Jürgen Heckel is a photographer and sound artist who's currently living in Munich, Germany after living in Paris, France for 14 years. He spends a great amount of time in the great outdoors, and many of his photo projects are studies of trees and forests.
One of his series is titled "Lumen," and contains nighttime long-exposure photos captured amidst trees, with the horizon line illuminated by a line of light -- the light of passing cars.
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.
In 1996, a palm tree was introduced to a suburb in Cape Town Africa. The tree appeared almost overnight, and it wasn't an ordinary tree: it was one of the world's first (if not the first) disguised cell phone towers. Rather than have unnatural and unattractive metal towers jutting out of the ground, companies began working to make the towers blend in with the natural environment. This fake tree concept soon spread across Cape Town, across South Africa, and finally across the world.
In response to the spread of these fake trees, photographer Dillon Marsh decided to shoot a series of photos to document the trend. The series is titled, "Invasive Species."
London-based photographer Martin Stavars has a beautiful series of photographs titled, "Portraits of Trees." For each of the photographs, he set his infrared camera up in front of a large tree and opened up the shutter for anywhere between four to ten minutes.
For her project Mirrors, photographer Traci Griffin explores the concept of symmetry by photographing trees in various locations, and then mirroring the sweeping branches while omitting most of the trunks.
The resulting photographs look like strange shapes, formations, and even creatures floating in midair.
If I get a photography idea, I tend to just go with it and see if it works. I had driven out to my parent's place early in the day and the idea just came to me. I think at first I thought, "Man, I wish I had thought to shoot moon-lit snow the day before when you could make a snow man for the op."
Polish photographer Boguslaw Strempel has a fantastic series of landscape photographs of mountains and valleys found in Poland and the Czech Republic. Strempel visits his photo spots early in the morning, when a blank of fog is hanging over the treetops. As the sun rises, the trees cast long shadows across the valley, turning the scene into a magical display of sunbeams.
If you want to enjoy some eye-popping infrared landscape photographs, look no further than the portfolio of French photographer David Keochkerian. He photographs gorgeous landscapes using an infrared sensitive camera, which causes the green tree leaves to show up as golden yellow and silvery white, and turning spring into fall and winter.
The amount of dedication required for the time-lapse video above is astounding. Titled "Fall," it shows the colors of New York City's Central Park changing with the seasons over a period of half a year. Here's what its creator, photographer Jamie Scott, says about it:
One of the most striking things about New York City is the fall colors and there's no better place to view this then Central Park. I chose 15 locations in the park and revisited them 2 days a week for six months, recording all camera positions and lens information to create consistency in the images. All shots were taken just after sunrise.
Clément Briend is a French photographer who photographs images being projected onto various surfaces in various spaces. For his project titled Cambodian Trees, he traveled to the Kingdom of Cambodia and photographed trees that had faces of the nation's deities projected onto the leaves.
Photographer Noel Myles has been working for the past 15 years on "still films" of trees across the countryside of eastern England. He originally created platinum/palladium prints of the trees around the year 2000, and then photographed the trees a decade later using color film. He then combined pieces from the different photos into single mosaics, which he tells us are "the antithesis of the notion of a decisive moment".
Photographer Zander Olsen creates amazing optical illusions by wrapping trees with white linen, lining up the ends of the material with the horizon line in the background.