Inspiration

Google's Street View imagery features plenty of photographs of people, but they're often distorted and almost always feature blurred faces. Street Ghosts is a project by artist Paolo Cirio that reintroduces these distinctive portraits back into the real world. After choosing a particular photo containing a person in Street View, Cirio prints it out as a life-sized print on thin paper, cuts out the person, and then uses wheat-paste to affix the giant person photo onto the exact location where the photo appeared in the virtual world.

"New York Sliced" is a beautiful and creative projected by photographer Richard Silver. No, it's not a project about the multitude of pizza shops in The Big Apple. Instead, Silver applied a very interesting technique he calls "sliced-time photography" to documenting the architecture found within the city.

For the past year, Washington, D.C.-based photographer Dave Engledow has been shooting a humorous series of photographs titled World's Best Father. With help from his wife Jen, he comes up with all kinds of random (and creative) photo shoot ideas to do with his young daughter Alice Bee. The photographs generally portray him as a distracted, incompetent father who lacks basic life skills and who lets his daughter get into all kinds of mischief. Thankfully, the photos aren't candid snapshots of what his life is actually like.

London-based photographer Tony Ellwood has a project called In No Time that deals with our perception and awareness of our passage of time. All the photographs are of the same pier on a beach that Ellwood visited over a period of six months. His technique, which took him 18 months to develop and perfect, involves visiting the location multiple times for each photo -- sometimes up to three times a day for multiple days. Using a 4x5 large format camera, Ellwood creates each exposure across multiple sessions, as if he were doing multiple exposure photography, but of a single subject and scene. Each exposure time ranges from a few seconds to multiple hours.

Light painting has become quite trendy as a photography project as of late, but it's by no means a new idea. The earliest known light painting photos were created back in 1914, and the technique has been employed by countless photographers over the years -- including Pablo Picasso in 1949.

Another artist to use light painting decades ago was American artist Eric Staller. In the 1970s, Staller would roam the streets of New York City, armed with a Nikon 35mm SLR camera, some 4th of July sparklers, and a set of Christmas lights. The surreal light art he created at the time is better than many of the light painting efforts seen these days with the latest and greatest digital cameras.

Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond of NOTsoNOISY created this amazing stop-motion animation titled "Animated Tower." He found students and staff volunteers to turn an 11-story-building at the University of Health Sciences (HESAV) in Switzerland into a giant 10 by 11 display, with each window serving as a single pixel.

At first glance, New York-based photographer Richard Barnes' Civil War photos might look like they were taken from some museum or historical photographic archive. Look a little closer, however, and you'll begin to notice things that are quite peculiar. In one of them, there's a pickup truck parked in the background. In another, a man wears a T-shirt and baseball cap -- certainly not the fashion you'd expect to see in a mid-1800s photo.

The truth is, Barnes creates beautiful war photos that appear to be from over a century ago by using the Civil War-era process of wet plate photography to capture modern day Civil War battle reenactments.

Sending a camera up to the edges of space on a weather balloon has been done quite a bit now, but perhaps none of the projects have been as creative as Ron Fugelseth's effort. Ron worked with his 4-year-old son to give his son's favorite toy train Stanley a fun and exciting ride to space. They built a rig consisting of a weather balloon, a styrofoam box, an HD video camera, and an old cell phone for GPS. Stanley was then attached to the outside of the box using a rod, positioned so that the camera would be perpetually pointed at Stanley with the world in the background.

French photographer David Chambon is a master of macro insect photography. An amateur photographer for over 10 years, his goal is to capture the magical beauty of nature through his imagery. All of his macro shots are amazing, but it's his morning dew series that stands out from the rest. He ventures out early in the morning, and photographs various insects perched on flowers and leaves, glowing from the tiny beads of dew that coat their bodies.

You've probably seen time-lapse videos shot looking out the side of an airplane through a passenger window, but have you ever seen one from the pilot's point of view? If not, check out the beautiful video above. It was created by pilot Jakub Vlk, who brought his Canon 600D to work and captured photographs across seven days. The video shows Vlk taxiing to the runway, taking off, floating up into the clouds, flying around, and landing.

Microbiologist-turned-photographer Zachary Copfer has developed an amazing photo-printing technique that's very different from any we've seen before. Rather than use photo-sensitive papers, chemicals, or ink, Copfer uses bacteria. The University of Cincinnati MFA photography student calls the technique "bacteriography", which involves controlling bacteria growth to form desired images.

