animals

"Out of the Wild: Zoo Portraits" is a project by photographer Boza Ivanovic, who created artistic low-key portraits of animals during visits to a local zoo.

When photographer Ashraful Arefin's bunny had babies recently, he decided to document the growth of the new family members through a series of daily photos. Over the course of 24 days, Arefin shot 16 beautiful portraits of the siblings, named Totoro and Chihiro, starting from when they were 6 days old.

Today is the day that many people recognize as Star Wars Day ("May the fourth be with you"). To celebrate the occasion, members of the costuming group in Canada known as the 501st Legion: Capital City Garrison decided to volunteer some time for a special photo shoot to help get homeless animals adopted.

For the past two years, Canadian photographer Nicolas Dory has documented the annual migration of the country's only free-range herd of reindeer, which consists of about 3,000 animals.

Photographer Guinnevere Shuster of the Humane Society of Utah came up with a fantastic idea for helping dogs get adopted: the doggy photo booth. Her photos of the dogs do a much better job at capturing their personalities than standard snapshots, and the results have been impressive: 93.26% of the dogs are now finding new homes.

Capturing clear and up-close photos of a mountain lion family is difficult for a photographer to do, and that's where remote cameras can come in and help. The National Park Service recently captured a beautiful set of photos in the Santa Monica Mountains showing a mother and two kittens.

Photos of a frog riding a beetle have been flooding the Internet over the past month. Think it looks cute and adorable? Reactions to the series of photos have been split between blind praise and outrage over the authenticity of the photo-story and welfare of the subjects. So, did this scene really occur naturally as claimed? We don't think so, and here's why.

Russian photographer Vadim Trunov recently captured a series of photographs showing wild squirrels doing human things. In the snow covered forests outside the city of Voronezh in western Russia, Trunov set out some props and waited with his camera as a pair of squirrels entered his makeshift set.

Bristol, England-based photographer Peter Thorpe has a special treat for his clients every holiday season. For the past 20 years, he has sent hilarious promo Christmas cards featuring his dogs as different animals in elaborate handmade scenes.

As Movember, or No Shave November, or whatever you're calling this month of bearded and mustached madness and charity, comes to a close, we're sharing perhaps the most appropriate photo series we could find.

A set of three images captured for the razor brand Schick by photographer Troy Goodall in collaboration with animal photographer Stephen Stewart, Free Your Skin features quintessential hipsters showing off beards made of... fuzzy animals.

Alicja Zmyslowska is a Polish photographer with a passion and a gift for capturing puppies... lots and lots of puppies. From family portraits of pooches and their siblings to sports photos of dogs running through courses, she photographs anything and everything that has to do with man’s best friend, and manages to make her photos stand out from the plethora of dog imagery out there.

Photoshop artist and photographer Sarah DeRemer likes animals, but she doesn't like them just the way they are. Sure, a seal is cute... and a pug is cute... but why settle on that when your Photoshop skills will let you create what she has dubbed a 'Speal'?

DeRemer, for her part, never settles. And so, for her series of Hybrid Animals, she mixes together species that from opposite sides of the animal kingdom to create sometimes strange, sometimes cuddly, and sometimes terrifying (I'm looking at you... Shider) animals of her very own.

Photographer Manuela Kulpa has a portfolio full of gorgeous wildlife photographs. Unlike other wildlife photographers, however, she doesn't have the opportunity to travel to the natural environments of the animals she wishes to photograph. Instead of shooting in the African safari, she visits zoos.

African Souls is a series by Kulpa that attempts to capture the soul and beauty of African wildlife.

Chris Keeney, a San Diego-based photographer, enlisted the services of the most unlikely of photographers to capture the artwork for his latest book, PetCam. As the name suggests, the book uses a handful of animals from all over the globe to capture first-pet perspective photographs of their daily activities.

After a single moth that had invaded her home, Rhose Island-based animal photographer Traer Scott was inspired to create a photo series dedicated to this creature and other denizens of the darkness.

Thus was born the photo-series-turned-book, Nocturne: Creatures of the Night. In it, Scott comes face-to-face (or is it face-to-lens?) with some of the world’s most evasive animals who tend to live and hunt most under the cover of night.

Summertime is quickly turning into Autumn. Before we know it, the sunshine and green tones that surround us will transform into fiery hues, with plenty of rain and wind to follow. But that hasn’t stopped Polish photographer Izabela Urbaniak from attempting to eternalize the carefree nature of summer in a beautiful black-and-white photo series titled Summertime.

Polish husband and father-of-two Sebastian Łuczywo is a business advisor for his day job. But when he's not at work, he's capturing incredibly heartwarming portraits of his family and their animals.

With his rural home in Poland serving as a backdrop for these images, his photographs of his family -- including his two four-legged children -- seem to be a conglomeration of many styles, from surrealism to straight up candid. And it’s this unique blend of styles, along with the intimate touch, that takes his photographs to the next level.

There are times when you come across a collection of images that no written words or powerful images can describe on their own. Such is the case with the heartfelt series, Lifelines.

Inspired by past projects, photographer Norah Levine teamed up with audio guru Gabrielle Amster and Animal Trustees of Austin’s 4PAWS (For People and Animals Without Shelter) program to document and tell the story of the connection between the homeless and their beloved pets.

National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore has been capturing life across the globe for over 22 years. And it was these travels across our Blue Marble that lead him to take on a personal project that he hopes will bring awareness to a subject he’s held dear since he was a child.

