Back in July, Polish landscape photographer Jakub Polomski spent two weeks traveling around Iceland and shooting aerial photographs with his DJI Phantom 3 Advanced camera drone. The resulting photographs are gorgeous.
You know those brilliant colors that appear when the sun is just rising or setting? While you may be lucky to see those colors for minutes in most parts of the world, in Iceland they can last for hours. Los Angeles-based photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee spent two weeks in Iceland from late June through early July, when the sun sets after midnight. He was able to capture some remarkable views of Iceland's landscapes glowing under the midnight sun.
The result of his trip was the 4-minute, 4K time-lapse video above, titled "Odyssey."
The Ijen group of volcanoes in East Java, Indonesia, features a popular tourist destination called the Blue Fire Crater. Molten sulfur and sulfuric gas emerge from cracks in the crater, causing large blue flames and streams of glowing blue "lava."
Chicago-based photographer Reuben Wu visited the volcano last month, capturing both its majesty from afar and its mesmerizing blue flows from up close.
CBS Evening News just aired this short segment on the work of photographer Rick Guidotti, who has spent years shooting portraits of people with genetic conditions for his non-profit, Positive Exposure. As we first shared back in 2013, Guidotti is using his background as a major fashion photographer to change the way people see and think about beauty.
Last year, journalist Esther Honig published a viral series of images showing how photo retouchers in 27 countries around the world "enhanced" a portrait of her according to their cultural preferences. Inspired by that project, the UK medical website Superdrug Online Doctor just published a similar experiment that explores body image.
Los Angeles-based photographer and retoucher Julia Kuzmenko McKim just released this 1-minute time-lapse …
For the past few wildfire seasons in Southern California, Los Angeles-based photographer Stuart Palley has taken his camera out into the hills to document the blazes at night. His long-exposure photographs show both the fury and the beauty of the fires. The resulting collection of images is now part of a series titled Terra Flamma.
Photographer Steve Axford lives in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales, Australia, where he has spent a considerable amount of time exploring the rainforest with his camera in hand. Among his favorite subjects are Australian fungi, which come in countless shapes, sizes, colors, and textures -- diversity that Axford captures in his photos.
"Beauty in Blood" is an ongoing project by Denver-based artist Jen Lewis that consists of abstract macro photographs of Lewis' own menstrual blood.
Want to see how the world's biggest fashion and beauty magazines retouch their photos? Here's a set of time-lapse videos that show many hours of retouching compressed into a matter of minutes.
Personal trainer Cassey Ho is a YouTube star with an exercise channel boasting more than 2.1 million subscribers. In recent days, however, she has seen an increase in the number of negative comments by people criticizing her appearance. In order to express what she felt in reading those messages, Ho came up with the idea of creating a video in which she Photoshops herself to create "the perfect body" based on what commenters want her to look like.
Could machines be trained to tell the difference between a beautiful portrait photo and a not-so-pleasing one? Beauty is pretty subjective, but scientists are trying to boil down the common properties of beautiful digital portrait photos so that a computer can be trained to spot them. Along the way, they're revealing interesting new things about what people look for in portraits.
Romanian photographer Noroc Mihaela is on a mission to photograph women from every single country on Earth in order to show that beauty is found everywhere. Her project is titled "The Atlas of Beauty."
Update: We have removed the photos after receiving a takedown request from the photographer.
Less than a week after an unretouched photo of Cindy Crawford leaked onto the Web, a set of untouched photos from an ad shoot featuring Beyonce has emerged as well. Just like with the Crawford photo, the new images are causing quite a discussion online about the role Photoshop has in creating perfection for advertisements.
An unretouched photograph of Cindy Crawford has leaked onto the Web, causing a fresh new wave of discussion and debate about Photoshop and what women's bodies really look like.
In Japan, purikura refers to a photo booth in which you can pose for a photo with friends and decorate the portraits before receiving little printed versions.
One interesting thing that sets many of these machines apart from their Western world counterparts is the fact that they will quietly do beauty retouching on photos in an attempt to fix subjects' facial "flaws."
Nicky Bay is a Singapore-based photographer who captures the beauty and diversity of insects in Singapore's rainforests through macro photography. He made 46 trips out into the wild in 2014, capturing tens of thousands of photographs and sharing thousands of photos online.
Time-lapse photographer Chris Field spent 107 days photographing carnivorous plants with two cameras. What resulted is this fascinating look at the beauty of plants that survive by trapping and consuming insects.
It seems as though each decade is defined by a handful of trends, fashion and otherwise, that permanently seal …
The most poignant revelations often come at the most unlikely of times. That's what happen to photographer Elly Heise, who created the touching project #DaughterDoesMyMakeup, a series of portraits of mothers sporting makeup their young daughters did for them.
How much weight loss can Photoshop do? As you’ll see in the video above, the answer is “a whole …
We received a tip today from a reader who asked us to take a look at the official portraits for the Miss World Philippines 2014 candidates. The tipster had harsh things to say about the images, saying the creator, "must've been bored or high when he post-processed these photos."
Remember the “Dove Real Beauty Sketches” advertisement? It was the ad that brought in various women, and then had those women and a stranger they had just met describe them to a forensic artists. This, in the end, showed the original participants that they were far more beautiful than they saw themselves.
It was an admirable advertisement that went viral, but according to a series of studies performed last year by psychological researchers Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Erin Whitchurch of the University of Virginia, the Dove campaign might just have it backwards. In other words: they found that we actually think we're MORE attractive than we really are.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if journalist Esther Honig has proven anything with her fascinating Photoshop project Before & After, it's that whoever 'they' are (it turns out, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford) is right.
Singapore-based photographer Ernest Goh, known best for his incredible work with animals, has just recently put another book out. This time, he's documenting the world of Chicken Beauty Pageants. Yes, Chicken Beauty Pageants. They exist... I guess.
