stunning

The Audubon Society has officially announced the winners of their 7th annual Photography Awards, and even though it might help, you absolutely don't have to be a bird photography lover to appreciate this stunning imagery.

We've seen people do some cool things using NASA's beautiful images of Earth captured from the International Space Station (ISS). But Armand Dijcks' 4K space cinemagraphs might just take the zen-like cake.

Sigh. There's nothing like a photo straight from the great Hubble Space Telescope to put our megapixel squabbling and ultra-fast frame rate comparisons in perspective. For the telescope's 26th birthday on April 24th, the Hubble engineers have released a spectacular photo of "an enormous bubble being blown into space by a super-hot, massive star."

Artist and photographer Fabian Oefner is constantly working out new and interesting ways to create his art—whether it's splattering paint using a spinning drill bit or 'disintegrating' a car piece by piece. For his latest series 'Corona,' he turned his attention to petrol and achieved unexpectedly beautiful results.

Amateur photographer Carola Becker spent last Autumn photographing hundreds of leaves as they turned from green, to gold, to red, to brown. The resulting macro images, placed side by side, show "the beauty of diversity and imperfection."

We wouldn't be surprised if you've never heard of The Drakensberg before. It almost sounds like a region in Game of Thrones, but it's not: it's a mountain escarpment in South Africa, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the subject of the timelapse above, and probably the newest addition to your bucket list.

Conveying the grandeur of the Aurora Borealis is a serious challenge for a photographer. How are you supposed to capture the splendor of the event, give it a sense of scale, and somehow imbue that photograph with the emotion involved in actually witnessing the polar spirits for yourself?

There probably isn't a magical mixture of ingredients that will yield the ideal northern lights photograph, but the image above by photographer Max Rive is one of the closest we've seen, and he was kind enough to share the details behind it with us.

It's safe to say photographer Fabian Oefner -- whose many projects have never failed impress us -- has a thing for paint and physics.

Usually this means spraying, spinning and otherwise manipulating it to create colorful, abstract images against a black background. But when Ferrari asked him to capture the essence of their new California T in images, he took his signature art/science hybrid photography to new heights to get the job done.

Five months of work, 10,000 miles travelled, several tens of thousands of photographs taken... all of that to create a measly 5 minutes worth of footage. And yet, we would argue it was worth every minute, mile and press of the shutter (or intervalometer, as it were).

Simply titled Norway, the time-lapse above was captured by Morten Rustad of Rustad Media, and it took almost a half-year to get all of the shots he was looking for.

When you think of colorful ripples of 'stuff' in the sky, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. But while we'll never get sick of seeing those polar spirits dance, the phenomenon above gives Aurora photography a run for its money.

The 'Enter Pyongyang' flow-motion hyperlapse by JT Singh and Rob Whitworth debuted to the public two hours ago as of this writing, and already it has over 3,500 upvotes on Reddit and almost half a million views... ON VIMEO!

But one look at the hyperlapse and you'll understand why. Done in the same style as Whitworth's jaw-dropping Barcelona time-lapse this is these are the kind of status quo-shattering creations that genres like time-lapse ache for.

Five years and 74 truly stunning (not the click-bait type) photographs later, photographer Kirsty Mitchell and the heroine of her story, Katie, are both bidding a fond farewell to Wonderland and everything it has meant to them over the past half-decade.

Montreal-based photographer Benjamin Von Wong's underwater fantasy fashion shoot in a Bali shipwreck has quickly become the most popular project he has ever released. And even though he shared some behind the scenes details when the series first debuted, he's back today with a much more detailed look at how exactly these now-viral photos came to be.

It seems every news and blog site that I visit these days in inundating me with stunning photos. Sometimes the photos are labeled “Jaw-Dropping” or “Amazing” or “Incredible,” and to be honest, the pictures are usually great. But just as often they are just above-average pictures with exaggerated headlines.

What’s going on here? When did every picture become stunning? And if every picture is stunning, is any picture stunning really? I mean how stunned can I get?

When the term decisive moment gets thrown around, it's usually used to describe a photographic moment that is fleeting -- the kind of street photograph that's there one instant and gone the next.

But the moments captured in these stunning landscape images by photographer Guy Tal are also decisive, not for their fleeting nature, but their rarity.

Between the landscape photos, aurora photos, waterfall photos and time-lapse project, Iceland probably ranks among the top most photographed countries in the world. And while all indications are that it, without a doubt, deserves that title, finding a photo series that offers a fresh perspective on the country can be tough.

Tough, but not impossible, as the photo series Blue Iceland and Iceland by Andy Lee go to show.

Time-lapse photographer Ole Salomonsen once referred to the aurora borealis as the 'polar spirits,' and characterized their movements as dancing. Well, after seeing the image above by photographer John Chumack we're tempted to conclude that the polar spirits have pets that do some jumping while their parents dance.

Taken by a collection of three satellites orbiting Earth -- Landsat 7, ASTER, and MODIS -- the images above and below are part of an incredible collection of photos that were captured from space purely for their aesthetic beauty, rather than the usual scientific reasoning.

When your day involves eight million flower petals, you either have a VERY upset significant other, are St. Valentine himself, or you're doing a photo shoot for a set of Sony 4K Television ads. Fortunately for photographer Nick Meek, it was the last of those that led to these spectacular shots.

Photographer Alexia Sinclair recently completed one of the most beautiful and challenging photo shoots we've ever run across. The resulting collection, A Frozen Tale, is both a magical visual journey and a testament to the iron will and determination of one of the world's premier fine art photographers.

It's been a very news heavy couple of days, with much of the news being depressing or controversial at that. So if you need a break from all the Terry Richardsons and bankruptcies of the world, this stunning photo series by Czech photographer and graphic designer Lukas Holas should do the trick nicely.

