projections

Projector Brought Into the Forest Turns Nature Into a Glowing Wonderland

3D projections are often used nowadays to create eye-popping visuals on flat surfaces such as the sides of buildings or on basketball courts, but could the same concept be done out in the wild where things aren't flat and orderly? Photographer Tarek Mawad and animator Friedrich van Schoor recently decided to try it out.

What resulted is the video above, titled "Projections in the Forest". The two artists spent six weeks illuminating various things in nature with a powerful projector and then capturing the results on camera.

Tree Leaves as “Pinhole Cameras” During a Solar Eclipse

If you went outdoors to observe the solar eclipse yesterday, you might have noticed that the shadows cast by trees had suddenly become quite strange. The tiny gaps between leaves act as pinhole lenses, projecting crescent shaped images of the eclipsed sun onto the world below.

Planets Created by Combining Photos Captured From High Locations

Creating tiny planets by projecting panoramic photographs onto a sphere is something you've probably seen before, but Dutch photographer Wouter van Buuren creates his planets a bit differently. rather than shoot panoramas from the ground, van Buuren climbs to the top of towers, cranes, skyscrapers, and bridges and points his camera in every direction below. He then takes the resulting photographs and arranges them into compact worlds.

Long Exposure Photographs of Patterns Projected Onto Landscapes

Photographer Jim Sanborn has a project titled Topographic Projections and Implied Geometries Series in which he casts complex patterns over vast landscapes using a projector, and uses long exposure times to capture the scenes. The projector and camera are, on average, half a mile away from his landscapes, and on moonless nights he uses a searchlight to illuminate the scene.