“NES Stop Motion” is an amazing stop motion video by YouTube user bornforthis43 that took over 120 hours to produce. Each scene was created using paper and ordinary household objects, and over 7,000 photographs went into making this 3 minute long stop-motion video. The result is a video that should deliver a healthy dose of nostalgia to people who enjoyed gaming on the NES back in the 80s and 90s.

“Skateboardanimation” is a creative video by Tilles Singer that combines digital photographs, magazine cutouts, and recorded sound effects to show little paper people skateboarding across handmade landscapes. It’s about a minute long, and should be just enough to give you your daily dose of creativity.

Pencil Vs Camera! is a wonderful series of photographs by Belgian photographer and painter Ben Heine in which he blends his pencil sketches with photographs to create new realities:

Heine tells us,

Pencil vs. Camera! is the continuation of many years of graphic research. These pictures show not only the battle between photography and drawing, but also between reality and imagination. I think this work can lead to many different forms of expression, because it gives a clear message while traveling into surreal worlds in the same time.

To see more of Heine’s work, check out his Flickr photostream.

Image credits: Photographs by Ben Heine and used with permission

Here’s a fun little tilt-shift, time-lapse video by The Bitter*Girls showing a sumo wrestling match in Japan. The two techniques make the video look almost like a clay animation, with little-big people trying to toss each other out of the ring.

(via Laughing Squid)

Photographer Jon Beard has a terrific set of photos called “Burning Bulbs” in which he breaks lightbulbs and photographs them with the filaments exposed.

The set includes the following photograph, titled “1UP Mushroom“:

This photograph recently became extremely popular on Flickr, amassing over 100,000 views. Beard tells us,

I’m a photographer and computer guy from the mountains of Virginia. My favorite kind of shot is one that gives a person a new perspective. Whether it’s a far away landscape, an unusual angle on something familiar, or a close-up of an everyday item, if it changes the way they see the things around them, it’s a success.

The idea for the 1UP came while going through shots from a broken bulb series I had shot with the intention of adding color. When I saw that one, the mushroom shape was undeniable and as a lifelong gamer all I could see was green with white spots.

DIYPhotography has a great tutorial on how to shoot this kind of photograph, but Beard also created a great behind-the-scenes video tutorial showing us his process:

If you decide to try out this idea, please be very careful – both electricity and glass can be hazardous to your health.

This project is similar to the Exploding Lightbulbs that Shatter Water tutorial that was posted here a while back by guest author James Davidson.

Image credits: Photographs by Jon Beard and used with permission.

It might be hard to believe, but each of the following “paintings” is actually a photograph by artist Alexa Meade.

Here’s a quick look behind the scenes to show you what we mean:

Were you fooled? We were.

To create the effect, Meade paints on three dimensional surfaces of objects, people, and spaces using acrylic paint.

Visit her website to see more of her work.

Image credits: Photographs by Alexa Meade and used with permission.

Luis Caldevilla creates beautiful time-lapse videos and publishes them to his website, timelapses.tv. He recently received his 1 millionth video view, and created this montage video to celebrate the occasion. It can give you quite a few ideas for things to make time-lapses of.

Despite what your eyes tell you, the above image is a photograph of a real person, not a painting. It was taken by Peter Kun Frary, a music professor at the University of Hawaii. He tells us,

Recently I walked by the Ala Moana Center Mac (cosmetic) store and noticed a crowd of Japanese tourists gawking and snapping pics. A model in full body paint was posing against a set on an open air stage in front of the store. I thought she was a darn good simulation of a late 19th or early 20th century French oil painting. Although there were no stage lights, natural sunlight light was diffused through white cloth canopy to reduce shadows and contrast.

We can imagine an artist doing a whole series of photographs that look exactly like paintings. Has this been done before? Link us if so!

(via Gizmodo)

Image credit: Photograph by Peter Kun Frary and used with permission.

Our jaws dropped when we came across Matthew Albanese’s work. He uses everyday materials to create astonishingly detailed small-scale miniatures of stunning landscapes, and then photographs them using forced perspective techniques.

Here’s his statement and a taste of his work:

My work involves the construction of small-scale meticulously detailed models using various materials and objects to create emotive landscapes. Every aspect from the construction to the lighting of the final model is painstakingly pre-planned using methods which force the viewers perspective when photographed from a specific angle. Using a mixture of photographic techniques such as scale, depth of field, white balance and lighting I am able to drastically alter the appearance of my materials.

Tornado made of steel wool, cotton, ground parsley and moss

Paprika Mars. Made out of 12 pounds paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder and charcoal

Volcano, “Breaking Point”, made out of tile grout, cotton, phosphorous ink. This model volcano was illuminated from within by 6-60 watt light bulbs.

Aurora Borealis. This one was made by photographing a beam of colored light against a black curtain to achieve the edge effect. The trees were composited from life ( so far the only real life element in any of these images) The stars are simply strobe light through holes in cork board.

Fields, After the Storm. This model is simply made out of faux fur(fields), cotton (clouds) and sifted tile grout(mountains). The perspective is forced as in all of my images, and the lighting effect was created by simply shifting the white balance.

To see more of Matthew’s work, you can visit his website.

American Pixels is an experiment by Jörg Colberg that uses a special kind of image compression algorithm to create a distinct look. Here’s Colberg’s statement:

These “American Pixels” are an experiment. Image formats like jpeg (or gif) use compression algorithms to save space, while trying to retain a large fraction of the original information. A computer that creates a jpeg does not know anything about the contents of the image: It does what it is told, in a uniform manner across the image.

My idea was to create a variant that followed in the footsteps of what jpegs do, but to have the final result depend on the original image: in a very direct way the computer algorithm becomes part of the image creation. The idea was to build a hierarchical compression algorithm, where the compression – in effect the pixel size – depends on the information in each uncompressed pixel and its neighbours. So adaptive compression (acomp) is a new image algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting.

[...] What is more, it produces images that have spatial depth: as you zoom in you can see more and more details. acomps are designed for a wall: The viewer has to be able to walk back and forth in front of them.

Basically, the algorithm leaves detail where there needs to be detail, and compresses areas of less detail. By doing this, the resulting image doesn’t look entirely realistic, yet doesn’t look entirely artificial either.