Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde’s photos of clouds hanging mysteriously in indoor locations have earned him a good bit of popularity. Created by using a smoke machine, precise atmospheric conditions and dramatic lighting, his Nimbus photos juxtapose the indoor and outdoor worlds.
In the short documentary video above, Smilde sat down with Avant/Garde Diaries and discussed his work, lending us some perspective on why he creates these photos and where he finds inspiration. Read more…
Stacking long-exposure photos of stars leads to some pretty neat photos and time-lapse videos, but what happens if you use a similar technique for clouds? That’s what photographer Matt Molloy does. His “photo stack” images of landscapes show clouds that look like smears and brush strokes across the sky. Read more…
Photographer Camille Seaman is well-known for her images of icebergs, but recently she turned her attention to another state of water: supercell storm clouds. She has been partnering with storm chasers and shooting amazing images of violent weather passing through the American Midwest. The series is titled The Big Cloud. Read more…
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde creates indoor clouds using a smoke machine and uses dramatic lighting to make them look realistic. He calls the project Nimbus. Read more…
At first glance, some of Simon Davidson‘s photographs look like Harry Potter stills showing flying cars floating in the clouds. They’re actually a glimpse into the burnout subculture that’s growing in Australia. These are competitions in which drivers try to create as much smoke as they can by spinning their tires in place. Read more…
This video tutorial, courtesy of Jeff Farmer of XNCreative.com, is a testament to what someone can do with just four still images, Photoshop, Motion, and a whole lot of creativity. The images were shot using a Canon EOS Rebel T2i, and all of the editing and effects work was done in Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended and Apple Motion. Although Jeff makes it seem very easy, words like “meticulously” clue you in to the amount of time this must have taken to make.
Be sure to stick around till the end when Jeff shows you how to turn the whole thing “otherwordly,” putting a sci-fi spin on the fly-thru.
Back on July 1, 2009, artist Kelly DeLay began a personal project titled “Clouds 365″ with the goal of shooting a photo or video or clouds every single day for a year. After completing his goal 365 days later, he decided to keep going. He has now amassed over 1000 days of documenting clouds, and his popular website (which receives millions of visitors each year) was recently nominated for a Webby Award. In case you’re wondering what DeLay does on cloudless days: not all the photos show actual clouds.
Before We Begin is a project by photographer Christopher Jonassen (whose frying pan photos we featured here) that consists of diptychs showing clouds and cloud watchers. The images capture peaceful “moments of reflection between thought and action.” Read more…
Fine art photographer Mitch Dobrowner wanted to photograph storm systems, so he partnered up with Roger Hill — regarded as one of the top storm-chasers in the world — and was introduced to Tornado Alley. Dobrowner writes,
Words are inadequate to describe the experience of photographing this immense power and beauty. And the most exciting part is with each trip I really don’t know what to expect. But now I see these storms as living, breathing things. They are born when the conditions are right, they gain strength as they grow, they fight against their environment to stay alive, they change form as they age… and eventually they die. They take on so many different aspects, personalities and faces; I’m in awe watching them. These storms are amazing sights to witness…. and I’m just happy to be there—shot or no shot; it’s watching Mother Nature at her finest. My only hope my images can do justice to these amazing phenomenona of nature.
His images certainly do them justice — the stormy landscape photographs Dobrowner has made through these trips are jaw-dropping. Read more…
Ken Murphy has completed his ambitious “A History of the Sky” project, which we first got a glimpse of in March of last year. Wanting to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year, Murphy installed a still camera on the roof of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, pointed at the sky and snapping a photo every 10 seconds around the clock.
After a year had passed, Murphy made this time-lapse mosaic, with each box — arranged chronologically — showing the time-lapse of a single day. They’re all synchronized by time-of-day, and provide an interesting way of looking how sunrises, sunsets, and weather change over the course of a year.