Hawaii-based photographer Christy Lee Rogers specializes in creating dreamlike photos of people underwater. Her project Reckless Unbound shows people swirling around one another while wearing colorful outfits. The photos are reminiscent of the paintings of old Baroque masters, who would often paint people floating around in heavenly realms.

Back in March, we wrote about photographer Bob Carey's Tutu Project, which consists of self-portraits Carey created while wearing only a pink tutu. The project started out as a fun image made for a non-profit ballet organization, but soon transformed into something much more after Carey's wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The folks over at PocketWizard recently interviewed Carey, creating the touching short film above that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the project came about (warning: you might want to have some Kleenex nearby).

Daré alla Lucé is a project by photographer Amy Friend that features old photos that resemble constellations in the night sky. Friend creates the images by finding vintage photographs (online or in shops) and then poking tiny holes into them. My Modern Met writes,

The series began through her desire to see the photograph as an object. Friend wanted to find out what it meant for them to change, "to become something different than what they were originally intended to be" yet still remain the same. To her, the images represented "a life, a face, a moment, but only through a momentary glance." By altering them she hopes to playfully bring to light stories beneath the surface or what she refers to as "the unknown."

"It is the unknown that shines through the photographs. It is the unknown that releases the photographs and allows them to become something new."

Philadelphia-based architect and photo enthusiast Andrew Evans has an interesting series of photographs titled Demolition Composites, which contains photographs of ghostly buildings spotted around the City of Brotherly Love. The technique used to create them is extremely basic. Evans took photographs of the buildings, and then rephotographed the same location after the building had been demolished (cleared away for new construction projects).

By compositing the before and after photographs together, Evans ended up with images that offer a final, fading look at the beautiful buildings that once occupied the new construction sites.

Last year, we shared an interesting video showing a blank white room that could be completely transformed in an …

An apparent meteor struck Jupiter yesterday, creating an explosion so massive that amateur astronomers looking through their telescopes her on Earth were able to see it. Amateur astrophotographer George Hall of Dallas, Texas happened to have a camera and telescope pointed at the planet at the time, and managed to snag some video footage of the fireball, which he soon uploaded to his Flickr account.

Check out this vintage photo of a halloween party group portrait. It might be hard to believe, but it's not actually a photograph, but a pencil drawing by 28-year-old Scottish artist Paul Chiappe. He creates insanely detailed artworks that look just like old, fading, blurry, black-and-white photographs from decades ago. The "photos" show family pictures, elementary school class pictures, and even standard yearbook pictures.

Photographer Jon Shireman has a cool project titled Broken Flowers that features photographs of flowers that were shattered. How do you shatter flowers, you ask? By freezing them with liquid nitrogen!

We've shared a number of examples of surreal images created using multiple exposure techniques or by combining images using Photoshop, but did you know that you can also create beautiful images by stacking actual film negatives? Photographer Laina Briedis did some experiments with 35mm film stacking, and achieved some stunning results. She combined photos of stars and sky with pictures of people, creating images that look like they were plucked from someone's dreams.

New York Times photographer Damon Winter shot a neat portrait project earlier this year during the London Olympics. Titled Their Golden Years, the Times tracked down former athletes who represented the United States of America during the 1948 Olympic games, which were also held in London. The project provides a neat little biographical glimpse into each athletes life, using before-and-after photos, a brief description of what they did, and short audio interviews in which they share some memories.

Photographer Benjamin Von Wong recently traveled to the city of Bratislava (the capital and largest city of Slovakia) to photograph ballet dancer Ana Beschia and a number of dancers from National Slovak Theater. Using mostly natural ambient light, Von Wong captured the dancers leaping, dancing, and posing in various locations around town.

Photographer John Eklund spent the past year visiting various locations in the Pacific …

If you're a dog lover, you've got to check out the photography of 17-year-old photographer Jessica Trinh. Her two main photo subjects are her two dogs: a Golden Retriever named Chuppy and an Australian Shepherd named Daisy. Over the past few years, Trinh has captured hundreds of beautiful and creative portraits of her furry happy-go-lucky friends, aided by her keen eye for spotting gorgeous lighting and happy expressions. We dare you not to smile as you look through the images in this post.

Freelance photojournalist Tracey Shelton captured the striking image above showing the instant a tank shell exploded in a Syrian rebel outpost earlier this week.

