trippy

This mind-bending photo of a bird is making the rounds on the internet, and people's brains are having a hard time processing what exactly the photo shows. It is a real single-exposure photo, though, and not the result of Photoshop manipulation.

"Playing With Time" is a new mind-blowing 1.5-minute video by Macro Room in which a man bends time and space in slow motion. It was created entirely with a high-speed camera with clever planning and editing.

Photographer Reuben Wu is best known for his pioneering outdoor light-painting projects, including lighting nighttime landscapes using LED-laden drones. Now he's back with a new series called EX STASIS that's a collection of four timelapse/motion audiovisual pieces created entirely with light-painting.

Kentaro Fukuchi was walking on a sidewalk in Japan on Monday when he captured this mind-bending photo that looks like a Photoshop job or some kind of glitch in the Matrix.

The Droste effect is when a photo recursively appears within itself -- the photo within the photo within the photo, "tunneling" forever. Here's a 12-minute video by photographer and retoucher Antti Karppinen that shows you can create a Droste effect photo for yourself.

Filmmaker Kevin McGloughlin and musician Max Cooper just released this new video titled "Resynthesis." For the visuals, McGloughlin explored the ideas of space and time using still photos and real-time footage captured using a Sony a7R II mirrorless camera.

German photographer Max Leitner has published a project titled "Misleading Lines." It's a series of architectural photos shot in Warsaw, Poland. They're not standard architectural images, though: Leitner photographed an urban gymnast from unusual angles perspectives to create mind-bending optical illusions.

Los Angeles-based photographer Daniel DeArco recently shot a series of "inverted room" photos of a dancer and a mirror on a wall. To turn the idea into reality, DeArco and his team spent days building a sideways room.

We can't decide if this video is annoying or exciting; whichever it is, it's most definitely our first glimpse of Fuji's upcoming Instax Square instant camera.

Whoa... We've all seen the so-called "Droste effect" in action—an image that contains itself, so it becomes a photo, in a photo, in a photo, etc. But now you get to look out from inside one! Turns out, it's just as trippy as it sounds.

You know that mind-bending scene in the movie Inception in which the dream world is folding up on itself? Photographer Aydın Büyüktaş' "Flatland" project is like that. The Turkish artist creates each of the images through a meticulous planning process and aerial drone photography.

There's a new fad on the Web. It involves creating trippy Inception-esque scenes by Photoshopping landscape photos into strange worlds with right angles in the horizon line.

A year ago, photographer Julian Tryba was featured by Vimeo after creating a time-lapse of Boston using a technique he dubbed the "layer lapse." Now he's back again with the same concept applied to a different subject matter.

Tryba has spent the past few months traveling, shooting, and editing the 2.5-minute video above, titled "Timeless Dreams." It's a layer-lapse of the American Southwest.

Check out this trippy portrait of the sketch comedy duo Hello Generic. It's a portrait of a portrait of a portrait... 18 levels deep.

Photographer Matthew Rycroft put together this video containing 13 strange, random, and mind-bending "facts" about photography. These are short and seemingly obvious statements that may make you stop and think.

Here's a neat video that shows what you get in a star trails time-lapse if you slowly move your lens' zoom ring over the course of the long exposures. Long exposures naturally create star trails around Earth's axis of rotation, but throw in some motorized zooms and you can turn those ordinary trails into some pretty trippy effects.

There are times where words don’t do a piece of artwork justice. Such is the case with Circle of Abstract Ritual: a trippy, creepy and downright weird time-lapse by artist Jeff Frost.

It consists of 300k photos captured over the course of two years. In it you’ll see riots, wildfires, decaying roadkill, abandoned houses turned into giant canvases and far more, all of it combined into an abstractly contextualized piece of time-lapse artistry.

We’ve showcased glitch photography before, both purposeful and accidental. Blurring the lines between science and art, glitch photography is often like a fingerprint, with each image being unique.

Today we have for you an awesome collection of these photographic fingerprints by artist and freelance photographer Sabato Visconti.

It’s safe to say we’ve all seen our fair share of night-sky time-lapses. Most often, they tend to show off grandiose views of mother nature as the stars (seemingly) rotate in the background. But the truth of the matter is, we’re the ones rotating, not the stars.

