photoseries

Combining light painting with sports that involve long fluid motion is a match made in photography heaven that companies like Red Bull have already taken advantage of to create some pretty spectacular shots.

Photographers Joanna Jaskólska and Zach Ancell both had similar ideas, and their resulting photo series -- Breakdance Baby! and Trajectory -- are both unique examples of the awesome photography you can create when you mix dance, athletics and light painting.

The Pantone Color Matching System is a standardized way for printers to make sure that they're all using the same color without having to constantly get in touch with one another. Each color is classified by name and number and given its own swatch for good measure.

In his new photo series The Pantone Project, photographer Paul Octavious is taking that system out of the world of swatches and into the world at large. His self-proclaimed mission is to "match all the Pantone colors to things I find in everyday life."

Photographer Nolan Conway's project Happy Meals is all about finding unique people in one of the world's most commonplace locations on earth: McDonald's restaurants. With his camera in tow, he has visited 150 McDonald's in 22 states, photographing some 180 patrons in the process.

Photographer Nicolas Reusens has always been interested in insects, so when he purchased his first DSLR three years ago, he immediately dove into the art of macro photography. By using the technique known as focus stacking -- combining several images taken at different depths of field -- he's generated some truly eye-popping photos of creepy crawlies from all over the world.

With the help of food stylist Charlotte Omnes, New York still life and food photographer Beth Galton put together an interesting series of photos that shows what prepared and packaged foods look like in cross section.

Here's a great photo series by artist Sonia Rentsch that quite literally takes the "fire" out of firearms. Dubbed "Harm Less," the series consists entirely of weaponry made out of only organic materials.

In September 2010, visual artist and filmmaker Rä di Martino set out on a quest to photograph and document old abandoned film sets in the North African deserts. The project had started when she discovered that it was common practice to abandon these sets without tearing them down, leaving them fully intact and crumbling over time, like archeological ruins.

Martino spent that month traveling around Chott el Djerid in Tunisia, finding and photographing three Star Wars sets in all for her photo series No More Stars and Every World's a Stage.

For the past decade, photographer Douglas Adesko has been creating a photo series that is half photography, half anthropological study. His series Family Meal captures families of all types, cultures and sizes sitting together and enjoying a meal.

Photographer Jaime Moore's daughter Emma recently turned 5 years old. Naturally, being a photographer, Moore wanted to commemorate the event for her daughter by putting together a cute photo shoot for her, so she turned to the Internet for inspiration.

Much to her chagrin, however, something like 95 percent of the ideas she ran into were actually the same idea: how to dress up your 5-year-old as a Disney Princess. Moore wasn't keen on that, so she went another way. Instead of dressing her daughter up as a made up ideal, an "unrealistic fantasy" as she put it, she chose to dress and pose her daughter as some of the greatest women throughout history.

All of his life, French photographer Pierre Carreau has been fascinated by the shape and movement of waves. It makes sense, then, that much of his photography revolves around the project "AquaViva" -- a series that captures the majesty of waves in action.

Artist Todd McLellan gets to live out many a destructive child's dream: he takes gadgets apart with no intention of putting them back together -- occasionally, he even throws the pieces in the air. The project, which was initially called the Disassembled series, has officially been dubbed Things Come Apart, and it's a photo series made up of both arranged and "falling apart" images of common objects that McLellan has broken down to their most basic components.

Images Connect is an international photo project by photographer Henny Boogert that explores the similarities and differences between the places students call home around the world.

Boogert believes that all students worldwide share the same goals: to move forward and establish a career. Their housing -- be it a room, an apartment or a hut -- is as universal as those goals, and the Images Connect project aims to highlight that universality.

'The Unseen Seen' is a project by Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler that captures the beauty of classic cinema in an unconventional way.

By way of his friend Volkmar Ernst, Riedler was able to get access to the old film roll archive of the The Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. He then photographed a few hundred rolls -- ranging from those of classic movies to ones with interesting titles -- to produce a series of beautiful film roll images that speak volumes about the films themselves.

We've seen some strange photo projects in the past, but they're typically making a statement or serving some purpose. Haley Morris-Cafiero's photos of herself getting strange looks turned the tables on judging onlookers. Theron Humphrey's photos of his dog Maddie balancing on things across America allowed him to document his trip in an interesting way.

But photographer Motomachi's daily photos of his local vending machine serve no real purpose -- in fact, he felt the need to apologize by titling the project/blog: "I take a picture of the vending machine every day (or so). I’m very sorry."

By his own admission, photographer Andrew McGibbon doesn't like using natural light. It's not that there's anything wrong with shooting natural light -- he's done it before when the situation called for it -- it's just that he prefers the wow factor that he knows he can get by experimenting with crazy lighting setups.

He wants to create "surreal" images, and so it makes sense that he would be the photog behind Super Colour, a series of psychedelic portraits taken by combing the effects of colored gels, paints, powder and sometimes water.

Action sports photographer Alexandre Socci along with kayakers Pedro Oliva, Ben Stookesberry and Chris Korbulic recently took a trip to Hawaii. But where most of us would spend our time on the beach or in a national park, they decided to brave the waters surrounding Kilauea, an active volcano on the southeast slope of Mauna Loa.

Photoshop wizard Cristian Girotto's photo series L'Enfant Extérieur (the outer child) takes his subjects' inner children and brings them, quite literally, to the surface. In the series, Girotto explores what adults would look like if men and women never left the cuteness of infancy -- at least in some respects. Each photo, originally captured by photographer Quentin Curtat, shows the subject 'shopped to look like a toddler.

Diane Meyer's "Time Spent That Might Otherwise Be Forgotten" project isn't so much about what photography can do, but rather what photography can't do. By embroidering pixel patterns into sections of her photographs, Meyer's work focuses on the inability of photography to truly preserve "experience and personal history."

In his series of overhead photographs title Car Poolers, Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena takes a different kind of look at the impact cultural issues like overgrowth are having on his beloved country. The series shows more and more workers who are catching rides into town in the backs of pickup trucks, and even though for them this is simply a means to save money, Cartagena sees them as "silent contributor[s] to the preservation of our city and planet."

There's something profoundly sad about a missing persons poster. That rectangular piece of paper often signifies a last ditch effort, a one in a million chance, and it's that desperation and sadness that Graham MacIndoe captures with his "Missing Persons" photo series. Started way back in 1989, the series takes an up close and personal look at the posters many of us pass daily but never notice.

Offering a very cinematic, editorial-style look at tradesmen doing their work, Japan-based photographer Yohei Shimada’s Workman series is an impressive display of photographic talent. The series was born out of necessity and a lack of subject matter in Shimada's small hometown of Nara. Having moved back there after completing an internship in Tokyo and coming into his own as a photographer, Shimada had to turn to the people he knew -- including his parents and friends -- to capture the series you see here.

Scottish photographer Iain Blake's fun and, let's face it, cute Stone Footprints series caught our attention earlier this week. Like many of the series we feature, it wasn't necessarily innovative photography technique, but rather the creative execution of a unique idea that drew us in.