composite

A while back, PetaPixel posted some features about image averaging and faces. Richard Prince created a composite portrait of the 57 faces of girlfriends on Seinfeld. This led to Pat David exploring the averaging of faces with Martin Schoeller’s portraits of celebrities.

I’ve long been interested in image averaging as well; as a measure of central tendency, I like that image averaging can highlight similarities and differences across an array of seemingly equivalent images.

Dr. Neal Krawetz, a computer science PhD who specializes in non-classical computer forensics, online profiling, and computer security, made some pretty damning claims in a blog post recently. After taking a close look at Paul Hansen World Press Photo 2012 winner (seen above), he concluded that it was "a digital composite that was significantly reworked."

This incredible image, which shows a breathtakingly beautiful solar corona surrounding the moon during a total solar eclipse, is actually not one photo at all -- it's a combination of 47 images taken using two lenses.

The woman in this portrait doesn't actually exist. The face is actually the average of 57 different women -- 57 girlfriends that appeared in episodes of the popular TV sitcom Seinfeld.

Statistics show that 70% of people who are abused as children will grow up into adults who will in turn abuse children. A recent awareness ad campaign by Mexican organization Save the Children shared this fact in single photographs that are both creative and difficult to stomach.

NBC recently received some criticism for distributing the above photo of Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon to several news outlets -- some of which used it on their front page -- without disclosing that the background and road in the image were fake. Being an entertainment outlet, however, they were granted a pass; the fakery was obvious and it was the news outlet's job to figure it out and disclose it to their readers.

But one particular newspaper has drawn more fire than the rest. The New York Daily News was one of the papers that used the photo on their front page, but on top of not disclosing the initial fakery, they further 'shopped the photo and kept that part to themselves as well.

The space agencies that run the Hubble Space Telescope may have some of the most powerful photographic equipment at their disposal, but every now and then they can still use a little help from amateur astrophotographers.

Amateur astrophotographer Robert Gendler created the beautiful photograph above showing the spiral galaxy M106 by compositing existing imagery captured by the Hubble telescope with his own photos captured from Earth.

If the book Frankenstein were written about the subject of photography, then French photographer Grégoire Cheneau would be Victor Frankenstein and his Altered States portraits would be Frankenstein's monster(s). Upon first glance, many of the portraits seem to be harshly-lit shots of ordinary -- albeit strange looking -- people. Upon closer inspection, however, you start noticing that there's something off about them.

Last month photographer Chris Crisman entered the photograph above, titled Butterfly Girl, into the World Photography Organization’s 2012 World Photography Awards. It was selected from the thousands of entries as part of a promotional campaign for the contest and in that process was spread out all over the Internet. From the Daily Mail to the Huffington Post, the story about the World Photo Awards and Chris’s photo made the rounds across the web.

In particular, on the UK news site The Daily Mail, the photo generated a ton of comments and sparked some controversy as to whether or not it was appropriate for a photography competition. This caused me to ask myself the question: "What defines a photograph?"

Check out this curious 25-second time-lapse/composite video that shows every airplane that landed at San Diego International Airport on Black Friday a week ago between 10:30am and 3pm. The giant planes whiz by overhead as if they're part of a fighter jet squadron heading off to battle -- not something you'd expect to see with commercial planes at an airport. It was created by photography and film professor Cy Kuckenbaker.

Some photographers have made names for themselves by creating and photographing extremely detailed dioramas: miniature tabletop scenes that are so realistic that viewers often mistake them for the real world. Belgian photographers Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux of 354 Photographers have put an interesting spin on the diorama photo concept by Photoshopping real people into their miniature scenes. The series is titled "Box".

Photographer Stephen Wilkes has become well-known for his project titled "Day to Night," which features single images of various locations that capture the passing of a day. CBS News recently caught up with Wilkes and aired the feature above. In it, the photographer talks about how the project began and walks through how the composite images are shot and created.

Now here's a creative idea that we've never seen before... For this short film titled New York: Night and Day, New York City-based filmmaker and animator Philip Stockton blended daytime and nighttime images of his city into single shots. He explains,

New York: Night and Day is a combination of non-traditional video time-lapse and animation. I filmed day and night scenes from around New York City and combined them back into single sequences using rotoscoping techniques. The piece explores the relationships between night and day, by compositing together scenes shot in the same location over a time period ranging from 4 - 8 hours. I hope you enjoy it.

Inspired by photographer Richard Silver's time-slice photos that we featured last month, European Southern Observatory Fellow Gabriel Brammer decided to do the same thing, except with photographs of the ESO's Very Large Telescope in northern Chile instead of NYC buildings.

Here's a fun weekend photo project for you to try: turn solid glass objects into liquid by splashing water onto them. That's what Mexico City-based photographer Jean Bérard did for his series titled Liquid Glass. He set various glass vessels onto a table, and photographed them multiple times while splashing the water contained within and tossing water on from the outside.

The photographs were then merged into single composite photos that make the objects look like they're created entirely out of water.

