NASA astronaut Don Pettit shot this beautiful long exposure photograph showing star trails and city trails from the International Space Station. The image was created by combining 18 separate long-exposure photographs. Pettit says,
My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do: I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.
See those blue blotches that appear in a line on the face of our planet? Those are lightning flashes.
Aerial photographer Stephan Zirwes shoots amazing images of patterns and repetition seen in landscapes while looking straight down from a helicopter. From his perspective, things like cars, shipping containers, and people blend together into abstract designs. Read more…
German photographer Christian Stoll‘s “Epic” series features epic wide angle photographs of futuristic locations. The spaces are immense and the scale dizzying. Read more…
Photographer Randy Scott Slavin creates spherical panoramic photographs of various cityscapes and landscapes. He makes the surreal images by shooting hundreds of photographs of a scene and then stitching them together into a stereographic projection. He calls the work Alternate Perspectives. Slavin writes,
The photographing of the images is the actually least time consuming part of the process. What takes the longest is finding the places that are worthy of shooting and getting to the spot that’s best to shoot them from. You can’t light landscapes so it’s important to figure out what the best time of day is to take a photograph. Sometimes this means long hours of waiting and watching.
This inspiring time-lapse video of Portland, Oregon was created by Uncage the Soul over the course of 51 days in March and April for the TEDx Portland conference. They captured 308,829 separate photographs at 50 different locations in and around the city. Each second in the video took an average of 3.8 hours of work to create. Their hard work paid off, and the film was given a standing ovation by the sellout crowd when it premiered.
Here’s a gorgeous series of underwater portraits shot by photographer Jacob Sutton, the same guy who did the LED snowboarding shoot that we featured a while back. It’s titled “Underwater Girl”. Read more…
Kanaal van Djsanderdj created this stunning time-lapse video using photographs shot by probes sent out by NASA through the Cassini and Voyager missions. It offers a close-up look at the other planets in our solar system in motion. Here’s a similar video we shared a year ago.
Photographer Isaac Gutiérrez Pascual of Spain shot this beautiful photograph of the sky that contains four different subjects: birds, clouds, the Moon, and Venus. It was shot using a Canon 5D and a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens. NASA writes,
[...] a crescent Moon and the planet Venus, on the far right, were captured during sunset posing against a deep blue sky. In the foreground, dark storm clouds loom across the image bottom, while a white anvil cloud shape appears above. Black specks dot the frame, caused by a flock of birds taking flight. Very soon after this picture was taken, however, the birds passed by, the storm ended, and Venus and the Moon set.
NASA liked the image so much that it even considered using the photo as a backdrop for a group portrait of the International Space Station crew (they ended up choosing a different one).
The Camera is a beautiful 7-minute-long short film by amateur filmmaker Peter Lewis about a solitary girl who finds a creepy mysterious Polaroid camera in an abandoned beach house. It’s the first film Lewis has completed, and was shot using a Canon Rebel 550D T2i (and the Canon 50mm f/1.4 and Tamron 28-200mm) on a budget of $50 during a vacation in Nags Head, North Carolina. Lewis singlehandedly managed all the stages of production, including composing the original score, creating the foley sounds, and editing the film in Final Cut Pro X. If you enjoy this film, be sure to check out Framed, an eerily similar short that was shot with an iPhone 4S.
“Child’s Caves” is a beautiful (and nostalgia-inducing) series of photographs by photographer Björn Ewers and STUDIO314 that shows how children turn their play areas into make believe scenes from the world of grown ups. Imagined locations include the moon, the jungle, a pirate ship, and an igloo. Read more…
