Have you ever stared up at clouds and tried to see shapes in the formations? Photographer Lân Nguyen channels that energy into images that mix silhouettes with colorful cloud-dotted skyscapes to create dreamy scenes.
Photographer and cinematographer Jeff Hutchens recently filmed a pair of dancers using a thermal camera. What resulted is this ethereal short film titled "X, Y" (Note: certain parts may not be work-friendly).
These days I spend most of my time living and traveling between Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, and Finland, exploring and researching the global analog photography scene as best I can. I do this for my own personal endeavors such as my store, Cameraville.co, as well as my continuing journey with Camerarescue.org (formerly Cameraventures), headed by Juho Leppänen, which I will get into a bit later.
Photographer Neal Grundy knows how to mix multiple elements to create stunning abstract work, and his recent personal project titled simply Flowers and Paint is just that. By mixing two still life staples together, he creates something eerily beautiful.
When Peter Liepke set out to create his series Above & Beyond, he wanted to capture the feeling of having just move to New York City. The dream-like feeling of arriving in NYC for the first time and being swept away by the environment.
But where others might use a certain photographic technique to do this, Liepke achieves this ethereal feeling instead through platinum/palladium and gum bichromate processing.
Lisa Holloway might be a super-human. Until we get her near some kryptonite, we can't be sure, but the self-taught photographer somehow manages to take care of 10 children while simultaneously running a successful photography business.
All the while, she's stacking her portfolio full of gorgeous natural light portraits of newborns, babies, children, seniors and families.
Most of us baby our film, making sure it's kept at the right temperature so that it produces the best possible photos when we finally do use it. Photographer Brigette Bloom takes a different approach: she pees on hers... seriously.
For her series Float On, the Hawaii-based photog produced ethereal imagery by soaking the film in a cup of her own pee before she ever went out to shoot it.
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.
Long exposure photography like UK photographer Darren Moore's is the polar opposite of the super fast, super sensitive in low light kind of photography that gets most of the attention these days. It's time-consuming and difficult, but the unearthly quality of the images that Moore produces make dealing with those challenges well worth it.
Mirroring your time-lapse footage can yield a trippy, ethereal quality to an otherwise standard video. Riding on the Japanese monorail, for example, is nothing particularly special. Creating a hyperlapse of the experience, while cool, probably won't stand out.
A few users, however, have come up with some interesting takes on a monorail hyperlapse by mirroring the footage and taking you on a much stranger journey.
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde's photos of clouds hanging mysteriously in indoor locations have earned him a good bit of popularity. Created by using a smoke machine, precise atmospheric conditions and dramatic lighting, his Nimbus photos juxtapose the indoor and outdoor worlds.
In the short documentary video above, Smilde sat down with Avant/Garde Diaries and discussed his work, lending us some perspective on why he creates these photos and where he finds inspiration.
Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!
Self-taught photographer Alexander Deschaumes only started making photos back in 2003, but his dedication to the craft and his thirst for jaw-dropping landscapes have brought him a long way since then. Deschaumes braves extreme weather and hazardous landforms, going to locations that many landscape photographers would never dare venture, all for the sake of his images. The 2-minute video above offers a look into his world of extreme landscape photography.
David Talley is a 19-year-old fine art photographer who has attracted a sizable following on Flickr through his dreamlike portraits and self-portraits. He often spends a good deal of time and energy setting up his shots. For the photograph above, Talley and his buddy hauled a huge door nearly a mile to the beach.
Take a look at the portfolio of Washington D.C.-based photographer Cade Martin, and you'll feel like you're looking at movie stills from an upcoming live action Alice and Wonderland film. His beautiful, dreamlike photographs have themes of grace, beauty, repetition, and light.
If you want to capture photographs or videos of otherworldly environments without using any computer generated imagery, one way is to create miniature worlds in your garage using a fish tank and salt water (a technique that has been used in numerous Hollywood movies). The video above is a tutorial on this trick by filmmaker and visual effects guru Joey Shanks.
Melbourne, Australia-based wedding photographer Lakshal Perera shot this stunning wedding photograph a few days ago showing the newlywed couple in the foreground and the Milky Way floating in the night sky. The scene was extremely dim, allowing for a clear view of the sky. Perera captured it in a single exposure using a Canon 5D Mark III and 16-35 f/2.8L lens at 17mm, 71 seconds of exposure, f/5.6, and ISO boosted up to 4000 (wow). The couple is relatively sharp given that they had to stand still for 71 seconds!
What happens if you take photos of synchronized swimming shot at the Olympics and flip them upside-down? Ethereal beauty, that's what.
The Huffington Post did this experiment yesterday using photographs shot by Getty and AFP photographers. The results are magical.
Landscape photographer Apo Japo captures beautiful landscape photographs of mountains and hills in Scotland, Norway, the Alps, and the Dolomites.
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde creates indoor clouds using a smoke machine and uses dramatic lighting to make them look realistic. He calls the project Nimbus.
Here's a gorgeous series of underwater portraits shot by photographer Jacob Sutton, the same guy who did the LED snowboarding shoot that we featured a while back. It's titled "Underwater Girl".
J. Mettälä took a camera under a frozen lake in Finland and captured this beautiful (and mind-bending) footage of …
Melbourne-based design studio Betty Wants In is at it again. They’ve created this …
Earlier this year, daredevil BASE jumper Jeb Corliss leaped off a cliff in Switzerland in a wingsuit and wearing 5 separate GoPro cameras. One of the things Corliss did afterward was create this ethereal slow-motion video with the footage using Twixtor, the artificial slowmo program that has become quite popular as of late.
Photographer Murray Fredericks took sixteen solo trips over eight years to the center of Lake Eyre in Australia, the largest lake in the country and one that forms salt flats every year when the water evaporates. These salt flats provide a perfectly flat, featureless landscape that extends to infinity in every direction, and allow for beautiful abstract photographs.
It took six months of on and off shooting for photographer Colin Rich …
Need a break from work? Photographer Murray Fredericks created this beautiful 10-minute time-lapse …
Melbourne-based design studio Betty Wants In captured some skydiving footage using a GoPro …
Landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd spent four years looking to create a timelapse of …
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.