surreal

Photographer Rory White's Rorshak Tape Transfer Series might look like some kind of surreal digital art, but the images were actually created without Photoshop. White shot portraits of his subjects, printed them out, and invited the subjects to paint, tear, and alter the prints. He then covered the image with packing tape, dropped it in hot water, and peeled off the paper on the back (like a Polaroid emulsion transfer). The semi-transparent image would then be hung from a stand, and the subject rephotographed while standing behind it.

"The Collective Snapshot" is a series by Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa (previously featured here) that consists of abstract images of famous landmarks created by blending together dozens of ordinary snapshots. His goal is to "create an abstraction of the places we've been an the things we've seen", and to create images that are both familiar and foreign at the same time.

Photographer Tim Chao created this beautiful photo of a dark figure standing over …

For her project titled Mirrors, Swedish photographer Ilar Gunilla Persson photographed various landscapes with giant mirrors placed in them. The mirrors give the scenes an surreal and artificial look, but all the shots were captured on film.

Photographer Bjoern Ewers directed this creative advertising campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra that shows beautiful views of the insides of various instruments. Shot using a macro lens, each one looks more like a giant music hall than a musical instrument.

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.

Photographer Rachel Hulin has a cute project titled The Flying Series that consists of photos of her infant son Henry flying.

Here's an awesome TED lecture in which digital artist Erik Johansson discusses creating realistic "photographs" of impossible scenes.

Erik Johansson creates realistic photos of impossible scenes -- capturing ideas, not moments. In this witty how-to, the Photoshop wizard describes the principles he uses to make these fantastical scenarios come to life, while keeping them visually plausible.

City Silhouettes is a beautiful project by Beijing-based photographer Jasper James that consists of portraits of city dwellers blended with the cityscapes in the background. There's no Photoshop trickery involved -- James uses reflections seen in glass and the images are composed entirely in-camera.

French artist Philippe Ramette captures surreal self-portraits in which he appears to be defying gravity. Rather than use digital trickery, Ramette -- who started his career as a sculptor -- builds metal support structures that allow him to stand or sit at impossible angles.

Reflections is a series of photographs by New York-based fine art photographer Ira Fox. Shot through the reflections seen in puddles on their ground, they show shadows of passers-by as they cross paths with Fox on a rainy day.

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.

For his project titled "Unrealistic Scenes", photographer Nathan Spotts composited his own landscape photographs with digital artwork of planets floating in the starry night sky.

I've always been captivated by the beauty of our world, and often dream of the things that lay just beyond what we can see. I wanted to create images of scenes that are not-quite real, but that almost could be.

The photographs in Nadav Bagim's project "WonderLand" might look like paintings or computer generated images, but they're actually real photographs captured at home using ordinary objects and creative artificial lighting. His tools and props include things like vegetables, plastic bags, flowers, and leaves, and he captures the images using a Canon 60D and 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Getting his "subjects" into the positions and poses he wants requires countless hours of patient encouraging.

Upon first glance, photographer Frank Kunert's photographs may look like they show pretty ordinary places. Look a little closer, however, and you'll start to notice that each one has something wrong about it, and that none of the scenes would actually exist in the real world. They're actually miniature scenes that are meticulously built by hand!

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.

New York-based artist Matt Wisniewski creates digital collages by blending fashion and nature photographs together into surreal images. The images remind us of photographer Dan Mountford's double exposure photographs, except Wisniewski uses digital manipulation rather than in-camera trickery.

This photograph by Jimmay Bones, titled “Eye …

Photographer Dennis Calvert creates amazing light painting portraits that look more like video game illustrations than photographs.

"Pavement Trees" is a series of photographs by wedding photographer Ingrid Nelson that captures a surreal glimpse of the world through puddles in a parking lot.

Flickr user Paul Little creates surreal images he calls "HDR Mixes" by combining different photographs with the help of HDR software. While you're normally supposed to feed the program multiple versions of the same photo (which are bracketed), with HDR Mixes you use two photos of the same scene and a third that's completely unrelated.

"Double Exposure" is a series of surreal photos by Dan Mountford creating by exposing single frames of film twice. While they look like photo-manipulations done with fancy image editing programs, Mountford relies on fancy camerawork for the images, leaving only the color additions/modifications to post-processing.

For her series entitled "Photo Opportunities", photographer Corinne Vionnet gathered hundreds of photographs taken by tourists at famous locations and combined them by layering them together, creating surreal views of places we've all seen before in photographs.

Patryk Kizny created this short HDR time-lapse film titled "The Chapel" that explores the inside of a Protestant chapel located in Zeliszów, Poland built in 1797. The HDR imagery gives the video a eerily beautiful surreal look that makes the video look like it came from a video game.

This surreal video might seem like some sort of abstract, computer-generated art project at first glance, but take a …

Foodscapes is a series by photographer Carl Warner in which he creates beautiful surreal landscapes using various foods. Warner starts by visualizing and sketching his ideas, which are then built on a large table in his studio with the help of his team. Large blocks of polystyrene are carved and covered with ingredients in order to make the hills seen in his photos, while shallow tanks are used to create lakes, rivers, and seas. Photographs for three different layers (foreground, middle ground, and background) are captured separately and then combined in post.

Totems is a series by photographer Alain Delorme that imagines an augmented reality of Chinese migrant workers in Shanghai transporting monstrous shipments from place to place using bicycles. Delorme captured 6,000 photographs over the course of 44 days while biking around Shanghai, and then created these photo-manipulations using Photoshop.

Mattijn Franssen is an artist based in the Netherlands who combines his photographs into beautiful and surreal photomontages.

German photographer Carolin Wanitzek's Die Grenze (The Border) project explores the intersection of dreams and reality.

Ronen Goldman is a photographer based in Tel Aviv, Israel who specializes in surreal “dream” photography: …

Here's a set of photographs by Daniela Edburg, who creates surreal scenes and landscapes around the theme of knitting.