Titled Cocks: The Chicken Book (you have no idea how difficult it is not to make jokes at this point...) this collection of work explores the beauty of some of the most debonaire fowl you have ever seen.
Here's an interesting video that offers a perspective we don't often get on the whole "anti-Photoshop," "what really is 'Beauty'" debate. In this short interview, former supermodel Paulina Porizkova gives her take on an industry she left behind in the mid-nineties.
New York-based photographer Alex John Beck began his series Both Sides Of in order to explore two beliefs. First, that perfectly symmetrical faces are the most beautiful. And second, that one face is representative of one character.
The final photographs, displayed as pairs of symmetrical portraits that show what the subject would look like if you simply mirrored their left or right sides, seem to indicate that neither of these beliefs holds true.
A few weeks ago, we shared a video by photographer Karl Taylor that gave you a behind the scenes look at what a day-long fashion shoot in his studio was like. And even though a few of our readers poked fun at the video's obvious product placement, a lot of people learned a thing or two and came back with followup questions regarding the light modifiers that Taylor was using throughout the day.
Fortunately for us, Taylor was listening, and has produced this very informative follow-up video in which he discusses the differences between his go-to modifiers, complete with side-by-side comparisons.
If your advertising campaign's goal is to redefine beauty and help High School girls accept and even embrace the flaws so studiously eliminated on magazine covers, you've got an uphill battle ahead of you. But Dove is fighting (and maybe even winning) that battle, and one of the ways they're doing it is by putting the selfie to more empowering use.
In June and July of this year, record temperatures and dry conditions in Colorado led to massive wildfires that destroyed hundreds of structures and the loss of 2 lives. The fires were so big that the smoke plumes could clearly be seen from space.
College Station, Texas-based filmmaker and photographer Matt Johnson created the time-lapse video above that captures both the beauty of Colorado's landscapes and the power of the recent forest fires.
Dove Canada is getting serious about promoting Real Beauty by going after art directors, graphic designers and photo retouchers -- basically anyone who distorts body image in print. In order to fight those who they feel create an unrealistic representation of what the body actually looks like, they created a "Beautify" action that can be downloaded for free from popular editing sites. The action appears to add a "glowing skin" effect when in reality, it reverts the image back to its original, unretouched state, thus driving home Dove's philosophy that "Real Beauty Isn't Retouched."
I don't know about you, but if I downloaded a skin enhancing action only to find it reverted my image back to the unretouched state, I'd be throwing out all my Dove products in protest.
I recently had an unusual experience. I was standing in a department store aimlessly browsing some shiny shelving that held many glittery bottles with promises of youth and perfect beauty. In the process of being pseudo hypnotized by the lovely array of bright colors, I heard a small feminine voice pipe up in the aisle behind me.
She was fawning over the stunning portraits of celebrity beauties that held small spaces, conveniently placed right above eye level. She kept saying how perfect and beautiful they all were, and you could hear a kind of wistful tone to her phrases. The kind of tone that says “I wish that were me”. After a few moments of hearing her adoration, I couldn’t keep quiet.
Voted "The Most Brilliant Artist of the Netherlands" in 2009, Dutch artist Diet Wiegman is a master of his craft. But of all the amazing creations he has to his name, his work with light and shadow is most breathtaking. Using garbage, pieces of glass and other rubble, he creates a sculpture that, with the help of a light source, projects a beautiful image onto a wall.
In October of 2012, LA-based photographer Sabine Pearlman found herself ensconced in a Swiss WWII bunker photographing 900 different "specimens" of cross sectioned ammunition. Her resulting photo series, AMMO, shows the beauty and craftsmanship that went into creating these destructive little pieces of engineering.
For many years, Rick Guidotti was a jet-setting fashion photographer. When he stepped into the studio in Milan, Paris or New York, he was instantly in charge of taking a model -- already an example of what we as a society deem is beautiful -- and capturing his or her best side.
But fifteen years ago, while he was doing research for a shoot he had considered doing featuring a woman with albinism, he was taken aback by the in-humane photos he found in medical textbooks. Speaking with genetic counselors, he found out that many will cover up the photos on the informational pamphlets they give parents when delivering a diagnosis.
A while back, PetaPixel posted some features about image averaging and faces. Richard Prince created a composite portrait of the 57 faces of girlfriends on Seinfeld. This led to Pat David exploring the averaging of faces with Martin Schoeller’s portraits of celebrities.
I’ve long been interested in image averaging as well; as a measure of central tendency, I like that image averaging can highlight similarities and differences across an array of seemingly equivalent images.
A recent Washington Post article has drawn attention to a new trend that is arising among young girls on Instagram; a trend that has both parents and child safety advocates worried. The trend is Instagram beauty pageants, in which young girls submit pictures of themselves using hashtags like #beautycontest or #rateme, and subject themselves to the praise and/or ridicule of their many million Instagram peers.
The 2013 Major League Baseball season kicked off this past weekend to the delight of fans of the sport across the US and across the world. Photographer Don Hamerman hasn't attended a ball game in over a decade, but he has a photo project that baseball enthusiasts may find quite interesting. It's a series titled Baseballs that shows off the beauty and diversity of found baseballs that were discarded after their usefulness was gone.
Skin care company Dove is speaking out on the issue of "fake beauty" being promoted in photographs through Photoshopping. Rather than address the issue directly at first, the company decided to speak out directly to those responsible for "fake" images by doing some clever guerrilla marketing. It essentially pranked retouchers through the Web by releasing a fake Photoshop beauty Action that undoes manipulation rather than creates it.
The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of daguerreotype photographs captured over the past two centuries. In addition to browsing the technically perfect ones that document history and people, it's also interesting to look at metal plates that are flawed.