perspective

Photographer Mark Gee shot this photograph of …

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.

Perspective, gravity, up, down, all of them are mere suggestions in The Ocean Brothers: a mind-bending, surreal video by …

Are you sick of living life in the first person? Do you sometimes wish your day-to-day activities could be viewed as an incredibly realistic RPG? Well, you’re in luck. With the help of Oculus Rift and a dual camera setup, mepi has just what you need to get started.

Put together by photographer Steve Perry, the video tutorial above shares a collection of useful tips, advice and examples that help explain how to best think of and use focal lengths when you're out capturing landscape photography.

French photographer Francois Dourlen gets creative using nothing more than his surroundings and an iPhone, but he's not an iPhoneographer. No, his iPhone is a subject of every one of his images, a little window into the magical world of movies and television inserted creatively into drab scenes in the real world.

Composition and the rules that accompany it are some of the most basic aspects you learn when first picking up a camera. If you've been a photographer long, it's probably safe to say that the "rule of thirds" and "golden mean" are ingrained into your brain so well that it's second-nature now.

That being said, every once in a while it's nice to take a fresh look at the rules and the underlying concepts behind them -- if for no other reason than because you have to know the rules in order to break them properly.

Anamorphosis is a technique you've probably seen used many times, even if you never knew what it was called. It's the projection technique that sidewalk artists use to make it seem like their drawings are three-dimensional when viewed from a specific angle.

In search of a difficult photo project? Try photographing airplanes passing in front of the sun and the moon. That's what French photographer Sebastien Lebrigand set out to do earlier this year, and his resulting photographs are incredible.

When technology and marketing director Michael Kammes got married to the love of his life earlier this year, he wanted to capture some footage from a unique perspective that most people don't get to see: the groom's. Using a 1080p keychain camera, he created what may be the first ever pair of groom point-of-view hidden camera glasses.

The video above are the highlights of the footage, captured throughout the ceremony and reception.

Earlier this year, Swiss photographer Philipp Schmidli attracted a good deal of attention for a series of photos showing the silhouette of a biker in front of a gigantic moonrise.

The photographer received many comments about how the photos resembled the cover of the movie ET. Although that was never Schmidli's intention, he decided to follow up the original series with an actual ET-inspired shoot!

Reuters photographer Yves Herman captured this peculiar photograph at a match between the Belgian and French national soccer teams yesterday. The photograph has attracted the Internet's attention due to the fact that it makes 28-year-old soccer player Mathieu Valbuena look like a child playing among men.

It’s incredible how Pinterest has taken the wedding industry by storm. My husband and I have always been, and still are, big supporters of Pinterest. It has been such an incredible tool for our business and has helped so many brides find our work. It can be a great place for brides to gather wedding ideas, color schemes, flowers they love, etc. It wasn’t until recently though, have we started seeing the negative affects of Pinterest on wedding photography.

Pinterest can discourage the creative process.

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.

This past weekend, hundreds of protestors clashed with riot police in the area surrounding the Maracana football stadium in Rio de Janiero. Their main gripe was the fact that the country is spending so much on hosting the 2014 World Cup despite many of the country's public services still lacking in funding.

Rio de Janiero-based photographer Michel de Souza was at the protests capturing everything on camera, and also captured the point-of-view footage above showing what he saw as he snapped photos.

Need a chuckle? Look no further than the latest bizarre photo fad to sweep across the Internet. Called "Cat Beard," the meme involves shooting a self-portrait with your face above a cat's head. If you can nail the right perspective, you get a humorous photograph that looks like you have a strange beard covering your face (and a frown as well).

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.

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.

Russian photographer Murad Osmann has been attracting quite a bit of attention this past week on the Internet for his images. No, it's not his professional photos of people and places, but rather a clever project he has been putting together on his Instagram account.

It's titled "Follow Me," and features a unique perpective: each shot is from Osmann's point of view, and shows the back of his girlfriend Nataly Zakharova's body as she leads him by the hand through various locations around the world.

Chinese New Years festivities have been going on over the past week in cities around the world. Over in Singapore, photographer Choo Yut Shing captured this neat photograph of a giant light snake slithering down a street.

Here's a series of clever pictures by Stockholm-based photographer Christian Åslund, who turned the ground of various city locations into a backdrop by having his models lie on their sides. By taking advantage of patterns, structures, and objects, the subjects look as though they're strolling on platforms, hanging from ledges, and resting on walls.

We've written a couple of times in the past on how you can achieve drastically different portrait looks by choosing different lens focal lengths and subject distances. Basically, your choice of glass can make a huge impact on what your subject's face looks like... and how much they appear to weigh.

Reddit user Popocuffs wanted to demonstrate this, but instead of using a human subject, he used his cat.

