped in her clothes.
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Chilean artist Diego Castillo Roa used a giant wall decal to turn this circular window into a camera lens looking out into the world. It’s a submission in Lipton’s inspirARTE contest.
Image credit: Photograph by Diego Castillo Roa/Lipton
City Silhouettes is a beautiful project by Beijing-based photographer Jasper James that consists of portraits of city dwellers blended with the cityscapes in the background. There’s no Photoshop trickery involved — James uses reflections seen in glass and the images are composed entirely in-camera.
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Don Hong-Oai was a San Francisco-based Chinese photographer who created beautiful images that resembled traditional Chinese paintings.
The photographs of Don Hong-Oai are made in a unique style of photography, which can be considered Asian pictorialism. This method of adapting a Western art for Eastern purposes probably originated in the 1940s in Hong Kong. One of its best known practitioners was the great master Long Chin-San (who died in the 1990s at the age of 104) with whom Don Hong-Oai studied. With the delicate beauty and traditional motifs of Chinese painting (birds, boats, mountains, etc.) in mind, photographers of this school used more than one negative to create a beautiful picture, often using visual allegories. Realism was not a goal.
Hong-Oai was one of the last photographers to use this technique, and was also arguably the best.
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