What exactly makes one landscape, milky way time-lapse stand head and shoulders above the crowd? In a genre so over-saturated that some people have lost faith in it altogether, how do you create a time-lapse worth international attention?

We're not entirely sure, but we do know that the video above fits the bill just right -- it is, in a word, spectacular.

I don't think we've referred to a time-lapse as "dramatic" before, but when it comes to photographer Nicolaus Wegner's most recent time-lapse creation, no other word fits quite as well.

Captured over 14 months in the Wyoming wilderness, beautiful motion landscape sequences are juxtaposed masterfully with weather that he calls 'terrorific' -- terrifying, horrific and terrific all rolled into one -- in Wegner's Wyoming Wildscapes II.

Sometimes a great photograph takes months of planning and patience to capture. Other times, you simply have to be in the right place at the right time, with your camera in tow and enough expertise to properly frame and capture an amazing moment. The photo above falls into the second category.

Once in a while, you wake up in the morning with problems on your mind (or in your Inbox) and immediately start your day in a funk, focused on those problems. It's these mornings that benefit most from some perspective-giving imagery, and perhaps nothing puts our tiny Earth-bound problems in perspective quite as decisively as photographs taken from the International Space Station.

The time-lapses you see above and below will do just that, and do it in spectacular fashion as you fly over the Earth feeling a bit like Superman trying to turn back time (oh, I'm sorry, is my Nerd showing?)

The NASA spacecraft Cassini has sent back some incredible imagery of the planet Saturn over the years, much of which is being put to use to create an IMAX movie. But thanks to the work of a Croatian software developer, we now have a full, breath-taking, high-resolution photo mosaic of Saturn in all its glory as it looked on October 10th.

On June 7th, 2007, a Delta II rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California, carrying with it the Italian Thales Alenia-Space COSMO-SkyMed Satellite. And while the rocket was careening towards space, Staff Sgt. Eric Thompson (who was moving in the decidedly opposite direction) managed to snap this amazing photo.

Joe Capra of Scientifantastic is a Los Angeles-based time-lapse cinematographer, photographer and filmmaker who gets to travel around the world shooting beautiful footage of beautiful places. When you're done envying his job though, it's worth taking a look at some of what he's put together. Most recently, a gorgeous time-lapse tour of Rio de Janeiro and the Iguazù Falls.

Earlier this month, photographer Maciej Winiarczyk captured a rare and beautiful celestial light show. While shooting a time-lapse in Caithness, Scotland, he was treated to not one but two stunning natural phenomena when his camera captured noctilucent clouds and the aurora borealis at the same time.

One day, while looking at a glass of water, photographer, artist and architect Moses Hacmon realized that he could really see it. He wondered what water really looked like, and in particular what it looked like when it moved.

One nanoparticle photographic technique later, and he had his answers in the form of a breathtaking photo series dubbed Faces of Water.

Photographer Eric Hines has always wanted to travel to Iceland. So naturally, when the opportunity came up, he jumped at it. Seventeen days, four thousand miles driving and a lot of shutter actuations later, the gorgeous time-lapse above serves as proof that he made the trip.

In the past, we've shared a few creative ways to take your fireworks shots to the next level. Be it shooting hand-held long exposures for an abstract result or refocusing during a long-exposure, the results can be quite stunning.

The video above combines a couple of techniques we've shared before, making wonderful use of bokeh and the refocusing technique to create a mesmerizing minute of footage.

Niagara Falls is (or rather are) a sight to behold, and while capturing the falls from a boat or one of the overlooks is impressive enough, why not take to the air? That's what YouTube user questpact did, creating the video above using his DJI Phantom quad-copter and GoPro Hero 3.

Capturing the growth or bloom of a flower is a staple of time-lapse photography, and therefore, it can be a bit banal. But photographer Daniel Csobot has managed to put a macro flower time-lapse together that is both beautiful and captivating.

On November 18, 1933, aviator Jimmie Angel became the first American to catch a glimpse of the tallest waterfall in the world -- a natural wonder that would eventually be named for him. Four years later, he returned to Venezuela and Angel Falls, crash landing on top of one of the flat-topped mountains in the area and having to hike 11 days with little food or water to the nearest village.

Photographer Philip Lee Harvey wanted to see these places for himself, and so he followed in Angel's footsteps, photographing the breathtaking sights along the way. The behind-the-scenes video above shows you how that adventure went down.

For his latest time-lapse project, South African fine-art landscape photographer Joe Louw and his wife Jonelle took a week-long trip into the Karoo region of South Africa. Armed with two cameras, a Shukuma DOLLY and a Shukuma MINI, Louw emerged with some truly beautiful footage.

This time-lapse, shot by photographer Bevan Percival on New Zealand's North Island, has to be one of the most beautiful we've ever shared. Shot over the course of six months using a Canon 5D Mark II, various lenses, and a Dynamic Perception 6' Stage Zero motorized dolly, it will keep your eyes glued to the screen all five minutes and fifty-nine seconds.

It may be hard to believe, but all the amazing slow-motion clips you see in the video above were created using individual still photographs. Joe Fellows of London-based film production company Make Productions gathered photographs of wildlife and people from the WWF archives, and then Photoshopped and animated the images using parallax.

We've shared examples of stereographic projection (AKA "little planet") photography here before, but none quite like these. Sydney-based visual artist Catherine Nelson creates some of the most amazing "planets" we've seen by stitching together hundreds of individual photographs. Trained as a painter and having worked on feature films like Moulin Rouge and Harry Potter, she uses her visual effects expertise to combine the images in creative and surreal ways.