'Levitation' photos are a fun, and not overly complicated style of photography. But if you really want to create believable levitation shots, there are some tips and tricks that will really help. Enter photographer Christopher James (@christopher.james).
Ever since the middle of high school, I’ve been immensely interested in “the process.” You know, that middle bit between point A and point B that nobody but the artist ever sees. I’ve always loved peeking behind the scenes to see where something started and what kind of work and thought went into creating the finished product.
Once Syria's largest city, Aleppo has been the worst-hit city in the country since the Battle of Aleppo began in 2012 as part of the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Now a series of before-and-after photos reveals just how much the once-vibrant historical city has been marred by war.
Here's a little something that's bound to put a smile on your face before you head off into the weekend. It's a new series of dog portraits called Hairy, and they're some of the most adorable before-and-after shots you've ever seen.
Not everything looks better in slow motion, but a whole lot of things do. Case-in-point, check out this behind the scenes video that shows a high speed robotic arm being used to capture slow motion footage, and then shows you the sweet results. (Warning: There is very brief nudity around 1:40).
Every photographer has gotten the question after a successful shoot: “The photos look great, but can I get the rest of them just in case I need them later? You don’t need to edit them or anything.”
If you’re here for the short answer, the answer is no, but it’s important to me for people to understand why.
When most people travel, they think of travelling to a destination. Whether it’s climbing Mt. Fuji, gawking at the frescoes in the Vatican, or relishing spicy cuisine in Thailand, most people think of the destination for what it has to offer, from culture to scenery to sensational experiences.
Photographer Peter Stewart is an internationally published photographer who's also popular on photo sharing sites, boasting tens of thousands of followers and millions of views on 500px, Flickr, and Instagram. Here's an eye-opening series of his before-and-after post-processing comparisons.
For me photography is not portraying what exists, but portraying what exist in me.
To show the extensive work that can go into retouching a beauty portrait, editing guru Pratik Naik of Solstice Retouch created this 7-minute timelapse video showing how he spend 1.5 hours cleaning up a photo by photographer Jonas Jensen.
"Tilbakeblikk" ("retrospective" in Norwegian) is a fascinating photo project that shows how Norway's gorgeous landscapes have changed over the past century. Decades-old photos are faithfully re-captured by figuring out exactly where the original photographer stood.
Over the past several years, the U.S. Geological Survey has been shooting a "Repeat Photography" project in various locations to show how glacier ice has been retreating over the past century. Using photos from the late 1800s and early 1900s as references, photographers are rephotographing those same scenes to show how things have changed (and are changing).
19-year-old signer, actress, and model Zendaya is making waves today after calling out a magazine for Photoshopping her body. She says she was "shocked" when she found her hips and torso "quite manipulated" in the published photo, and she has posted comparison photos showing what the retouchers did to her.
If you're a dog lover, photographer Amanda Jones has a photo project that will tug at your heartstrings. After photographing 30 different dogs as puppies years ago, she revisited them and captured what they look like as older dogs. The before-and-after portraits, a series titled "Dog Years," show how dog's have a unique spark of personality that lasts a lifetime.
Earlier this month, Reddit user magic976's parents celebrated their 40th anniversary as husband and wife. To mark the occasion, they decided to recreate two photos from their wedding day back in 1975.
Adobe's new Dehaze slider has been wowing photographers since it was launched for Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW last month. We've seen what it can do for haze, rainy days, and blizzards, but there's yet another interesting application: enhancing photos of the starry night sky.
One of the big Hollywood blockbusters to hit the silver screen this year has been Mad Max: Fury Road, which has gotten rave reviews, with many praising the insane and complex visual design of the film. If you were wondering what some of the shots looked like when they were originally captured on camera, here are some before-and-after comparison images showing those shots next to the final frames after visual effects were applied.
Some months ago, 34-year-old telecom worker Kevin Blandford of Louisville, Kentucky, won a free vacation to Puerto Rico from his job. His daughter was too young to make the trip at the time, so she and his wife stayed home. Blandford decided to document the entire trip with a series of sad-faced portraits showing that he wasn't having a single second of fun without his family. Those photos went viral after he shared them online, racking up millions of views.
They were so popular, in fact, that the hotel in Puerto Rico and an ad agency noticed and decided to pay for a second identical trip for Blandford's entire family. Blandford took the opportunity to recreate each one of his original sad photos as a happy family portrait.
Photographer Blake Morrow shot a creative series of clone photos showing his friend Beth Beard before and after she lost 150 pounds. The portraits were taken two years apart and combined into pop-culture inspired clone photos showing old Beth interacting with new Beth. It's a series titled The Beth Project.
Yesterday I shared the before-and-after photos above. The image on the left was taken on the 22nd April, 2009, almost exactly six years and one week before the image on the right. They show the same street in Bhaktapur, one of Nepal's most historic cities, before and after last Saturday's earthquake.
I was in Nepal exactly six years and three days before the earthquake that devastated the country on Saturday.
Back then, I was photographing for a magazine feature and had spent much of the day in Bhaktapur, a beautiful and ancient city in the Kathmandu Valley.
Want to see how much our ability to photograph space has improved over the past 135 years or so? …
See this house? It languished on the Orlando, Florida, market for 224 days. It’s no wonder; with a photo like that who would want to come see it? A new realtor took over -- one who understands the importance of professional photography for his listings.