Four years ago, Kai-Huei Yau had an idea. During a presidential election year, why not create a series of high school football preview photographs that tie into the political atmosphere? This year, the Tri-City Herald photographer finally put the idea into motion. His "Football Campaign 2012" series features portraits of local high school football players that make them look like they're running for office rather than preparing for a season of war on the gridiron.

San Francisco residents were treated with a dazzling sight yesterday: a double rainbow all the way across the sky, visible from many parts of the city.

Lets say you find an imaginative kid, put a pen in one of his hands, put a camera in the other, and ask him to create a movie. What would you get?

That's the basic idea behind Kid Snippets, a cute and hilarious new web series by BoredShortsTV. For the short above, titled "Salesman", filmmaker Ryan Haldeman had a couple kids come up with an interaction between a salesman and a customer. He then took the resulting audio, and had actors John and Brett Roberts act it out and mouth the words. What resulted was the humorous sketch seen above.

German student Hans Findling has some interesting architectural photos captured deep underground in subway stations around Europe. The images, snapped in Germany, Austria, and Spain, are generally devoid of the hustle and bustle you usually find inside a metro system. Findling chooses to focus on capturing the eye-catching patterns, lines, and symmetry built into many parts of these stations.

Fractal-like patterns are found widely in nature, "in phenomena including clouds, river networks, geologic fault lines, mountains, coastlines, animal coloration, snow flakes, crystals blood vessel branching, ocean waves and many others." The fact that it appears on a large scale in geographical formations means that many of these beautiful patterns can be captured as photographs from space.

On August 27, 2006, photographer Noah Kalina uploaded a highly influential video to YouTube. Titled everyday, the video was a time-lapse spanning six years of self-portraits showing Kalina staring expressionlessly into the camera. The video has since amassed tens of millions of views, and has spawned countless copycat projects and videos.

Luckily for the Internet, Noah has kept up his daily picture taking, and today he uploaded an updated version of the video spanning 12 years and 5 months. It contains over 4500 daily portraits and runs a little less than 8 minutes in length. This translates to roughly 10 frames every second, and 1 month every three seconds.

Two years ago, San Francisco-based photographer Shawn Clover began to create an amazing series of images, titled 1906 + 2010: The Earthquake Blend, featuring photographs captured during the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake blended into views of what the city currently looks like.

Moscow-based photographer Alexander Khokhlov has a striking series of portraits of models with various designs painted onto their faces. The faces are either painted completely black or completely white, and then used as a canvas for some kind of artwork (e.g. a Mickey mouse face, a silhouette, a keyhole). Khokhlov calls the series Weird Beauty.

Earlier this year, we shared some amazing work by Swedish retoucher Sanna Dullaway, who takes historical B&W photographs and colorizes them. YouTube user IColoredItForYou is another master of restoring, retouching, and colorizing, but what's awesome about his work is that he creates behind-the-scenes videos showing how the edits are done. The above time-lapse video shows how he recently used Photoshop to colorize Margaret Bourke-White's famous 1937 photograph, titled "Bread Line during the Louisville flood, Kentucky".

The folks at Mexican agency Golpeavisa were recently tasked with creating a portrait of world-renowned Danish chef René Redzepi for a cover of ClasePremier magazine. Instead of doing a digital illustration like they've done before, they decided to flex their creative muscles and try their hand at making a portrait out of food using perspective photography. After a good deal of planning and setting up, the cover above is what resulted.

Upside Down (Faces) is a bizarre portrait project by Milano, Italy-based photographer Davide Tremolada. The photos show the front and back sides of individuals digitally blended into a single head, with the backside of the head serving as a giant beard. The resulting look is quite surreal, especially if the subject already had a beard to begin with.

How do you capture 5050 years of life in a single 150 second video? By capturing portraits of 100 people representing ages 1 through 100.

In October 2011, Dutch filmmaker Jeroen Wolf began roaming the streets of Amsterdam with a Panasonic GH2, asking strangers if he could film them stating their ages. Wolf's goal was to collect 100 people with every single age between 1 and 100.

Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has spent the past 25 years documenting man's interaction of nature in factories, quarries, and mines. One particular subject that he has given a great deal of time and attention to is Japanese limestone mining. His beautiful large-scale images show the destructive blasts used to break up the rocks, and the man-made landscapes left behind in their wake.

