Taken by a collection of three satellites orbiting Earth -- Landsat 7, ASTER, and MODIS -- the images above and below are part of an incredible collection of photos that were captured from space purely for their aesthetic beauty, rather than the usual scientific reasoning.
Firefly photography isn't a novel concept. In fact, long-exposure images of these glowing creatures lighting up beautiful forest scenes have appeared on PetaPixel a couple of times before... we've even featured a tutorial on the subject. But photographer Vincent Brady's firefly time-lapse above IS novel.
It's novel, not because it's a time-lapse of fireflies (we're sure that's been done a time or two) but because he combined many different photographic techniques to create something truly breathtaking.
In November of 2012, we posted an article featuring impressionist-inspired photographs by photographer Matt Molloy that were created using a method called time stacking. The resulting images are quite beautiful, and in the tutorial above Molloy will run you through how to create them for yourself.
Photographer Alexia Sinclair recently completed one of the most beautiful and challenging photo shoots we've ever run across. The resulting collection, A Frozen Tale, is both a magical visual journey and a testament to the iron will and determination of one of the world's premier fine art photographers.
There's nothing like a Hubble Space Telescope image to break up all of the law and stock photography-related news (and there has been a LOT in the last 24 hours). Then again, this video and image aren't the most peaceful NASA has ever released, given they show a galaxy tearing itself apart as it hurtles through a particularly harsh part of our universe.
Update: The original version of this post quoted a flight attendant in the intro, when it was in fact the author's girlfriend who made the remark that he was annoying people. This was an editorial mistake on our part, and has been fixed.
"The sound of your shutter clicking is annoying the people around you." said my girlfriend, sitting next to me. "I know," I replied "I don't care at the moment, I'm shooting some crazy unique footage!"
Last week I was lucky enough to shoot the world's first sunset hyperlapse sequence from an airplane, here's how I did it.
What exactly makes one landscape, milky way time-lapse stand head and shoulders above the crowd? In a genre so over-saturated that some people have lost faith in it altogether, how do you create a time-lapse worth international attention?
We're not entirely sure, but we do know that the video above fits the bill just right -- it is, in a word, spectacular.
Taken on February 19th (and available in high-resolution here) the satellite image above …
This is just plain beautiful, no matter which way you slice it. Using the magic of time-lapse photography and microscopy, Vyacheslav Ivanov captured the formation of those ice crystals we call snowflakes that caused so much grief in the northeastern US over the past several weeks.
In Sweden's Abisko National Park, 2014 has been something of a God-send for time-lapse photographers. In the first 32 nights of the year, the so-called 'polar spirits' have come out to dance 29 times! But even that couldn't have prepared photographer Chad Blakley for the spectacular light show he captured on February 1st.
I don't think we've referred to a time-lapse as "dramatic" before, but when it comes to photographer Nicolaus Wegner's most recent time-lapse creation, no other word fits quite as well.
Captured over 14 months in the Wyoming wilderness, beautiful motion landscape sequences are juxtaposed masterfully with weather that he calls 'terrorific' -- terrifying, horrific and terrific all rolled into one -- in Wegner's Wyoming Wildscapes II.
Russian photographer Elena Shumilova only got into photography in early 2012, when she acquired her first camera. But if you were to look through her Flickr and 500px profiles, you would swear she had been doing it for much, much longer.
Here is a good example why it is so important to work the scene to get the best results from …
Okay, this video doesn't necessarily have much to do with photography, but we could think of no better way to wake you up on a Monday morning than by sharing this gorgeous footage of creamer being poured into a cup of coffee at 2,000 frames per second.
It's getting harder and harder for photographers who shoot time-lapse to get our attention. You see, they're getting too darn good, and so gorgeous time-lapse after gorgeous time-lapse makes its way across our computer screens forcing us to be very picky.
That said, veteran time-lapse photographer Andrew Walker's recently released "Journey Part 1" time-lapse had no issue getting our approval, because it's absolutely, unequivocally breathtaking.
Once in a while, you wake up in the morning with problems on your mind (or in your Inbox) and immediately start your day in a funk, focused on those problems. It's these mornings that benefit most from some perspective-giving imagery, and perhaps nothing puts our tiny Earth-bound problems in perspective quite as decisively as photographs taken from the International Space Station.
The time-lapses you see above and below will do just that, and do it in spectacular fashion as you fly over the Earth feeling a bit like Superman trying to turn back time (oh, I'm sorry, is my Nerd showing?)
One of the most recent videos to go extremely viral over the past several days involves a behind the scenes look at how a portrait of Morgan Freeman came together... and when we say came together, we mean created from scratch on an iPad by finger-painting!
The NASA spacecraft Cassini has sent back some incredible imagery of the planet Saturn over the years, much of which is being put to use to create an IMAX movie. But thanks to the work of a Croatian software developer, we now have a full, breath-taking, high-resolution photo mosaic of Saturn in all its glory as it looked on October 10th.
Sometimes photo projects take days. Sometimes they take months. In photographer and filmmaker Gioacchino Petronicce's case, his project "PICTURES" took years. Three years and 80,000 photos that eventually turned into the elegant cinematic stop motion video you see above.
On June 7th, 2007, a Delta II rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California, carrying with it the Italian Thales Alenia-Space COSMO-SkyMed Satellite. And while the rocket was careening towards space, Staff Sgt. Eric Thompson (who was moving in the decidedly opposite direction) managed to snap this amazing photo.
