Whoa. If you enjoy watching mind-bending concepts that confuse you and make your brain hurt, check out this experimental short by Willie Witte, titled “Screengrab.”
Nothing in the video is computer generated trickery: it simply uses clever camera tricks and a whole lotta printed photographs to create the seamless transitions. “All the trickery took place literally in front of the camera,” Witte says. See if you can understand what’s going on through the entire 1 minute and 30 seconds. Read more…
Swiss photographers Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (yes, the ones who created a large format camera out of books) have a clever series of photos that uses wooden beams to play around with a few things photographers often think about: lines, angles, and perspective.
For each of the photos, the duo constructed a structure of wooden beams that blends in with buildings in the background from the perspective of the camera. The resulting scene looks as though the wood magically connects the lines of the buildings with the foreground. Read more…
Remember that slow-motion wildlife footage that consisted entirely of still photos animated with parallax? French photographer Sebastien Laban does the same thing, except with his wedding photographs.
In the video above, all the apparently 3D scenes you see are actually the result of using some After Effects magic on ordinary 2D photographs. Read more…
To make the point that Garnier Fructis’ hair products are great for both women and men, advertising agency Publicis teamed up with photographers Billy & Hells for a series of creative advertising photographs.
Upon first glance, each of the photographs appear to show a tough guy with a massively long beard. However, look a little closer and you’ll realize that things are not what they appeared to be. Read more…
YouTube illusion and science channel Brusspup recently did an anamorphic illusion project in which he photographed a few random objects resting on a piece of paper (e.g. a Rubik’s cube, a roll of tape, and a shoe), skewed them, printed them out as high-resolution prints, and then photographed them at an angle to make the prints look just like the original objects. Read more…
You know those Photoshopped optical illusions that involve combining two photos of a person’s face — one straight on and one looking to the side — into a single bizarre shot? Quebec, Canada-based photographer Ulric Collette put a spin on that concept with his new portrait series titled “Facade.” Instead of using negative space and two completely different angles, Collette had his subjects turn their heads slightly to the side for the second shot, and then merged the two photos together by aligning one eye from each shot. Read more…
Here’s an old-ish video that’s been making the rounds again lately (viral videos are like viruses — they don’t go away very easily). Titled “Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency,” it shows what can happen when your camera is synchronized with the RPM of a helicopter’s rotor blades. The resulting footage makes the helicopter look as though it’s just floating in the air! Read more…
Last year, we shared an interesting video showing a blank white room that could be completely transformed in an instant using 3D projections beamed from two projectors overhead. The music video above, created filmmaker Filip Sterckx for the song “Sweater” by Willow, takes the idea of 3D projections in a blank room to a new level. Although it looks like the actor visits all kinds of crazy locations, everything is actually happening inside a small “room” consisting of one white floor and two white walls. The surfaces serve as canvases for imagery beamed from three $1,000 Panasonic PT-LB90 projectors. A moving treadmill on the ground adds to the effect.
It looks like Sterckx chose to go with CGI for the projected imagery, but imagine what this could look like if done with photos and videos of real locations. The next time you need to do a shoot in some exotic location, just buy a few projectors instead of a plane ticket!
The folks at Mexican agency Golpeavisa were recently tasked with creating a portrait of world-renowned Danish chef René Redzepi for a cover of ClasePremier magazine. Instead of doing a digital illustration like they’ve done before, they decided to flex their creative muscles and try their hand at making a portrait out of food using perspective photography. After a good deal of planning and setting up, the cover above is what resulted. Read more…
Photographer Carl Kleiner, the man behind IKEA’s beautiful baking recipe and kitchen item photographs, has a delightful new series of images that features things neatly arranged in mid-air instead of on a table. More specifically, each of the shots uses simply trickery to make household objects look like they’re floating in a blue room. Read more…