Gigapixel photographs are generally created by snapping a large number of photos of a scene using a special robotic camera rig, and then stitching those images together afterward using special software. Jean-François Rauzier creates similarly massive images, except his "hyperphotos" are all stitched together by hand.

Earlier this month, Noah Kalina released an updated version of his everyday self-portrait time-lapse video, showing how …

Philadelphia-based architect and photo enthusiast Andrew Evans has an interesting series of photographs titled Demolition Composites, which contains photographs of ghostly buildings spotted around the City of Brotherly Love. The technique used to create them is extremely basic. Evans took photographs of the buildings, and then rephotographed the same location after the building had been demolished (cleared away for new construction projects).

By compositing the before and after photographs together, Evans ended up with images that offer a final, fading look at the beautiful buildings that once occupied the new construction sites.

Capturing a single shooting star can make for a brilliant photograph, but what does it look like if you composite multiple meteors into a single image? Fort Collins, Colorado-based nature photographer David Kingham decided to find out recently during the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. The amazing photo seen above is what resulted.

A couple months ago we shared a creative photo project that showed various interior spaces from directly overhead, as if they were photographed by a fly on the ceiling. German photographer Michael H. Rohde has a similar project, except his photographs are shot from the opposite direction: directly below.

Atomic Overlook is a startling series of images by photographer Clay Lipsky that shows tourists enjoying the beauty of mushroom clouds at atomic bomb tests. Lipsky writes,

Imagine if the advent of the atomic era occurred during today's information age. Tourists would gather to view bomb tests, at the "safe" distances used in the 1950's, and share the resulting cell phone photos online.

Lipsky created the images by combining photos taken during his travels over the last 8 years with photographs of nuclear bomb blasts.

Like most people, your kitchen at home is probably littered with various items collected over the past months, years, or even decades. Photographer Erik Klein Wolterink has a project titled Kitchen Portraits in which he captured portraits of the kitchens of various ethnic groups within Amsterdam. Rather than photograph them from one angle, he opened up the cupboards, drawers, fridges, and ovens, and photographed each space individually. The images were then combined afterwards into detailed composite images that offer interesting snapshots of the spaces.

Think you're good with Photoshop? Graphic designer Alexander Koshelkov created this amazing time-lapse video showing how he created an epic plane crash image in Photoshop using elements found in other photographs (e.g. freeways, an airplane, destroyed engines and cars). The project took Koshelkov nearly 4.5 hours and required 244 separate layers.

A new Nikon patent unearthed by Egami shows that the company has developed …

Photographer Lauren Marsolier’s Transition series consists of minimalist landscape photographs of desolate locations. The various places don't actually exist -- Marsolier creates them by combining photographs captured in different places at different times.

Here’s a video in which photographer Ryan Schude walks through how he went …

This past Sunday, Jupiter and Venus put on a show by lining up with our moon (a …

Researchers have created the first comprehensive image of the entire 3×5-mile debris field around the sinking of the Titanic: …

Director Ninian Doff made this creative music video for singer …

Photographer Thomas Jackson has an ongoing project titled Emergent Behavior that consists of surreal photographs of swarms of various things (e.g. leaves, plastic cups, ping pong balls) in various locations. The images aren't computer generated, but are rather composite images combining a number of photographs -- probably similar to the "flock of phones" tutorial that we featured a while back.

Starting in 2001, photographer Mary Mattingly has created an image every year on the winter solstice -- the day of the year when daylight is shortest -- showing the first light of the day and the last light of the day blended into a single photo. The series is called "First Light / Last Light".

Here's a tutorial on how to do non-automated HDR for real estate photography using Photoshop CS5. The first thing you'll need is a sturdy tripod with a level. The closer you are to a leveled image, the less correction you'll have to do later.

Photographer Pep Ventosa made these abstract composite images of carousels in various amusement parks around the world by photographing them from multiple angles and then blending the photographs together.

Photographer Anthony Chang created this amazing image of a liquid rose without any computer-generated trickery. He hung a glass rose upside down and snapped photos while pouring food coloring onto it.

Here’s a brief video in which Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Kelley shares his …

An earlier post here on PetaPixel showcased a wonderful image of a flock of cell phones and the method used to create it. In a rather snarky comment, I said to get back to me when they started tossing babies, and linked to my daughter merrily jumping in her crib with her toys. Mike was kind enough to approach me about writing up a small walk-through on how I created my image, and who can honestly turn down a chance to show off their baby daughter looking so cute?

Award winning Korean photo studio Indylab shot this award winning advertisement without the aid of computer generated imagery. Instead, they manually tossed and photographed phones one at a time, and then composited all the images afterward.

Here’s a video in which interior photographer Roger Brooks walks through how he …

Inspired by Noah Kalina's viral everyday video a girl who goes by clickflashwhirr has been doing a similar self-portrait-a-day project. Designer Tiemen Rapati decided to make a composite image showing what the average of the self-portraits looks like. Taking 500 images from clickflashwhirr's Flickr set, Rapati wrote a script that counts the individual RGB values for each pixel, averaging them across the 500 portraits.

This amazing image might look like a computer generated graphic, but it’s actually …