I was hired to photograph the home on February 28 and delivered the images the next day. On March 10 he told me a buyer had made an offer. To put it another way, after almost 8 months on the market, the home was under contract within 8 days after I took new photos.
Here's an interesting look at the magic that goes into making movies look the way they do. The video above shows how scenes in one particular movie looked straight out of the camera compared to the finished version after color grading. It's like the video equivalent of the before-and-after post-processing examples photographers often share on the Web.
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Back in November 2013, an EF4 tornado tore through Illinois, killing several people and destroying hundreds of homes. Photojournalists at the Journal Star in Peoria, Illinois captured numerous photographs documenting the devastation from both the ground and the air.
Last month, at the one year anniversary of the disaster, those same photojournalists went out and rephotographed those same scenes. The resulting before-and-after photos document the process the community has made in rebuilding their lives.
Then & Now style photo series are anything but uncommon, but what if the "then" you want to compare to "now" happened before the invention of photography? You would think that would be a deal-breaker, but one computer graphics manager and gaming enthusiast found a way around this issue.
For his 'Then & Now' series, Damien Hypolite printed out screenshots from the game Assassin's Creed Unity -- which is based during the French Revolution -- and then went around holding them up against modern-day Paris.
As photographers, we're already intimately familiar with the importance of lighting and posture, but just how much of a difference can the proper pose and lighting make? This video by BuzzFeedBlue, titled "How to Fake a Before and After Photo," answers that question by showing the shift in real-time.
A couple of months ago we shared a series of before and after portraits that showed you what Warped Tour musicians looked like before and after rocking out on stage. This series is similar... only the people in the photos did something quite a bit more difficult than playing Warped: they ran the United States of America for anywhere between 2 and 12 years.
Sean Scheidt shows off the transformational power of makeup, costumes, props and sass in his recently before-and-after series Burlesque. In it, Scheidt uses simple composition against a black backdrop to show how burlesque performers transition from their day-to-day selves in street clothes to the characters they become on stage.
Musicians go hard. And while every artist and band puts it all out on stage for the world to see, the Vans Warped Tour in particular often features a lineup of bands whose members truly give it their all, for as long as three months, day after day.
In an effort to document just how exhausting just one of these performances can be, live performance photographer, Brandon Andersen, decided to do something a little different than usual and capture a collection of before-and-after performance images of musicians whose bands were in this year’s Vans Warped Tour lineup.
Timera 2 is the second iteration of a rather unique then-and-now compositing app that crowdsources photographs from around the globe and allows you to easily document the changes that have taken place in the world around you over the decades.
Through a massive user-generated database of historical images, appropriately geotagged to their location, Timera users can create unique then-and-now photos by overlaying the archive photo with a photo they just took.
Always fascinated by the then and now series that make their way across the Web, photographer Samantha Decker wanted to give it a shot herself. The thing was, she didn't want to do the exact same thing everyone else was doing.
That's how she settled on a reality-altering series by the name of Now & Then: Seeing the Future from the Past.
We told you to expect a wave of interesting "then and now" series when Google first integrated the 'time-machine' feature into Street View, and that prophesy is starting to come true.
A couple of weeks ago we showed you GooBing Detroit, a Tumblog that tracked the demise of Detroit in Street View images. And today, Gizmodo published a fascinating look at the rapid pace of gentrification that has transformed several areas of Brooklyn.
We’ve shared his work before here on PetaPixel, but this time filmmaker Simon Smith has stepped up his game.
Whereas his previous collaboration compared 1920s footage of London to footage he captured present day side-by-side, his newest then-and-now piece overlays the two, creating a throwback to the London of 1924 by placing the scenes inside of modern-day London.
In a city like New York, buildings and their façades can change seemingly overnight. So, what happens to the face of "the city that never sleeps" over the course of a decade? If we take the work of James and Karla Murray as an example, the answer is: a lot.
The National Parks Services and Gigapan recently put together a photography project that takes a comparative look at two of America's best-known pieces of land and how they've changed over the course of 80 years.
Reddit user Nasdaf created this moving composite photograph using images of Kiev's Independence Square captured before and after the havoc wreaked by violent clashes between the government and protesters.
It's common knowledge that Photoshop is used, in varying degrees, to help models and celebrities look their best in magazines. But is 'their best' really all that great? Does removing imperfections, smoothing skin and trimming waistlines really something desirable?
BuzzFeed wanted to find out, and so they offered four women professional photoshoots and Photoshop makeovers to see how they reacted to their before and after images.
Last year, a time-lapse called 'Body Evolution - Model Before and After' went viral as people the world over had their eyes opened to just how much a model can be altered with the help of hair, makeup and, most of all, Photoshop. That video has accrued almost 8 million views, and is still shared today in hopes of convincing magazines to begin putting disclaimers on images that are significantly altered in post.
The video above by ad agency Victors & Spoils takes that video and does something hilarious with it. Almost as if to say "You think that's extreme? We'll SHOW you extreme!" the agency Photoshopped the model further, from the beautiful Barbie-like cover girl into none other than Santa Claus!
This week marks the one year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, the most devastating storm of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season and the second most costly hurricane in the history of the United States. To capture how far New York City has come since being pummeled by Sandy, resident photographer Natan Dvir decided to re-shoot photographs that he captured last year after the storm.