Called Photo Ark, Sartore has teamed up with zoos and rescue facilities across the globe to document the last of some of the most endangered animals on our planet, and in the TEDx talk above, he tells you all about this moving endeavor.

If you thought cat photos were something new, you’d not only be greatly mistaken, you'd be stepping all over the life's work of one Mr. Harry Whittier Frees.

Born in 1879, this American photographer made his fortune taking photographs of cute kittens and puppies dressed up in human clothes and posed in human environments, which he then turned into postcards, calendars and even children’s books.

If you care about endangered animals that are hunted for their parts, here's something important you should keep in mind: make sure you scrub the GPS data on the images prior to sharing them online. Poachers have reportedly been turning to geotagged photos on social networks in order to find out where they can make their next kill.

Behold the work of South Carolina-based photographer Vincent J Musi and one of the most unusual photo sets you're likely to run across today. As part of an April cover story for National Geographic on “exotic” pet owners, Musi went out and photographed the owners of an animal most of us wouldn't dare bringing into our homes: skunks.

The metro in almost any city can be a metaphorical zoo at times. But the Animetro series by photographers Clarisse Rebotier and Thomas Subtil takes that concept to a much more literal place.

Budapest-based photographer Sarolta Bán is on a mission to shed a positive light on all shelter animals by creating images that will capture the eyes -- and hearts -- of anyone considering the pups for adoption.

It took photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur 13 years to compile the photography found in her book We Animals, but it will take only moments for your emotions to run the gamut between deeply moved and sickened while scrolling through her work.

Street photography is usually reserved for humans, while animals are typically photographed out in nature, but Giacomo Brunelli's series The Animals and The Animals II turn that dynamic on its head. The photographs in these two series bring the stark, black-and-white and often invasive nature of classic street photography into to the animal kingdom with fascinating results.

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.

I'm all for a little monkey business when it comes to taking photos and playing around with your gear, but this guy here might've taken it a bit too far...

Arie van't Riet isn't your typical photographer. In fact, he's not a photographer at all. Riet is a Dutch physicist-artist who has a knack for creating stunning colored X-ray images of nature that he calls 'Bioramas.'

Russian photographer Elena Shumilova only got into photography in early 2012, when she acquired her first camera. But if you were to look through her Flickr and 500px profiles, you would swear she had been doing it for much, much longer.

A couple of days ago we shared a video/story that has since gone viral across the Internet. The video showed photographer James York getting into a bit of a headbutting match with a young bull elk who took an interest in his gear before getting aggressive.

Today we've found out that the elk in question has since been put down by Rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, leaving much of the internet and York himself saddened and speechless.

Here's something really cool and creative for you to watch as you're getting ready for TGIF. The video above, a commercial for Japanese paper company Nepia, is one of the more inventive and probably difficult to create stop motion animations we've run across.

You may think the worst offenses on Instagram are aesthetic, but animal-rights activists are complaining that the service helps users sell live animals that end up slaughtered for food or religious sacrifices.

Certainly there's ample artistic precedent for including a dead animal or two in a still-life. Old Master paintings are rife with images of freshly killed ducks, bunnies and fish awaiting a trip to the dinner table.

Photographer (and certified taxidermist) Kimberly Witham slyly subverts that tradition with "Domestic Arrangements," a series of still-life photographs that combine modern kitchenware and other items of domestic life with birds, squirrels and other animals retrieved from the roadside. All items come from within a short radius around Witham's New Jersey home.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but in the case of Suren Manvelyan's macro photography, it's just in the eye. After his extreme close-up photos of both human and animal eyes went viral one right after the other, Manvelyan decided to continue seeking out more beauty in the eyes of animals by releasing a part two to the amazing series we shared with you back in 2011.

Photographer Paul Nelson spends the majority of his time shooting commercial work for big name clients like MAC Cosmetics or Target. But when the flow of work began to slow to a trickle over the past couple of years, he embarked on a personal project that he hoped would remind him why he loved photography.

Thus was born Aviary. Shot in partnership with Springbook Nature Center, the photo series captures beautiful studio-style portraits of birds taking flight as they're released back into the wild.

When people take pictures of captive animals in zoos, oftentimes their goal is to shoot the images in a way that makes the animals appear to be in the wild. Photographer Daniel Zakharov does no such thing. Rather than make the glass, bars, and concrete disappear off to the sides of the frame, Zakharov intentionally captures the fact that the animals are found in unnatural environments.

It's no secret that wild animals can be immensely difficult to photograph. Now imagine taking photographers of large wild animals in a studio-like setting. It's just what photographer Joel Sartore has managed to capture in his work for The Photo Ark project. The project aims to document endangered species (with over 2650 photographed to date), in order to raise awareness of the fact these creatures may soon be gone.

Some photographers make a name for themselves by creating portraits of children, while others create similar images of wild animals. Photographer Robin Schwartz does both -- at the same time.

Since 2002, Schwartz has been photographing her daughter Amelia while the young girl interacts with all kinds of creatures in the animal kingdom. Subjects have included everything from dogs and cats to monkeys, kangaroos, and elephants.

Need a pick-me-up? Check out the project "Your Pet and You" by photographer Tobias Lang of Hamburg, Germany. The series is composed of beautiful portraits of all kinds of pets and their loving owners.