Back in June, New York City-based photographer Htet T San visited a number of beaches around The Big Apple, mainly on Coney Island and at Brighton Beach. Her goal was to capture the concept of "the complete nothingness" through reflections of beachgoers seen in the wet sands. The resulting images form a series she calls "The Frail Second."
In search of a difficult photo project? Try photographing airplanes passing in front of the sun and the moon. That's what French photographer Sebastien Lebrigand set out to do earlier this year, and his resulting photographs are incredible.
Joe Capra of Scientifantastic is a Los Angeles-based time-lapse cinematographer, photographer and filmmaker who gets to travel around the world shooting beautiful footage of beautiful places. When you're done envying his job though, it's worth taking a look at some of what he's put together. Most recently, a gorgeous time-lapse tour of Rio de Janeiro and the Iguazù Falls.
Earlier this month, photographer Maciej Winiarczyk captured a rare and beautiful celestial light show. While shooting a time-lapse in Caithness, Scotland, he was treated to not one but two stunning natural phenomena when his camera captured noctilucent clouds and the aurora borealis at the same time.
Although it shares a name with a certain state about 90-miles east of where I live, the country of Georgia couldn't be more different in every other way. The mountainous 26,216 square mile country is packed with gorgeous sights that range from Black Sea beaches to gorgeous mountain ranges.
The folks at Timelapse Media decided this picturesque country deserved its own "hyperlapse postcard" as they call it. And so they grabbed their cameras and got to traveling.
Want to snap a memorable bridal photo? Just have her pose on the side of a mountain, and then capture a double rainbow in the background. That's what Alaskan wedding photographer Josh Martinez did yesterday, resulting in the incredible image above.
Every architecture 101 class in college would do well to start off the semester with the above time-lapse by Luke Shepard. Over the course of three months he travelled to 36 cities in 21 countries to capture some of Europe's most beautiful architecture on camera. This time-lapse, titled Nightvision, is the result.
Photographer Eric Hines has always wanted to travel to Iceland. So naturally, when the opportunity came up, he jumped at it. Seventeen days, four thousand miles driving and a lot of shutter actuations later, the gorgeous time-lapse above serves as proof that he made the trip.
Hey aspiring storm chasers -- want to dramatically improve your lightning shots? Try getting an elevated view. Like about 400 miles up. That's the approximate orbital height above Earth of the International Space Station, which is producing an impressive library of images showing what lightning looks like from way above.
In the past, we've shared a few creative ways to take your fireworks shots to the next level. Be it shooting hand-held long exposures for an abstract result or refocusing during a long-exposure, the results can be quite stunning.
The video above combines a couple of techniques we've shared before, making wonderful use of bokeh and the refocusing technique to create a mesmerizing minute of footage.
So you want to create stirring nature documentaries. You could go the National Geographic way and risk trench-foot, snakebite and more in pursuit of the scenic wild. Or you could take the Boris Godfroid route: Schlep a few hundred pounds of bricks into a spare room, cover it with moss and other forgiving plant life, and let nature run wild in miniature.
Were you smiling a lot Friday afternoon? Hope so, because that's when you and your 7 billion planetary neighbors got a rare portrait session from the Cassini spacecraft. Orbiting above Saturn almost a billion miles away, the craft turned its camera towards to Earth to capture some spectacular images of our planet foregrounded by Saturn's rings.
It was the first time in nine years that Cassini has been in orbit and taking scheduled photos of our planet, prompting NASA and friends to promote a "The Day That the Earth Smiled" event via social media.
Spanish visual artist Sergio Albiac is offering the world a chance to meld with the universe in an innovative project that combines portraiture with images from the Hubble space telescope.
Albiac calls his "Stardust" project "an experiment in generative portraiture."
Niagara Falls is (or rather are) a sight to behold, and while capturing the falls from a boat or one of the overlooks is impressive enough, why not take to the air? That's what YouTube user questpact did, creating the video above using his DJI Phantom quad-copter and GoPro Hero 3.
On July 9th, 2012, photographer Sam Cornwell of Hayling Island, England welcomed his son Indigo into the world and became a father for the first time. Starting on that life-changing day, Cornwell and his wife Beverley have been documenting the growth of their boy by capturing at least one second of video every single day.
Yesterday, one year and thousands of videos after the project began, the photographer took the clips and combined them into the beautiful "moving time-lapse" seen above.
Our sun can look very different in photographs depending on the wavelength of light you're trying to capture. Some photographs show the sun as a glowing white ball, while others capture hotter areas in a cold blue color. NASA recently took a collection of sun photos shot at different wavelengths and combined them into the beautiful photo collage seen above (here's a higher-res version).
Some people have all the luck right? The above photo was taken by photographer Jason Smith, and it's a great example of the right place meeting the right time. While taking 4th of July photos at a friend's house, he was able to capture a lightning strike that synched perfectly with some fireworks.
You've heard us mention the US Department of the Interior once before, in reference to Travis Roe's awesome Grand Canyon lightning strike photo that went viral a couple of months ago. One of the department's goals is to get people interested in visiting different areas of the United States, and they do this by sharing some of the most beautiful photos they come across.
Roe's photo went viral after the Interior Department shared it on their Facebook page, but if you really want a great overview of beautiful US imagery, the department's Instagram account is the way to go.
Capturing the growth or bloom of a flower is a staple of time-lapse photography, and therefore, it can be a bit banal. But photographer Daniel Csobot has managed to put a macro flower time-lapse together that is both beautiful and captivating.
Madrid-based photographer Silvia Grav's work is best described as "surreal." Paired with poetic captions that Google Translate simply doesn't do justice to, each black-and-white photo manipulation holds a deep artistic meaning.