This has to do with filmmaking rather than photography, but check out this jaw-dropping shot from the 1997 movie Contact. Can you figure out how it was created? Here’s the answer.

The image above is one-hundred percent fake. It has no connection whatsoever to the world of things. I created the bolts, lights, textures, and everything else in a free, open-source, relatively easy-to-use software package called Blender. It’s easy enough that even a novice user like me is able to make a pretty convincing image. If you are a photographer that makes a living shooting still-life photos, this should scare you.
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A strange bit of news coming out of China: couples are opting to have their wedding photos faked using Photoshop due to rising photography costs.

Rising cost of a wedding photo-shoot is forcing some Chinese couples to get their wedding albums prepared with the help of morphing offered by various online photography-related agencies. With the help of computer software like Photoshop, a couple’s ordinary photo can be added with wedding dresses, flowers or even a tropical island setting to create faux wedding images.

While the cost of a professional shoot in China can run upwards of $950, having your wedding photo album faked by online Photoshopping businesses only costs $50.

Chinese couples opting for faked wedding albums [Yahoo News]

Image credit: chinese wedding by chokola and Hawaii by Sarah_Ackerman

A week ago we published a tongue-in-cheek post on how to improve the quality of your Canon kit lens by painting a red ring around it. While that wasn’t intended to be taken seriously, we were pointed to a Korean workshop named Park in Style that actually takes custom lens body work quite seriously. What you see above is a Canon 18-55mm kit lens that they disassembled, painted, and then reassembled to look like a Canon L lens!
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Photographer Kim Keever creates large scale landscape photographs using miniature dioramas. He first creates the topographies inside a 200-gallon tank, and then fills it with water. He then uses various lights, pigments, and backdrops to bring the scenes to life for his large-format camera to capture.
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Update: Erin from Reuters contacted us informing us that this is in fact a genuine, non-manipulated photograph. Here’s a good explanation of why it’s real.

Reuters published the above image as an Editor’s Choice photo yesterday, and almost immediately readers began leaving comments questioning whether the photograph was Photoshopped. The debate soon spread to other websites, including Reddit, and it appears that the photographs has since been taken down (though it can still be seen in its original slideshow from last week).
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Devin Graham shot this beautiful surfing footage using a Canon 7D and a couple lenses (70-200mm and 100-400mm) with a 2x teleconverter, so much of the footage was shot at 800mm. The slow motion is actually “faked” (here’s another faked 7D video) using software:

To get the “super slow motion”, after I filmed at 60fps, I through it into the program “After Effects”. I used an effect that comes with the program called “Time Warp”. This allowed me to make the 60fps, to 1000fps. The way this works is the computer processes/adds frames in between the frames that are already in existence. It took several days for the computer to process the clips into the super slow motion that appears as well, so it does take a lot out of the computer, as far as processing goes.

Using After Effects or Twixtor to create fake slow mo is becoming a pretty popular technique. Beats shelling out big bucks to rent a high speed camera for many purposes.

(via Gizmodo)

In his series “Elastic” photographer Edi Yang shows that you can fake smoke photography by shooting plastic bags a certain way. What you need is a strong backlight and some post-processing mojo.
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Design firm XNcreative shot some photographs with a Canon Rebel 550D (T2i) while flying over various locations in the western US, but didn’t feel the still photos captured the original grandeur of the locations, so they decided to turn the stills into a motion-faked video. It was all done using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Apple Motion. You can find a walkthrough for how it was created here if you want to try your hand at this 3D effect.

(via Photoxels)

Canadian artist James Birkbeck shot this creative photo wearing paint to look like a van Gogh self-portrait painting.
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