gtav

Sometimes I make brief escapes from the humdrum of city life and venture into the woods to capture the majesty of nature. I ride around on my bicycle like a madman looking for interesting subjects to capture. The last time I did this, my beloved camera bounced out of my pocket somewhere along the bumpy road; I’d gotten some good shots that day, quite a few actually, and keeping a stoic attitude while backtracking in search of my lost camera became increasingly difficult. Not only was the camera lost, I was lost.

Back in October 2013, we featured the work of Fernando Pereira Gomes, an artist who creates street photographs in the virtual video game world of GTA V. Montreal-based photographer Benoit Paillé also works in the same virtual world, except he takes his work one step further: he uses a real world camera.

Photography student and street photographer Fernando Pereira Gomes is used to practicing his craft on the streets of New York, but recently, he's taken to shooting photos on the virtual streets of Los Santos, San Andreas, the fictional city of Grand Theft Auto V.

As graphics continue to improve and virtual worlds become more detailed, it makes sense that some people are branching out to photograph (or at least capture via screenshot) these video game worlds. Case in point: the above time-lapse was created from photos, not of any state you'll ever step a physical foot in, but of the fictional Grand Theft Auto V state of San Andreas.