fantasy

When I started planning a series titled DreamWorld, one of the first characters that came to me was a dryad: a nature spirit representing our connection with nature. I saw her as a strong, benevolent queen, keeping watch over the woodland creatures and protecting them. The first concept I came up with that made my heart pitter-patter with excitement was the idea of building a huge crown for her from sticks and branches. I had no idea how I was going to accomplish this, but I had a vision. And I have learned over the years that having a vision will pave the way to making it a reality, regardless of if I know how that will come about.

Portland, Oregon-based photographer and visual artist Jim Kazanjian is like the M. C. Escher of architectural photography. His art pieces appear to be photos of some of the strangest looking buildings found in the weirdest locations, but the reason the images are so dreamlike is because they came from Kazanjian's mind rather than the real world.

For her projects titled Égarements and Quotidien, French photographer Cerise Doucède creates elaborate scenes by hanging objects from the ceiling, creating swarms that look computer generated but aren't.

For his project titled Reflexion Autour du Bassin, French photographer Alain Laboile created fantasy photographs of his children, seen through the reflection of a small pond.

Gigapixel photographs are generally created by snapping a large number of photos of a scene using a special robotic camera rig, and then stitching those images together afterward using special software. Jean-François Rauzier creates similarly massive images, except his "hyperphotos" are all stitched together by hand.

We first shared photographer Rachel Hulin's The Flying Series back in February when it started getting quite a bit of attention online. The series consists of beautifully Photoshopped images of Hulin's baby boy Henry using his magical powers of flight. Since then, Hulin has added more surreal images to the set that capture Henry taking his skills to new locations and new heights.

Starting in 2007, Disney and portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz have collaborated on a series of advertisements called the Disney Dream Portrait Series. Each ad features a portrait of one or more celebrities dressed up as famous Disney movie characters. Along with the advertisements, Disney has also been releasing some behind-the-scenes glimpses showing how the photographs came together. The video above shows actress and model Olivia Wilde posing for Leibovitz as the Evil Queen from Snow White.

Photographer Shawn Van Daele has launched a beautiful (and meaningful) photo project called "The Drawing Hope Project" in which he shoots magical photographs based on the drawings of children living with health conditions. The photo shoots take 1-2 hours, but combining the images in post-production takes up to 8.

Photographer Andrey Pavlov's images of ants may look like they were computer-generated or created with dead insects, but they're actually real photographs of living ants. Pavlov spends hours setting up his fantasy scenes and then waits for his ant subjects to interact with his miniature props in just the right way.

The Girl With 7 Horses is a creative project by photographer Ulrika Kestere that shows a girl traveling to various landscapes in search of her "invisible horses".

The photographs in Nadav Bagim's project "WonderLand" might look like paintings or computer generated images, but they're actually real photographs captured at home using ordinary objects and creative artificial lighting. His tools and props include things like vegetables, plastic bags, flowers, and leaves, and he captures the images using a Canon 60D and 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Getting his "subjects" into the positions and poses he wants requires countless hours of patient encouraging.

For his project Alter Ego, photographer Robbie Cooper traveled around the world to shoot portraits of online gamers. He then combined his portraits with screenshots of the gamers' avatars in the various games they play, showing an interesting side-by-side comparison of what the people look like in the real world compared to what they choose to look like in their fantasy worlds. The project got its start back in 2003 after Cooper did a shoot with a CEO who used the game Everquest to communicate with his children after getting divorced.

Photographer Dennis Calvert creates amazing light painting portraits that look more like video game illustrations than photographs.

Photo enthusiast Robert Simpson created this informative behind-the-scenes video detailing how he created …

We've featured this creative style of photography before where the subjects were neighborhood children and a baby, but what about dreaming up scenes with a cat and a dog on the ground instead of a person? That's exactly what Theresa Knudson did with her cat Fluffy, arranging paper props in the scene and using the ground as the backdrop.