For its 2010 lookbook, Swedish fashion brand Courtrai Apparel created some gravity-defying shots of a guy floating in a featureless room. Rather than use fancy computer trickery, they used the same perspective trick as the Carl Kleiner project we shared a couple days ago.

A one-point perspective photograph is one in which there exists only a single vanishing point. Parallel lines in the scene all converge on that single point, leading away from the viewer. It can be used for interesting compositions, especially if that vanishing point is placed at the intersection points of the rule of thirds.

Earlier this week we shared a series of photographs by photographer Dinah Fried showing notable meals found in famous novels. It's difficult to catch the meals when reading the books, especially if they're only mentioned once or twice, so major props to you if you recognized more than one or two of the meals.

French photographer Candice Milon's project La Mode en Grand Écran, or "Fashion on the Big Screen", is much more accessible. The series shows famous outfits worn by main characters in well known movies, from the snazzy skater style of Marty McFly in Back to the Future to the droog look worn by characters in The Clockwork Orange. The clothing items are arranged neatly on backgrounds of various colors. See how many you can recognize (answers at the end).

Photographer Carl Kleiner, the man behind IKEA's beautiful baking recipe and kitchen item photographs, has a delightful new series of images that features things neatly arranged in mid-air instead of on a table. More specifically, each of the shots uses simply trickery to make household objects look like they're floating in a blue room.

Although Adobe Photoshop's introduction in 1990 spawned the term "Photoshopping", the manipulation of photos has been around pretty much as long as photography itself. To show this fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be holding an exhibition titled, "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop." The show will feature 200 'shopped photographs created between the 1840s and the 1990s, providing a glimpse into how photographers of old use their work to humor and deceive.

Children often incorporate things they see in the news and in movies into their playtimes, whether it's soldiers engaged in battle or a superhero saving innocent people. Canadian photographer Jonathan Hobin has a project titled In The Playroom that offers a darker and more troubling look at this truth. The photographs show children at play, except instead of more traditional imaginary ideas, they're reenacting the horrors of things seen in the news -- things like 9/11, Jonestown, and the death of Princess Diana.

How creative could you be if you could only photograph through a single window your house? That's the kind of self-limitation South Korean photographer Ahae placed on himself. His photography, titled Through My Window, features a million nature photographs captured over the past two years through a single window in his studio. He snaps a staggering 2,000 to 4,000 from his window every single day, rain or shine, documenting the story of the landscape and wildlife through that single point of view.

After the viral success of Noah Kalina's self-portrait-a-day video everyday, there has been no shortage of people copying the idea and creating their own versions of the project. However, not many come close to the awesomeness and creativity of the video above, created by a guy named Mike (Thisnomyp on YouTube).

Almost exactly one year after Kalina's video hit the web, Mike began taking one self-portrait each day, starting on August 25, 2007. Five years later, this past weekend, Mike was able to compile all the photos into the video seen above, titled "Jump Man."

Photographer Dinah Fried has a series of photographs titled Fictitious Dishes that features the the meals described in five famous novels: The Catcher in the Rye, Oliver Twist, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Moby Dick. Working off a few lines of text in the books describing what the characters ate, Fried cooks up the food herself and then photographs the meals from above (the perspective reminds us of IKEA's recipe book photos).

Photographer David Johnson recently captured a beautiful series of firework photos while attending the International Fireworks Show in Ottawa, Canada. During the Spanish fireworks performance, Johnson decided to deviate from the standard long-exposure style that pretty much everyone uses when shooting firework displays. Instead of fixing his focus at a certain point in space, Johnson introduced refocusing as part of the equation.

NASA's Curiosity Rover snapped photographs at 5 frames per second as it descended onto the face of Mars a few weeks ago. The footage that results when the images are combined into a 15 frame per second HD video is pretty amazing, but apparently not amazing enough for a YouTube user named hahahaspam. He spent four straight days taking the 5 fps footage and interpolating it to 25 frames per second. This means that instead of a video showing the choppy landing at 3 times the actual speed, his video shows the landing smoothly and in real time!

Anne Geddes is known internationally for her trademark-style of baby photos showing infants dressed up like tiny animals, flowers, and various fantasy creatures. VICE magazine recently decided to parody her work, and enlisted the help of photographer Lee Goldup to photograph adults instead of babies in Geddes' iconic style.