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.

The video above is only 44 seconds long, but we'll bet it'll take up at least a minute and a half of your time -- you'll just have to watch it twice. It was created by British psychological professor Richard Wiseman, and demonstrates the power of perspective. It's titled, "Assumptions."

For his project titled "NYC By Bike," photographer Tom Olesnevich attached his DSLR to the underside of his bicycle, and then snapped photographs while riding around in various areas of the city. The resulting photographs offer an interesting look at how the rear wheels of bikes see the Big Apple.

When San Diego-based landscape photographer Ben Horne got married recently, he and his bride came up with an interesting way to document the wedding from their point-of-view without attracting attention or weird stares: a wedding bouquet camera.

The photo above is the album cover for Jay-Z's 2009 album Blueprint 3, featuring a photo of a pile of musical instruments and recording equipment with three red lines across the front. It might look Photoshopped -- an easy way to create such an effect -- but it was actually done with perspective trickery and good ol' fashioned hard work.

Die-hard Dodgers fan Bobby Crosby is the only person to ever film himself catching a home run at a Major League Baseball game. That's not all though: over the past few years, he has also filmed himself catching tens of home runs during the batting practice prior to games, holding his baseball glove in one hand and his camera in the other. The video above, which is currently going viral online, shows Crosby's amazing first person view of all but a few of those catches.

Some weeks ago, I received an invitation from Leica for a special launch party they were planning to hold the day before Photokina 2012 opened. The event was titled LEICA - DAS WESENTLICHE, which translates to "The Essentials". Aside from stating that there would be product premieres and "photographic and musical highlights", the invitation did not reveal much else about the event, which went down this past Monday. Here's a first-hand account of what it's like to attend one of these Leica parties.

Be careful not to leave your camera unattended when animals are nearby -- you never know what might happen. We've shared a number of videos in the past of animals such as monkeys, octopi, sharks, and seagulls "borrowing" cameras for their own purposes.

The folks at Mexican agency Golpeavisa were recently tasked with creating a portrait of world-renowned Danish chef René Redzepi for a cover of ClasePremier magazine. Instead of doing a digital illustration like they've done before, they decided to flex their creative muscles and try their hand at making a portrait out of food using perspective photography. After a good deal of planning and setting up, the cover above is what resulted.

For its 2010 lookbook, Swedish fashion brand Courtrai Apparel created some gravity-defying shots of a guy floating in a featureless room. Rather than use fancy computer trickery, they used the same perspective trick as the Carl Kleiner project we shared a couple days ago.

A one-point perspective photograph is one in which there exists only a single vanishing point. Parallel lines in the scene all converge on that single point, leading away from the viewer. It can be used for interesting compositions, especially if that vanishing point is placed at the intersection points of the rule of thirds.

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has a habit of using one-point perspective for dramatic effect, often with the vanishing point in the dead center of the frame, disorienting the viewer and creating tension for his scenes. Film enthusiast kogonada recently took a bunch of Kubrick films, collected the shots showing this technique, and created the interesting supercut seen above.

Photographer Carl Kleiner, the man behind IKEA's beautiful baking recipe and kitchen item photographs, has a delightful new series of images that features things neatly arranged in mid-air instead of on a table. More specifically, each of the shots uses simply trickery to make household objects look like they're floating in a blue room.

Astrophotographer Laurent Laveder has a delightful series of photographs titled Moon Games that feature creative photographs shot as the moon hangs low over a hill. Laveder's subjects play with the moon as if it's a glowing sphere here on Earth. In one shot it's a reading lamp, and in another it's a framed art piece waiting to be hung. The photos are sure to make you want to find your own hill so you can play with the moon yourself!

A week ago, a short TED talk by Duncan Davidson called "Why do we hate seeing photos of ourselves" went viral in the blogosphere. While I agree with Duncan's main premise that part of the issue is that we are used to seeing a mirror image of ourselves, I think it goes deeper.

There are many things a photographer has to take into consideration when composing a phenomenal picture, but one that …

World travel bloggers Michael Powell and Jürgen Horn recently visited the The Trick Eye Museum in South Korea, where visitors can snap humorous and mind-bending pictures of themselves interacting with various painted rooms.

Here's a creative series of photographs by photographer Nithin Rao Kumblekar. He shot models from above as they sprawled out on the ground over intricate chalk drawings, using perspective to blend them into the scenes. The work reminds us of Jan von Holleben's 'Dreams of Flying' project, except chalk is used instead of props.

What would various indoor spaces look like if you were a fly on a ceiling? Photographer Menno Aden answers that question with his photo series titled "Room Portraits". He shoots from an interesting overhead perspective, capturing everything from bedrooms to dentist offices.