So what would happen if a night-sky time-lapse photographer used the stars – or more precisely a star – as a fixed axis, instead of Earth? Well, you would end up with a trippy time-lapse like the one you see above.

When you first play the clip above, you might wonder why this guy is the only one walking normally in a world of backwards walking people and backwards driving cars... and then it hits you: he's the one walking backwards, and the video is being played in reverse.

French photographer Micaël Reynaud first made it onto the blog in May of 2012 when he created a trippy-but-cool example of what the dolly zoom (also known as the Hitchcock zoom) looked like when stretched to its extremes.

North Webster, Indiana-based photographer and videographer Justin Fredrick Clark recently shared this awesome behind-the-scenes video showing how he and some other guys at his church built a rotating room for just $350 (granted, they already had access to some pretty serious equipment) for a creative work project.

Photographer Michael Shainblum has been mirroring images and video for about five years now. So when he decided to explore the world of time-lapse, that naturally meant exploring it in Kaleidoscopic fashion. The result was the psychedelic cityscape time-lapse Mirror City.

Mirroring your time-lapse footage can yield a trippy, ethereal quality to an otherwise standard video. Riding on the Japanese monorail, for example, is nothing particularly special. Creating a hyperlapse of the experience, while cool, probably won't stand out.

A few users, however, have come up with some interesting takes on a monorail hyperlapse by mirroring the footage and taking you on a much stranger journey.

When Toronto-based photo enthusiast Alexander Kolomietz had a birthday party recently, he asked …

Whoa. If you enjoy watching mind-bending concepts that confuse you and make your brain hurt, check out this experimental short by Willie Witte, titled "Screengrab."

Nothing in the video is computer generated trickery: it simply uses clever camera tricks and a whole lotta printed photographs to create the seamless transitions. "All the trickery took place literally in front of the camera," Witte says. See if you can understand what's going on through the entire 1 minute and 30 seconds.

Want to see how much of an effect the direction and color of your lighting has on your portrait subject's face? Check out this trippy video by Nacho Guzman, who used a moving light and changing colors to cause a woman's face to look like it's constantly morphing.

YouTube illusion and science channel Brusspup recently did an anamorphic illusion project in which he photographed a few random objects resting on a piece of paper (e.g. a Rubik's cube, a roll of tape, and a shoe), skewed them, printed them out as high-resolution prints, and then photographed them at an angle to make the prints look just like the original objects.

Last week we issued a challenge asking readers to shoot a creative mirror self-portrait using an alternative style of photography. Reader Agustin Barrutia took us up on that challenge, and created a pair of wet plate photographs that take the concept of "mirror self-portrait" to a new level (they're unlike anything we've seen before). Both photographs are straight-out-of-camera wet plate photos that weren't manipulated digitally. Barrutia simply used "mirrors" (one doesn't involve a mirror, per se) and "reflections" in clever ways.

The wet plate above is a self-portrait of Barrutia shooting the wet plate. That camera in the frame is the camera that captured the wet plate.

Slit-scan imaging can make for some pretty trippy photos and videos. The technique involves capturing (or displaying) one "slit" at a time through a frame, causing motion to take on a bizarre appearance as each line in the image shows a slightly different moment in time. French filmmakers Adrien Mondot and Claire Bardainne used the technique a couple of years ago for the video above, which makes two dancers look like human Slinkys.

Looking for a photo project to play around with this weekend? Try exploring a technique known as the Harris Shutter. Invented in the days of film photography by Robert Harris of Kodak, it involves capturing three sequential exposures of a scene through red, green, and blue filters, and then stacking the images into a single frame. This causes all the static elements within the scene to appear as they ordinarily would in a color photo, while all the moving elements in the shot show up in one of the three RGB colors.

The video above is one of the trippiest things you'll see today. It's a video showing a seemingly endless transition from a picture of a picture, to a picture of that picture of a picture, and so on. Want to know how it was made?

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.

We’ve featured slit-scan photographs and slit-scan still camera apps before, but have you ever seen …

Video effects team Corridor Digital created this clever short film titled “Photoreal” featuring …

If you liked the the “impossible shot” from the film Contact that we shared earlier this week, …