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.
This past weekend, New York-based photographer Brian Maffitt set up an angled mirror underneath his bird feeder and photographed hummingbirds for a few hours. Afterward, he combined a large number of the photos into this single, surreal composite photo showing ruby-throated hummingbirds swarming.
Wet plate collodion photographer Alex Timmermans recently shot a new photo titled "Swan Lake" for his surreal Story Telling project. Here's a look at how the image was made.
Earlier this year, photographer Thomas Blanchard released a mesmerizing time-lapse showing 21 kinds of flowers blooming. Now the artist is back again with another eye-popping project.
The video above is titled "The Colors of Feelings." It's a colorful, experimental video created using paint, oil, milk, honey and cinnamon.
My name is Kristjan Järv. I'm a 17-year-old photographer from Estonia, and today I'll be sharing about how I recently created a surreal photo titled "Miseducated."
Every week, Apple selects an application from the iOS App Store and makes it available for free to anyone with an Apple ID. This week’s app is ‘Matter’ by Pixite, which is normally $2. It allows you to add surreal 3D objects to your photographs. With only a few taps, you can add three-dimensional effects to your pictures with realistic shadows and reflections.
Before I get into the nitty gritty details of how this piece came together, I would just like you all to take a minute to appreciate how very talented Mackenzie Johnson is. (She is the model for this photo, and happens to be a YouTube-singer-songwriter in case you were unaware.) Not only did she do her own hair/makeup/wardrobe and model like boss, but she even actually played and sang for this photo.
Photographer Antti Karppinen was recently hired to do a portrait photo shoot with Cardiff-based singer and songwriter Jammy Harris. For one of the shots, Karppinen decided to create a mind-bending image of Harris sitting on a stone ledge over rough waters using a creative perspective and photo-manipulation.
Ongeim'l Tketau, or "Jellyfish Lake," on the island country of Palau is a place you need to add to your underwater photography bucket list. The waters are famous for the millions of jellyfish that migrate across the lake on a daily basis, which provide for incredible views that many have captured on camera.
A man who goes by mikeyk730 recently visited the lake after learning about it four years ago, and he captured the amazing footage above by bringing along a GoPro HERO4 Silver.
"In Motion" is a short film by photographer Aaron Grimes showing the city of Tokyo, Japan. It features a novel, surreal effect that was created by stacking video frames inside Adobe Photoshop and then recombining those stacked frames into a video again.
"Animated Photography" is an ongoing project by photographer ErAn Croitoru, who stages and shoots creative scenes with everyday objects that turn them into living creatures.
After spending four months growing out an impressive beard, photographer Adriano Alarcon decided to use his facial hair -- well, half of it, anyway -- for a series of surreal portraits. He shaved off just one side of the beard and filled in the gap with all kinds of strange things.
Since last year, Canadian photographer Daniela Majic has been working on an ongoing series titled "Secret Garden." It's a collection of surreal portraits created with elaborate handmade costumes and impressive garden sets constructed inside Majic's tiny attic.
Ok, let's just be honest for a second here: everyone and everything in the world looks drastically cooler with wings. Period. It's just the way it is.
In middle school when I was heavily into my "drawing magical fantasy creatures" phase (it never ended by the way... just ask my sketchbook), I used to check out this "how to draw animals" book from the library all the time. Really they should have just given it to me, I had it checked out so often.
As a part of a personal 50/50 project (a photo a day for 50 days with a 50mm lens), I tried my first attempts at levitation photography and had a lot of fun doing it. This tutorial will walk you through the best methods to make a surreal levitation portrait; only a pinch of magic required.
Last year, photographer Seph Lawless published a project called "Black Friday" showing abandoned malls across the US -- widely-published photos that documented the victims of the recession and the online shopping revolution.
Lawless recently revisited one of the malls and found that it had become filled with snow. The broken roofs and skylights had turned the indoor mall into a winter wonderland.
Anita Anti is a photographer based in Ukraine who uses elaborate costumes, props, and makeup to create magical portraits that are often inspired by fairy tales.
The photograph above is the "Queen of Hearts" from Alice in Wonderland.
By day, Robert Jahns is a digital artist and art director based in Germany. By night, he's known as nois7 on Instagram and runs a popular account boasting more than 600,000 followers. His stream of images consists of dreamlike photos that are often clearly the result of compositing, but there's one hidden fact that sets Jahns apart: his editing is done strictly on his phone.
Photographer Nick Turpin's series Through a Glass Darkly takes a different approach to candid street photography than we typically see. Turpin captures London bus commuters on their way home after a long day, and his photographs are at once artistically compelling and potentially controversial.
Are you sick of the standard arm's-length selfie? Or even the remote-triggered self-portrait? Well, photographer and talented Photoshop artist Martín De Pasquale was, so he turned his self-portraits up to eleven and created some reality-bending images that make that make those bathroom mirror selfies look even dumber.
