imagination

I started in photography as a stepping stone into digital art. As with most photographers, I started taking pictures of everyone and everything. It was not fun hiking with me; I was the guy stopping every five minutes to take pictures of trees and rocks.

Photographer Rich McCor (AKA paperboyo) has amassed over half a million followers on Instagram by transforming real-world locations into imaginative scenes through holding up carefully-created paper cutouts.

Grown is a new photo series by Hamburg, Germany-based photographer Sebastian Baumann that "examines the border between childhood and adulthood -- if there is any."

I am starting a rescue effort. It has nothing to do with dogs, cats, or dolphins caught in tuna nets. I’m not trying to salvage old buildings nor save the environment. I still use plastic straws, people. I admit it. What I am rescuing is old photos.

Russian-born, London-based visual artist Helga Stentzel has an imaginative series of photos showing animals that she created out of various foods.

Justin Peters is a 22-year-old self-taught artist from Germany who uses Photoshop to creative dreamlike photo manipulations. His work blends reality with his imagination to transport the viewer to strange worlds.

After moving into a new home, photographer Juhamatti Vahdersalo noticed the cardboard boxes he used sitting in his garage. So, he decided to get creative and use the used cardboard for a photo series.

What if a spell turned some of the world's most famous car models into real women? What would they look like? That's what photographer Viktorija Pashuta decided to explore with her latest portrait project, titled "What if Cars Were SUPERMODELS?"

She gathered 12 top supermodels and gave them looks that reflected cars that range from Kia Optima to the Rolls Royce Phantom.

Photographer James Popsys lives in London, one of the most photographed cities in the world. With so many people making virtually the same photos as each other, Popsys decided to take his images in a different direction using Photoshop.

After shooting photos of places and things, he uses photo-manipulation to create imaginative scenes that show strange sights that you never see in the real world.

PermaGrin Films just released this new short film titled "Imagination." It's a mind-bending stop-motion journey that follows a child through his imagination over 4 minutes.

“Regardless of what it signifies, any photographic image also connotes memory and nostalgia, nostalgia for modernity and the twentieth century, the era of the pre-digital, pre-post-modern.” --Lev Manovich

There will always be a need to connect to the past. Contemporary culture actively and unconsciously cycles through past follies and reflects upon progress. It is no surprise then, that we see popular culture re-presenting past generations. Perhaps more so than any other period in our recent past, today’s pop-cultural climate is mimicking that of the 1970s.

Photographer Jonathan Diaz is using his imagination and portrait photography skills for a good cause. He's the founder of Anything Can Be, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based non-profit that's working to inspire hope in young cancer patients by bringing their dreams to life with photos.

Fine art photographer Kylli Sparre spent years training to become a professional ballet dancer. After realizing that dance wasn't what she wanted to pursue as a career, Sparre picked up a camera, found that it was the perfect tool for channeling her creativity, and "never looked back."

Since then, Sparre has become well known for her surreal self-portraits, holding international exhibitions featuring her work.

The photo illustration above shows what a photo of a sunset here on Earth would look like if the sun were replaced with Arcturus, one of the brightest stars in our "neighborhood."

The Russian Federal Space Agency recently released a couple of "Alternative History" videos that imagine what the sky would look like if the Sun were replaced with other stars and if the moon were replaced with planets in our solar system.

If you were like many kids, you probably spent much of your childhood in a hybrid world where reality and imagination fused into an indistinguishable whole. Magical creatures walked the streets, everyday-objects transformed into priceless relics and your favorite movie characters walked down the street opposite you.

For photographer Thomas Dagg, this meant one thing and one thing only: Star Wars. And so for his recent series by the same name, he recreated this imaginary world by creatively inserting Star Wars characters and objects into the real world around him.

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.

Parents Refe and Susan Tuma aren't big on Movember, at their house November is reserved for a different tradition: Dinovember. Documented in photos on the project's Facebook page, the Tumas spend November keeping their kids' imaginations alive by convincing them that every night, their dinosaur toys come to life and get into all sorts of trouble.

If you want a daily dose of creativity and humor, start following the Instagram account (@cintascotch) of art director Javier Pérez. The Ecuador-based artist regularly posts simple and quirky photographs that consist of only a small object and a simple sketch.

French photographer Julien Coquentin's series Please Draw Me a Wall is a curious combination of street art and photography. By having his subjects (sometimes himself) interact with wall art as if it were real, he creates fantasy worlds using only a few props and drawings that some call art and others defacement.

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.

For his project titled Improbabilità ("improbability"), Italian photographer and photo manipulator Giuseppe Colarusso created a series of surreal photographs showing various household objects and scenes... with a twist.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of years shooting personal projects as a way to get hired by the companies with whom I really want to work. When I began this process, my images were fairly tame. I assumed that mainstream and technically-correct images were better than free-form zaniness.

But then I started attending portfolio reviews, where I had the opportunity to sit down with industry buyers to find out what it is they really wanted to see. It was surprising to discover that my loopier ideas resonated more, even if they weren’t necessarily in the style of the company to whom I was pitching.