Ideas

Undoctored Abstract Aerial Photos of the World’s Largest Beta Carotene Farm

Australian engineer turned photographer Steve Back has been working for several years to put together the completely un-edited images you see here. Although they may seem like abstract art you might find on a museum wall, they're actually aerial photos of Kalbarri, Western Australia's Hutt Lagoon, the world's largest Beta Carotene farm.

Handmade Diorama Maps Created Using Thousands of Printed Photos

What you see above is a "map" of Paris created by collaging thousands of photographs shot in the city. It's just one of the amazing pieces in Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino's Diorama Map project. The series contains maps of many of the world's most famous cities, and all of them are photographed and collaged by hand.

Photoshop Chimeras: Fantasy Creatures Created by Splicing Photos

Want to have some fun as you're learning how to use Photoshop for image editing? Try creating a "Photoshop Chimera." In Greek mythology, the Chimera was a monstrous creature composed of three different animals: the lion, snake, and goat. The term "chimera" has since come to describe any imaginary creature that's the mashup of two or more real animals.

Photo Collages That Show the 4 Seasons with 1 Million Photos Each

There's no shortage of interesting work coming from Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun of Seoul, South Korea. Yesterday we posted an interesting body of work that employed the use of computer algorithms to detect facial structures in the clouds above. The duo has another project that caught our eye: one that shares a representation of the four seasons -- with a twist.

Latest Photo Fad Involves Photographing Your Cat as Your Beard

Need a chuckle? Look no further than the latest bizarre photo fad to sweep across the Internet. Called "Cat Beard," the meme involves shooting a self-portrait with your face above a cat's head. If you can nail the right perspective, you get a humorous photograph that looks like you have a strange beard covering your face (and a frown as well).

The Jarvie Window: Photographing Faces Through a Ring Flash

Check out the picture above. Pretty cool, huh? Well, to make photos like this you can use a special technique. It wasn’t invented by me, but by a Bay Area photographer named Scott Jarvie. It's a pretty eye catching way to take portrait photos, and here's an introduction to how it's done.

BTS: Chase Jarvis Literally Gets to Make His Dream a Reality for a Samsung Ad

Photographer Chase Jarvis has a recurring dream in which he is floating in a sea of vividly colored clouds (don't we all?). So when Samsung came to him with a bunch of money and instructions to do whatever he wanted just as long as it highlighted the color capabilities of the company's Series 9 monitors, he decided to make his dreams come true -- literally.

BTS: The Rolls Royce Wraith Launch Film and the Largest DSLR Array in Europe

In order to shoot the best Rolls Royce Wraith launch film possible, Angus Elliott and company pulled out all of the stops. In addition to using some very nice video cameras and all-around great filmmaking, they also wanted to shoot a bullet time sequence, for which they set up a 100 DSLR array. By their reckoning, that's the largest DSLR array shot in Europe.

High Speed Photo Series of Liquids and ‘Stuff’ Flying Through the Air

You don't have to be high-brow to put together a creative photo series; you don't even need to travel the deserts of Tunisia. Sometimes, all you need is a container full of something, the willingness to toss it in the air, and the skill to capture the result. That's what Belgium-based photographer Manon Wethly has done, shooting various airborne containers filled with stuff and uploading the resulting pictures to her Instagram account.

Photo Series Visits Abandoned Star Wars Film Sets in the Tunisian Desert

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.

Abstract Art Created by Combining High Voltages with Instant Film

After working with standard photography and digital cameras, Brooklyn-based artist Phillip Stearns decided to experiment with creating works of art using old photographic technologies. He ended up studying the effects of high voltages and household cleaning products on instant pull apart color film. The results are pretty wild.

Photos Created by Coating Negatives with Gasoline and Setting Them On Fire

Lisle, Illinois-based photographer Peter Hoffman's "Fox River Derivatives" project is a series of abstract photos that question mankind's relationship with natural resources. The photographs have a strange purple bubbles and colorations across the surface that are the result of an interesting technique: these images are what you get when you burn your negatives.

Photos of Everyday Gadgets Dismantled Into Their Individual Parts

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.

Anti-Abuse Ad Uses Lenticular Printing to Show Alternate Photo to Kids

Last week we shared some photos from an awareness campaign by the Mexican organization Save the Children, which showed the "cycle of abuse" through powerful, hard-to-stomach photos of children growing into future abusers. The ads were meant to illustrate the statistic that 70 percent of abused children turn into abusing adults.

Before-and-After Portraits of Alternative Education Students Decades Later

Located in the city of Toronto, ALPHA Alter­na­tive School is one of Canada's oldest free schools. For the school's 40th anniversary last year, photographer Michael Barker worked on a project titled Alpha Alternative School 1972/2012. It's a series of diptychs with portraits of students shot back in the 1970s/1980s placed next to new portraits of the students captured around four decades later.

How Veterans Are Using Photography to Cope With PTSD

PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a serious problem that affect a huge percentage of war veterans. A condition once associated most strongly with Vietnam War veterans, the Afghanistan and Iraq war have brought the condition back into the public eye with a vengeance.

Eternal Light Organizes Photos Into Crazy ‘Near-Death Experience’ Slideshows

Created by photographer Peter Basma-Lord, the Eternal Light Mac and iOS app offers users a way to play back an infinite number of photos in a slideshow format, set to music, at any speed they like. If you so chose, you could select every single photo you have hidden deep within all of your external hard drives and play them back at breakneck speed -- a sort of, near-death experience slideshow if you will.

Playing Around with Average Faces Using Martin Schoeller’s Celebrity Portraits

Yesterday, PetaPixel shared photographer Richard Prince's composite portrat created by blending together 57 faces of girlfriends seen on Seinfeld. I also enjoy playing with the idea of image averaging, and can't get enough of it. Late last year, I started experimenting with the idea of averaging faces by blending portraits.