No photoshoot goes off without a hitch. But with the correct amount of planning in the way of a vision, schedule, proper team and backup equipment, the risk that you'll run into a big hitch is dramatically reduced.
One photographer who seems to have mastered putting all of those components together seamlessly is Benjamin Von Wong, but it took all of his skill and more to make sure that his most recent crazy adventure came together seamlessly.
Consider this your GoPro video break for the week. So sit back, relax, put on the head phones and make sure the video is playing in HD, because this underwater footage shot by photographer Nana Trongratanawong is a real stunner.
Oleg Oprisco is a photographer based in Ukraine whose magical, dreamlike photographs have been shared far and wide on the Internet. In an age where realistic photo manipulations are the secret sauce behind impossible images, Oprisco's work stands out for one simple mind-blowing fact: they aren't artificial digital manipulations.
Surreal self-portraits from young photographers are nothing new. In fact, one could say there are almost too many of them out there. But that makes it that much more impressive when a young photog breaks out of the pack and catches the attention of the masses.
That's exactly what 18-year-old photographer and college student Laura Williams did with her viral self-portrait series 'Invisible.'
There are selfies, and then there are self-portraits. Make no mistake, these are two very different things, in the same way that a photograph differentiates itself from a snapshot. So while the word 'selfie' might be in the midst of experiencing its 15 minutes of fame, it would be an injustice to call photographer Kyle Thompson's gripping self-portraits 'selfies.'
We're not entirely sure if this is the first of its kind, but this surreal stop motion animation is definitely the first we've run into that was shot entirely on Google Glass. Yep folks, the future is here, and it's reaching into the past for its animation techniques.
The 2D or Not 2D series isn't the first time Russian photographer Alexander Khokhlov has dabbled in painting his models faces and taking striking portraits of the results. His Weird Beauty series got quite popular, with black and white designs jumping out at you from the faces of his made-up models.
2D or Not 2D, however, is different -- and not just because he used color this time. It's different because the point of each photo is to trick your mind into thinking you're looking at a two-dimensional painting.
Back in June, New York City-based photographer Htet T San visited a number of beaches around The Big Apple, mainly on Coney Island and at Brighton Beach. Her goal was to capture the concept of "the complete nothingness" through reflections of beachgoers seen in the wet sands. The resulting images form a series she calls "The Frail Second."
In this tutorial I’d like to demonstrate that you don’t need expensive studio flashes to create a complex scene with subtle lighting. I haven’t yet seen anyone else do this quite the same way and there doesn’t seem to be a name for it, so I named the process “zone lighting”, a form of exposure blending by dividing the scene in different zones. But let’s start with a little bit of background about the project and its concept.
Benjamin Zank is a young fine art photographer based in New York City. He caught the photography bug a few years ago, at the age of 18, after picking up a Pentax ME Super 35mm film SLR from the attic of his grandmother's house, and has been creating incredible concept images ever since.
For his project titled "Tree," South Korean photographer Myoung Ho Lee found solitary trees out in nature and then erected giant white canvas backdrops behind them. He then created photos showing the trees surrounded by artificial boxes in their natural surroundings.
Pay a visit to photographer Zack Seckler's website, and you'll find "Humor" as a category next to "Lifestyle," "Landscape," and "Personal." The images in the collection are like miniature jokes in the form of pixels: each one is a strange and quirky scene manufactured by Seckler to make you think and smile.
Carl Warner isn't your typical landscape photographer. Where most would take to the outdoors, the London-based photog creates landscapes in his studio. Previously, we shared his surreal photo series Foodscapes: landscapes created using all manner of edible products.
His most recent project is a departure from his work with food, and perhaps posed an even greater challenge. Dubbed "Bodyscapes," the series turns the ridges, hills and valleys of one or more human bodies into strange and surreal landscape photos.
I did my first surreal photoshoot with a model this past weekend. Here's a breakdown of the process from start to finish.
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.
Madrid-based photographer Silvia Grav's work is best described as "surreal." Paired with poetic captions that Google Translate simply doesn't do justice to, each black-and-white photo manipulation holds a deep artistic meaning.
Moscow-based photographer Nikolay Tikhomirov describes the photographs he's taken as "art inside me" -- and that's just what they are, art.
One of his collections, dubbed 'Zero Gravity' is series of images featuring women in Earthly environments floating as if they've escaped the confines of our planet's gravity. Some appear to be well aware of their surroundings, whilst others are seemingly in the midst of a slumber, oblivious to their dream-like condition.
For her projects titled Égarements and Quotidien, French photographer Cerise Doucède creates elaborate scenes by hanging objects from the ceiling, creating swarms that look computer generated but aren't.
Strange Fruits is a series of clever conceptual photographs by German photographer Sarah Illenberger. Each photo shows a common fruit or vegetable that has been arranged to look like some other object or material.