diorama

Hungarian photographer Benedek Lampert has shot a beautiful series of photos paying homage to the iconic science fiction movie Back to the Future. What's neat is that each of the images was created with a LEGO DeLorean car and simple practical effects.

A couple of months ago, photographer and YouTuber Chris Hau stumbled across the miniature world photography of Erin Sullivan and was absolutely blown away. So he decided to try out this style for himself and show you exactly what you need to do to start capturing these miniature worlds at home.

I love the theme of science fiction, so I always have these ideas about flying UFOs and houses in the middle of nowhere that aliens show an interest in as they try to take over a new planet.

In Thailand, there's a wedding photography business that's attracting quite a bit of attention. It's called คนตัวเล็ก, which literally translates to "Small Person." The photographer's specialty is making couples look like miniature figures living in a giant world.

"Put Your Head Into Gallery," is an unusual interactive art project by Tbilisi, Georgia-based artist Tezi Gabunia. After creating realistic small-scale models of famous rooms in art galleries, Gabunia and his collaborators put them on display and invited visitors to his exhibition to pose with their heads inside the tiny spaces. The resulting photos show giant heads peering into well-known art galleries.

Here's a fascinating video about how photographer Michael Paul Smith creates and photographs Elgin Park, a 20th century town created through miniature 1/24th-scale models. Smith creates incredibly realistic photos by capturing the detailed dioramas with an ordinary compact camera, and his images have gone viral in recent years on the Internet (the project has over 70 million views on Flickr).

Tokyo-based artist Satoshi Araki is a man whose eye for the detail is immediately evident when you look at his dioramas... if you can even tell they're dioramas, that is.

For each miniature, Araki painstakingly plans out the layout of his trashed and scattered street scenes and photographs in such a way that, often, you'd be hard-pressed to identify them as dioramas at all..

For the past three and a half years, Japanese artist Tanaka Tatsuya's daily to-do list has included creating and photographing a miniature diorama. Part of his project Miniature Calendar, you can follow his little miniature figurines through all manner of creative adventures, starting in April of 2011 and still ongoing today.

In fact, the diorama for today, dubbed Deforestation, has already gone live.

Just look at the above photo. It looks like an extremely well-lit photo of an abandoned wasteland in the middle of some old town, doesn't it? Well, while that might be what it's depicting, that isn't what it is. It's cardboard. All of it.

Titled Cardboard Cities, this collaboration between set-designer Luke Aan de Wiel and photographer Andy Rudak is sure to make some jaws hit the floor.

For the photo above, titled "Dead Little Things," I wanted to create a scene out of strictly dollhouse supplies. Inspired by many of the weather events that have occurred in recent years: tornados in Joplin and Oklahoma City, Hurricane Sandy and even Katrina.

I was struck by the indelible photos of homes destroyed in various ways that almost make them look fake, a physical upending of one's life as defined by materialistic possessions.

Model maker/collector and photographer Michael Paul Smith is a master at recreating incredibly accurate outdoor scenes using his extensive die-cast model car collection and forced perspective.

Mixing up miniature cars, detail items and buildings into a scene whose backdrop is the real world, he shoots the gorgeous miniature vistas of the town he has created and named "Elgin Park" -- and he does it all with a cheap point-and-shoot.

What you see above is a "map" of Paris created by collaging thousands of photographs shot in the city. It's just one of the amazing pieces in Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino's Diorama Map project. The series contains maps of many of the world's most famous cities, and all of them are photographed and collaged by hand.

Some photographers have made names for themselves by creating and photographing extremely detailed dioramas: miniature tabletop scenes that are so realistic that viewers often mistake them for the real world. Belgian photographers Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux of 354 Photographers have put an interesting spin on the diorama photo concept by Photoshopping real people into their miniature scenes. The series is titled "Box".

We first featured photographer Matthew Albanese's Strange Worlds project back in 2010, not too long after the project's inception. His amazing images appear to show beautiful outdoor scenes, but were actually shot on a tabletop in his studio. He creates extremely detailed dioramas that take months to complete, and then uses various photographic techniques to make the scene look like the real world. It's like the opposite of using tilt-shift lenses to turn the world into a miniature model.

Seattle-based photographer Bill Finger creates and photographs amazingly realistic small scale dioramas showing various imaginary locations. The things contained in each miniature model are 1/6th to 1/12th the size of their real world counterparts. Finger builds each of the dioramas while looking through his camera's viewfinder, which ensures that everything he constructs conforms nicely to the perspective limits of his lens.

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!

Photographer Kim Keever creates large scale landscape photographs using miniature dioramas. He first creates the topographies inside a 200-gallon tank, and then fills it with water. He then uses various lights, pigments, and backdrops to bring the scenes to life for his large-format camera to capture.