miniature

Google's Street View cameras have gone to the ends of the Earth, from under the sea to desolate deserts, in order to document the world in photos. The project is grand, but its latest effort is on a much smaller scale -- literally.

The company just announced Street View for the famous Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany, the world's largest model railway. To shoot the images, Google mounted tiny cameras to tiny vehicles (they also had a tiny Street View car look-alike drive around).

Canon's Japanese store recently began offering a miniature 5DS replica camera with two L lens flash drives. This is an official Canon product, unlike some DSLR flash drives we've seen. We shared earlier this month that Canon appears to have made a 1D X version as well.

New York-based photographer Chris Buck is known for his celebrity portraits and magazine cover photos (two of his TIME covers here and here), but recently he's been working on a rather unusual personal project -- one that involves his iPhone and a realistic miniature 3D-printed figurine of himself.

Ad agency brand strategist Derrick Lin has developed a creative way to vent about all the little annoyances of his office job. Using an iPhone, a desk lamp, and miniature figurines, he shoots miniature world photos that capture his real world frustrations.

Here's a fascinating video about how photographer Michael Paul Smith creates and photographs Elgin Park, a 20th century town created through miniature 1/24th-scale models. Smith creates incredibly realistic photos by capturing the detailed dioramas with an ordinary compact camera, and his images have gone viral in recent years on the Internet (the project has over 70 million views on Flickr).

Tokyo-based artist Satoshi Araki is a man whose eye for the detail is immediately evident when you look at his dioramas... if you can even tell they're dioramas, that is.

For each miniature, Araki painstakingly plans out the layout of his trashed and scattered street scenes and photographs in such a way that, often, you'd be hard-pressed to identify them as dioramas at all..

LEGO and baking powder, that and some Star Wars inspiration is all Finnish photographer (and PetaPixel reader, we might add) Vesa Lehtimäki needs to blow your mind and send you into a nerd frenzy that'll have you digging up your old D&D set.

Well, at least that's how we feel about it, because we couldn't have geeked out any harder than we did when we stumbled across Lehtimäki's miniature movie scene photography.

Sorry, Mom, but playing with your food rocks. Especially if you do it with the imagination and exacting detail that French photographers Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle have poured into their series MINIMIAM.

In English, the title of husband and wife photographer team Kurt and Edwige Moses' photo series Un Petit Monde translates into "A Small World," but there's nothing small about the world the duo have created for the series, only its inhabitants.

For the photo above, titled "Dead Little Things," I wanted to create a scene out of strictly dollhouse supplies. Inspired by many of the weather events that have occurred in recent years: tornados in Joplin and Oklahoma City, Hurricane Sandy and even Katrina.

I was struck by the indelible photos of homes destroyed in various ways that almost make them look fake, a physical upending of one's life as defined by materialistic possessions.

Model maker/collector and photographer Michael Paul Smith is a master at recreating incredibly accurate outdoor scenes using his extensive die-cast model car collection and forced perspective.

Mixing up miniature cars, detail items and buildings into a scene whose backdrop is the real world, he shoots the gorgeous miniature vistas of the town he has created and named "Elgin Park" -- and he does it all with a cheap point-and-shoot.

The splendor of the white snowy peaks of the Andes mountains is one of the reasons thousands of nature enthusiasts and outdoor adventurers flock to Peru every year. A front row seat to such stunning views aboard the cockpit of a C-130, at the age of eight, is an unforgettable memory that sparked my passion for planes.

While working on a feature film called The Grind, filmmaker Vashi Nedomansky had to come up with a way to shoot a flashback scene, complete with Humvee, in the desert of Iraq. The only problem? He had neither Iraq, nor a Humvee to work with.

Fortunately, he did have the sand dunes outside of Los Angeles and a 1:18 scale model of a Humvee purchased at Walmart for $23. Combine those things with a bit of creativity and you get some low-budget, professional-looking visual effects.

Custom gear maker Walter Pretorius of Walter Leica has come out with a new product for photographers who want a safe and fun way to carry additional memory cards. It's the Walter SD Card Holder, a tiny Leica M look-alike that has memory card slots of its own.

Flip through photographer Michael Jackson's "A Child's Landscape" series, and you'll find what appear to be vintage photographs of rocky coastlines that were captured with some old photographic process over a century ago. The images are actually modern photographs captured quite recently in Jackson's studio using rocks in a fish tank.

If you ever get a chance to visit the National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, be sure to check out the Kodak history area, which contains various Kodak cameras that appeared in the history of photography. One of the exhibits is the "Queen Mary's Doll's House Camera," an amazing 1/8th-scale replica of an old Kodak 2C Brownie. As if the detail of the camera weren't enough, here's the kicker: the model is actually a fully functional camera!

Texas-based tabletop photographer JD Hancock is a self-proclaimed nerd. But he's a nerd with a bent towards photography, and so the myriad action figures and toys he owns don't just sit unattended in their mint-condition boxes, they get to act out funny real-life scenarios through the lens of his camera.

How old were you when you first started working with Photoshop? 14-year-old Natick, Massachusetts-based photographer and retoucher Zev has been at it for 6 years now, which means he first picked up his camera and laid his mouse cursor on Photoshop's Toolbox when he was just eight years old!

New York-based photographer Richard Silver is a passionate traveler, and his primary goal as an artist is to share his life experiences by creating beautiful photographs during his travels. Rather than shoot traditional photos, he uses techniques such as tilt shift, HDR, panorama, and time-slice in order to capture the world in eye-catching ways. Last year we shared his time-slice photos of NYC, which showed day turning into night in single photos.

