illusion

Picking the wrong camera lens can lead to unintended consequences in your resulting photos. Case in point: this new photo of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden meeting with former president Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter.

Kentaro Fukuchi was walking on a sidewalk in Japan on Monday when he captured this mind-bending photo that looks like a Photoshop job or some kind of glitch in the Matrix.

Photographer, computational biologist, and science presenter Andrew Steele just released a fascinating short video about his favorite optical illusion. By manipulating a function of your visual system, he shows you how you can trick your brain into "adding" color to a black-and-white image.

Here's a beautiful new short film titled "Night Light" by UK-based photographer and filmmaker Arthur Cauty. While it may look like timelapse photography, it's actually comprised entirely of still photos with motion and lighting added in.

Check out this photo captured from a plane over Colorado. It looks like strange blocks arranged in a grid across the Earth, but it's actually ultra-flat farmland that has been turned into a 3D illusion thanks to windblown snow.

For their new project The Fallout of the Food System, photographer Henry Hargreaves and stylist Caitlin Levin created photos to capture the threat of nuclear war to the global food system. The series shows images of mushroom clouds created with actual mushrooms.

Destin Sandlin of SmarterEveryDay was out shooting the recent Super Blue Blood moon when something weird happened. As soon as the moon "touched" the tip of a model of the Saturn 5 rocket in Alabama, USA, a dark line appeared in his photos.

Stop-motion animator Kevin Parry has shared a clever little video illusion titled "Walk in the Woods" that has a lot of people scratching their heads. It's a loop that shows Parry repeatedly walking into a mirror in a forest and emerging out "the other side."

These days, more and more of what you think are real photos are actually CGI renderings. But have you seen "CGI renderings" that are actually real photos?

Remember #TheDress? It's the viral Internet photo from early 2015 that divided public opinion: some people thought it was a photo of a black and blue dress, and some people thought it was a white and gold dress. Now there's a new viral image that has people talking. It's called #TheLegs.

Kristina Lechner of Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a fake-food photographer (not to be confused with a fake food-photographer). Her project Food Not Food is a series of tasty photos in which everything in the frame is something inedible that was found around the house.

Netherlands-based photographer and videographer Chung Dha made this quick 2-minute video showing how he fakes the look of drone shots using a light stand and action camera.

Here's a fun little 7-minute video tutorial on how you can create interesting water illusions using an ordinary camera and some sound. It has to do with syncing the water drops to your camera's frame rate.

"Run Baby Run" is a new video by artist Eran Amir that shows a baby running through all kinds of locations. It was entirely captured in camera with no green screen or digital manipulations.

Any object can be seen as something else given the right perspective. In this instance, fairly common items have been used to create the effect of lava.

Shooting splashes is always great fun, even if it’s a simple image with a coffee cup and a falling piece of refined sugar. Plus, there is always so much room for experimentation for even more fun!

One of the popular photo ideas in San Francisco is to shoot the sloped sidewalks as level for mind-bending photos that are confusing to look at. The short 1:42 video above takes the same idea but applies it to video, resulting in some clever gravity illusion shots.

In my work, the concept and the pre-visualization of the images are the key issues. It's all about fresh ideas and trying to achieve something that has never been seen when trying to create original pieces of art.

Indie rock band OK Go's recent music video for the song "The Writing's On the Wall" was a smash hit, receiving some 6.6K likes on PetaPixel alone and currently boasting over 7.6M views on YouTube.

But just in case the claim that it was all shot in a single take without any cuts has you skeptical, the band yesterday released a spellbinding behind-the-scenes video to show you how the optical illusion magic was made.

The indie rock band OK Go has an uncanny ability to come up with some of the most creative, fun and visually compelling videos in the entire music industry. Over the years we've featured several of the music videos they've come up with, and today we have another that is perhaps the most impressive of them all.

What you see in the video above is a real sculpture that does, in fact, look as if it is perpetually melting right before your eyes. But while creating the exact sculpture took months of design and engineering work, the photographic technique behind it was invented as long ago as 100 BC.

What you're looking at is a three-dimensional "zoetrope," an animation device that created the illusion of motion using lighting effects or a sequence of still images (in this case, it's a mix of clever sculpting and well-timed strobes).

The Tadaa app for iOS is a neat camera and effects app that has managed to win itself some 3 million users since it first hit digital shelves. It's done this by offering interesting effects and features that competitors like Instagram don't -- such as a Twitter-like re-share feature and the recently added ability to blur the background.

The newest feature out of the Tadaa camp, however, comes as its own stand-alone app rather than an in-app ability. Dubbed Tadaa 3D, it'll allow you to "create breathtaking 3D illusions" using standard photos.

Check out this colorful photo mosaic created by photographer Bela Borsodi for the cover of the album "Terrain" by VLP (you can find a larger version here). Would you believe us if we told you that it's actually a single photograph?

Well it is.

Whoa. If you enjoy watching mind-bending concepts that confuse you and make your brain hurt, check out this experimental short by Willie Witte, titled "Screengrab."

Nothing in the video is computer generated trickery: it simply uses clever camera tricks and a whole lotta printed photographs to create the seamless transitions. "All the trickery took place literally in front of the camera," Witte says. See if you can understand what's going on through the entire 1 minute and 30 seconds.

Swiss photographers Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (yes, the ones who created a large format camera out of books) have a clever series of photos that uses wooden beams to play around with a few things photographers often think about: lines, angles, and perspective.

For each of the photos, the duo constructed a structure of wooden beams that blends in with buildings in the background from the perspective of the camera. The resulting scene looks as though the wood magically connects the lines of the buildings with the foreground.

Remember that slow-motion wildlife footage that consisted entirely of still photos animated with parallax? French photographer Sebastien Laban does the same thing, except with his wedding photographs.

In the video above, all the apparently 3D scenes you see are actually the result of using some After Effects magic on ordinary 2D photographs.

To make the point that Garnier Fructis' hair products are great for both women and men, advertising agency Publicis teamed up with photographers Billy & Hells for a series of creative advertising photographs.

Upon first glance, each of the photographs appear to show a tough guy with a massively long beard. However, look a little closer and you'll realize that things are not what they appeared to be.

YouTube illusion and science channel Brusspup recently did an anamorphic illusion project in which he photographed a few random objects resting on a piece of paper (e.g. a Rubik's cube, a roll of tape, and a shoe), skewed them, printed them out as high-resolution prints, and then photographed them at an angle to make the prints look just like the original objects.

You know those Photoshopped optical illusions that involve combining two photos of a person's face -- one straight on and one looking to the side -- into a single bizarre shot? Quebec, Canada-based photographer Ulric Collette put a spin on that concept with his new portrait series titled "Facade." Instead of using negative space and two completely different angles, Collette had his subjects turn their heads slightly to the side for the second shot, and then merged the two photos together by aligning one eye from each shot.

Here's an old-ish video that's been making the rounds again lately (viral videos are like viruses -- they don't go away very easily). Titled "Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency," it shows what can happen when your camera is synchronized with the RPM of a helicopter's rotor blades. The resulting footage makes the helicopter look as though it's just floating in the air!

Last year, we shared an interesting video showing a blank white room that could be completely transformed in an …