imaginary

What do you do when you get spam emails from imaginary people that try to separate you from your hard-earned money? If the email is lucky enough to get past spam filters, it's usually immediately recognized and deleted by the recipient.

If it ends up in the inbox of photographer Christina De Middel, however, it gets turned into a photograph. For her project Poly-Spam, De Middel took her spam, carefully noted the details within, and created fictitious portraits of the imaginary senders.

Photographer Jan Von Holleben specializes in imaginary awesomeness, creating scenes that whisk you away to a different place where random objects can be used to turn dreams into reality.

For his most recent project, however, he and his friends set about doing something even more difficult than bringing 'Dreams of Flying' to life: they're trying to save the universe... with imaginary machines, of course.

Two years ago, photographer and musician David Niles was watching his son Nathan let his imagination run wild as he played with his favorite toys. It was then that he was inspired to put Nate, now 9 years old, into these worlds with a little help from Photoshop. Thus was born the Nate's Adventures series.

When photographer Caleb Cole sees strangers in public, he wonders about them -- the lives they lead, how they experience the world, how they make meaning of things, etc. This interest led him to start a self-portrait project titled "Other People's Clothes. It's a series of photos in which Cole steps "into the shoes of the types of people" he sees on a daily basis.

Slovenia photographer Matej Peljhan has a touching series of photographs titled The Little Prince, which stars a 12-year-old boy named Luka. The images show the boy exploring an imaginary world created by laying colored sheets and household objects on the ground. Peljhan created the images to give Luka the feeling of being able to do things he can't.

You see, Luka suffers from muscular dystrophy, a disease that causes his body to become weaker and weaker over time.

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.

British advertising photographer Tim MacPherson has a wonderful series of photographs showing children having fun in imaginary worlds created out of ordinary objects. Kids are seen couch surfing, skiing down stairs, and horseback riding on shelves. The project is titled, "Kids at Home and Play."

"Out of Place" is a clever series of photo manipulations by German photographer Robert Rickhoff, who starts with somewhat mundane photographs taken around town and then adds in elements that don't belong. A residential scene shows a "speed jump", streets are turned into skateboard ramps, and highways are transformed into volleyball courts. Each scene makes you look twice and smile at the absurdity of what it seems to show.

Atomic Overlook is a startling series of images by photographer Clay Lipsky that shows tourists enjoying the beauty of mushroom clouds at atomic bomb tests. Lipsky writes,

Imagine if the advent of the atomic era occurred during today's information age. Tourists would gather to view bomb tests, at the "safe" distances used in the 1950's, and share the resulting cell phone photos online.

Lipsky created the images by combining photos taken during his travels over the last 8 years with photographs of nuclear bomb blasts.

For his project titled Perspe, Italian photographer Gustav Willeit created imaginary locations by mirroring landscape photographs and then adding in non-symmetrical elements into the images.

"Child's Caves" is a beautiful (and nostalgia-inducing) series of photographs by photographer Björn Ewers and STUDIO314 that shows how children turn their play areas into make believe scenes from the world of grown ups. Imagined locations include the moon, the jungle, a pirate ship, and an igloo.

For his project titled "Unrealistic Scenes", photographer Nathan Spotts composited his own landscape photographs with digital artwork of planets floating in the starry night sky.

I've always been captivated by the beauty of our world, and often dream of the things that lay just beyond what we can see. I wanted to create images of scenes that are not-quite real, but that almost could be.

Photographer Jan von Holleben, known for his Dreams of Flying series, was recently hired by a German newspaper to make photos using his signature "lying on the ground" style for a feature on dreams. He ended up shooting photographs showing a girl's dream using a mattress and other ordinary objects you might find inside a bedroom.

Light painting is sometimes called light graffiti, but who does graffiti with flashlights? Halo is a neat light-painting tool designed by Aïssa Logerot that makes painting with light feel much more natural for people accustomed to creating... less-legal forms of art. Shaped like an aerosol can of spray paint, the tool includes interchangeable LED lights for painting in different colors and a battery inside that recharges when the can is shaken.

The photographs in Adam Magyar's Square series appear to show crowds of people bustling about in open town squares, seen from a height that makes them look almost like ants. In reality, each photograph is actually a composite of hundreds of individual photos, and none of the squares actually exist. Magyar photographed strangers walking on sidewalks from only 3-4 meters off the ground, and then blended the photographs together to make them seem like they were captured from a fake height!

Pirela Neuman created this 3D concept design of a Leica R10 camera, a …