beautiful

70-200mm f/2.8 II at f/11, 170mm 1/15 seconds, ISO 100 It’s approaching 8pm and I’m sitting at the Chez Vrony, …

Mugshots aren't exactly known as the height of beautiful portrait photography, but 30-year-old felon Jeremy Meeks' mugshot is something else entirely. Within 24 hours of the photo being posted on the Stockton Police Department's Facebook, Meeks' glamour shot had received over 23,000 likes and nearly 6,000 comments... as of this writing those numbers are up to over 87,000 likes and over 11,300 comments.

It's safe to say this image has gone well and truly viral, turning Meeks into a meme and sparking everything from Photoshop spoofs to a 'Free Jeremy' Twitter campaign.

One of the standard cliché Instagram shots that gets ridiculed on occasion is the plane wing photographs, usually accompanied by some clouds or a sunrise or sunset. And while we agree that taking a photo out the window of your commercial airplane is tacky and overdone, the photo above by astrophotographer Alessandro Merga is a big fat beautiful exception.

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.

Diving into the latest exhibition from Vietnamese American fine arts photographer Dinh Q. Lê, Walley Films created this short doc to tell the story behind the beautiful art project Crossing the Farther Shore.

Consider this your GoPro video break for the week. So sit back, relax, put on the head phones and make sure the video is playing in HD, because this underwater footage shot by photographer Nana Trongratanawong is a real stunner.

Singapore-based artist Lim Zhi Wei, who goes by Limzy or @lovelimzy on Instagram, doesn't use your typical materials to create her mini masterpieces. Where others might use paint or, in the case of photographers, light, the artwork that she shares with her 50,000+ followers is created using flower petals, watercolors, food and random household objects.

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.

Time-lapse photographer Ole C. Salomonsen specializes in the northern lights. But before you skip over this post because you've seen about a billion more aurora time-lapses this month, we suggest you click play and give Ole's work a shot.

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.

Firefly photography isn't a novel concept. In fact, long-exposure images of these glowing creatures lighting up beautiful forest scenes have appeared on PetaPixel a couple of times before... we've even featured a tutorial on the subject. But photographer Vincent Brady's firefly time-lapse above IS novel.

It's novel, not because it's a time-lapse of fireflies (we're sure that's been done a time or two) but because he combined many different photographic techniques to create something truly breathtaking.

In November of 2012, we posted an article featuring impressionist-inspired photographs by photographer Matt Molloy that were created using a method called time stacking. The resulting images are quite beautiful, and in the tutorial above Molloy will run you through how to create them for yourself.

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.

There's nothing like a Hubble Space Telescope image to break up all of the law and stock photography-related news (and there has been a LOT in the last 24 hours). Then again, this video and image aren't the most peaceful NASA has ever released, given they show a galaxy tearing itself apart as it hurtles through a particularly harsh part of our universe.

Update: The original version of this post quoted a flight attendant in the intro, when it was in fact the author's girlfriend who made the remark that he was annoying people. This was an editorial mistake on our part, and has been fixed.

"The sound of your shutter clicking is annoying the people around you." said my girlfriend, sitting next to me. "I know," I replied "I don't care at the moment, I'm shooting some crazy unique footage!"

Last week I was lucky enough to shoot the world's first sunset hyperlapse sequence from an airplane, here's how I did it.

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.

Taken on February 19th (and available in high-resolution here) the satellite image above …

This is just plain beautiful, no matter which way you slice it. Using the magic of time-lapse photography and microscopy, Vyacheslav Ivanov captured the formation of those ice crystals we call snowflakes that caused so much grief in the northeastern US over the past several weeks.

In Sweden's Abisko National Park, 2014 has been something of a God-send for time-lapse photographers. In the first 32 nights of the year, the so-called 'polar spirits' have come out to dance 29 times! But even that couldn't have prepared photographer Chad Blakley for the spectacular light show he captured on February 1st.

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.

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.

Here is a good example why it is so important to work the scene to get the best results from …

Okay, this video doesn't necessarily have much to do with photography, but we could think of no better way to wake you up on a Monday morning than by sharing this gorgeous footage of creamer being poured into a cup of coffee at 2,000 frames per second.

It's getting harder and harder for photographers who shoot time-lapse to get our attention. You see, they're getting too darn good, and so gorgeous time-lapse after gorgeous time-lapse makes its way across our computer screens forcing us to be very picky.

That said, veteran time-lapse photographer Andrew Walker's recently released "Journey Part 1" time-lapse had no issue getting our approval, because it's absolutely, unequivocally breathtaking.

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?)

One of the most recent videos to go extremely viral over the past several days involves a behind the scenes look at how a portrait of Morgan Freeman came together... and when we say came together, we mean created from scratch on an iPad by finger-painting!

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.

Sometimes photo projects take days. Sometimes they take months. In photographer and filmmaker Gioacchino Petronicce's case, his project "PICTURES" took years. Three years and 80,000 photos that eventually turned into the elegant cinematic stop motion video you see above.

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.