Another major project he has been working on is called "Tilt Shift." He has been photographing some of the world's most famous locations and turning them into miniature scenes.

Remember that tiny Lomo-inspired fisheye camera we featured back in February? It turns out there's actually a market for that camera, and the gadget's creator is now reaping the rewards as orders for the gadget have been pouring in.

Leica's Hermes edition M9-P is a beautiful camera that comes with a steep price of $50,000. If you don't have a spare 50 Gs lying around waiting to be burned, check out this replica created by Halifax, Nova Scotia-based photographer Chris McVeigh using 114 LEGO pieces. Sure, it may not be functional as a camera, but it's a great conversation piece, and one that you can build yourself at home!

Behold, the coolest photography-related toy we've seen so far this year: War Journalist: Battlefield Hero. It's a 1/6-scale Toymaster-brand action figure that lets kids play make believe with their very own conflict photographer!

Canadian photographer Joel Robison regularly creates surreal self-portraits that show what his life might be like if he found himself on the receiving end of a shrink ray. The conceptual photo-manipulations show him interacting with objects that are suddenly the size of trucks. In one image he is seen sitting on a Christmas tree next to some body-sized ornaments. In another, he's exploring a globe while perched on top of a bottle of Coke.

Freelance filmmaker Colin Mika scored a viral hit last year with his time-lapse video of Los Angeles shot through a snow globe. This past November, Mika created a followup video as a holiday Christmas card on behalf of Canadian law firm McCarthy Tétrault. He visited six cities across Canada and England: Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Québec City, Montréal and London.

Hong Kong-based design group Carbon has created a novelty digital camera called the One Mini, which is designed to look just like a pocket-sized version of Polaroid's iconic SX-70 One Step instant camera.

Model train enthusiasts often photograph their miniature locomotives placed in realistic dioramas, but for his project titled "The Canadian: Ghost Train Crossing Canada," photographer Jeff Friesen decided to use the real world as a backdrop. He photographs the train in various outdoor locations across Canada to capture its scenic journey. In some of the photos, its difficult to tell that the train is a tiny model rather than the real thing. Friesen says that his goal was to document the beauty of his huge country in a creative way.

Some photographers have made names for themselves by creating and photographing extremely detailed dioramas: miniature tabletop scenes that are so realistic that viewers often mistake them for the real world. Belgian photographers Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux of 354 Photographers have put an interesting spin on the diorama photo concept by Photoshopping real people into their miniature scenes. The series is titled "Box".

Projecteo is what you would get if you crossed a View-Master with a carousel slide projector and then miniaturized the love child using a shrink ray. It's a tiny LED-illuminated, battery-powered projector that takes in wheels created from 35mm slide film. Each wheel holds 9 photographs, and focusing the resulting image is done by twisting the lens barrel on the tiny gadget.

You've probably seen macro photographs of everything from bugs to blooms, but have you seen any of ocean waves? That's the niche that Australian photographer Deb Morris has carved out for herself, and it's working out quite nicely.

We first featured photographer Matthew Albanese's Strange Worlds project back in 2010, not too long after the project's inception. His amazing images appear to show beautiful outdoor scenes, but were actually shot on a tabletop in his studio. He creates extremely detailed dioramas that take months to complete, and then uses various photographic techniques to make the scene look like the real world. It's like the opposite of using tilt-shift lenses to turn the world into a miniature model.

Seattle-based photographer Bill Finger creates and photographs amazingly realistic small scale dioramas showing various imaginary locations. The things contained in each miniature model are 1/6th to 1/12th the size of their real world counterparts. Finger builds each of the dioramas while looking through his camera's viewfinder, which ensures that everything he constructs conforms nicely to the perspective limits of his lens.

Last year we shared the work of artist Frank Kunert, a man who builds and photographs extremely …

Big Appetites is a project by photographer Christopher Boffoli that features miniature people living in a world of giant food. The subjects are seen mining for strawberry seeds, chopping up giant blocks of chocolate, and lobster wrangling. Each of the figures (meant for miniature train models) are hand-painted with meticulous detail.

Vancouver-based photographer Eszter Burghardt creates miniature landscapes using food (e.g. seeds, powders, milk) and wool, and then photographs them using a shallow depth of field. Her images show everything from volcanos to icebergs. The projects are titled "Edible Vistas" and "Wooly Sagas".

Etsy shop Tyndall's Polymerclay sells earphone jack accessories shaped like tiny DSLRs. The plugs are based on popular camera models (e.g. Canon 5D, Nikon D90, Nikon D3), and are created from polymer clay for the body and resin for the lens.

Bellamy Hunt of Japan Camera Hunter recently got his hands on this amazing handmade camera pendant by jeweller Luke Satoru. The attention to detail is amazing: it's a tiny Olympus Trip 35 camera crafted from multiple pieces of brass, and the various components actually work! You can open up the back to look at the film plane, turn the rewind knob, move the advance winder, and the whole shebang.

Remember those beautiful macro photos that showed the inside of musical instruments as giant rooms? Sao Paolo, Brazil-based photographer Valentino Fialdini did something similar, except instead of musical instruments he used small chambers created out of LEGO blocks. With some clever lighting and camera trickery, Fialdini captured the tiny rooms and corridors as to look like giant architectural spaces.

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 annual Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is considered to be the …