Inspiration

Dream Music: Part 2 is an amazing stop-motion and time-lapse video by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams that features a technique they call "lyric-lapsing". Using still photos, they somehow planned the time-lapse sequences just right, so that the singer in the video is actually mouthing the words as he scurries around to various locations. They state that the video is a "musical voyage into the depths of the subconscious", and that it was designed to "transport the viewer from their own reality into a world of dreams and at the end, [...] awake to wonder how we were able to take them there."

The magnitude of the effort is what's truly impressive. The creators spent six months shooting the photos across two states. Every 3-4 seconds seen in the video required about 6-8 hours of work to create.

One way to shoot surreal photographs is to capture things where they don't ordinarily belong, whether it's glowing cubes in a forest or houses and babies floating in mid-air. Often this type of image is done using photo manipulation, but that's not true of the photos in artist Joy Umali's project titled Ladders. Umali hauled a number of distorted metal ladders onto Rodeo Beach in San Francisco, and then had photographer Walter Kitundu photograph the scene.

John James Audubon, a French-American ornithologist (a person who studies birds), became internationally known in the 1800s for his ambitious goal of painting and documenting all the different bird species found in the United States. His methods, however, weren't exactly bird friendly. To prepare his subjects, Audubon would first kill them using fine shot and then fix them into striking poses using wire.

Ornithologists these days have a much better way of capturing birds for science: mist nets. The nylon mesh nets virtually invisible to birds when suspended between two poles, and allow scientists to capture, study, and release the birds unharmed. Photographer Todd R. Forsgren wants to be the modern day equivalent of Audubon. His project titled Ornithological Photographs consists entirely of photos showing different birds caught in mist nets.

Manchester-based couple Lisa and Alex are on a mission to find the best place in the world to get married, and through first hand experience rather than other people's opinions. They're currently in the midst of a two-year journey around the world in a 24-year-old camper van, hunting for both the perfect location and the best cultural wedding ceremonies.

When NASA's Curiosity rover performed its "seven minutes of terror" landing on Mars a couple weeks ago, the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) camera had the task of capturing 1600x1200 (~1.9 megapixel) photographs at a rate of 5 frames per second. The camera began snapping away from when the heatshield separated to a few seconds after the rover touched down. The amazing high-definition video above was created with these photographs, showing what it's like to fall onto the surface of the red planet.

This creative stop-motion video was created over the course of one year by a boy named Kristen (unbeatableme on YouTube). He took at least one photograph every day for 365 days showing himself standing in front of a whiteboard. By changing elements inside the shot (e.g. his clothing, the art on the whiteboard, his hair), Kristen made one of the most "time-consuming" animation projects we've seen.

Portland, Maine-based photographer Caleb Charland (whom we featured before) has a fascinating new series of science-based photos that show various alternative batteries created using things like apple trees and stacked coins. The photo above shows an experiment in which he powered a lamp using 300 apples in a Newburgh, Maine-orchard.

Helsinki, Finland-based photographer Janne Parviainen has been light painting since 2008, and recently created series of experimental photos showing a technique he calls Light Topography. Using a single LED light for each image, he carefully traces over every surface in the scene while the camera's shutter is open. Fully tracing a room can take as long as half an hour. The resulting light outlines provide a trippy look at what each space contains.

Photographer Emma Kisiel's project At Rest is both beautiful and morbid. On one hand, they show animals lying serenely inside a ring of rocks and flowers, but on the other hand, each one is of an animal that was stuck and killed by a car. What's startling is the variety of roadkill she manages to find: everything from a squirrel to an owl (when's the last time you saw an owl as roadkill?).

German photographer Geraldine Lamanna has a great series of photographs titled "Powder Dance" that captures the elegance and powder of dance using white powder. Inspired by the music video for the song "Rolling In The Deep" by Adele, Lamanna coated dance instructor Olivia Maciejowski and two her dance students with powder, and then had them bust out their moves for the camera. The resulting photographs are meant to show "echoes" of the movement.

We first shared photographer Rachel Hulin's The Flying Series back in February when it started getting quite a bit of attention online. The series consists of beautifully Photoshopped images of Hulin's baby boy Henry using his magical powers of flight. Since then, Hulin has added more surreal images to the set that capture Henry taking his skills to new locations and new heights.

Shooting photos of the letters of the alphabet isn't anything new, but London-based photographer Amandine Alessandra's method of creating her letters is. Armed with only her arms and a camera, Alessandra shoots long exposure photographs of herself waving her hands in the shape of each letter. The project is titled Dance with Me.

Artist Simon Beck needed a way to get exercise without aggravating his problematic feet, and discovered that walking around in the snow with rigid boots and snowshoes resulted in the least amount of pain. He then came up with the amazing idea of doing crop circle-style designs in large expanses of untracked snow.

Beck spends the good part of a day -- between five to nine hours -- plodding along according to a pre-planned design. Once each piece is finished, he photographs them from a higher vantage point to preserve them before sunlight, wind, or snow erases them from the face of the Earth. The art is so large that some of the pieces cover entire valleys.

Starting in 2007, Disney and portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz have collaborated on a series of advertisements called the Disney Dream Portrait Series. Each ad features a portrait of one or more celebrities dressed up as famous Disney movie characters. Along with the advertisements, Disney has also been releasing some behind-the-scenes glimpses showing how the photographs came together. The video above shows actress and model Olivia Wilde posing for Leibovitz as the Evil Queen from Snow White.

San Francisco-based photographer Lisa Kristine has spent the past 28 years documenting indigenous cultures in 70 countries on 6 continents around the world. More recently, she has been working with the organization Free the Slaves, using her photography to document the monstrosity that is modern day slavery.

The photo above is the winning photograph in this year's National Geographic 2012 Traveler Photo Contest. It's a photo by Brooklyn-based photographer Cédric Houin titled "Butterfly", which shows a Kyrgyz mother and daughter using a sewing machine in their dwelling. His caption reads,

This image was shot in the Kyrgyz lands of the Wakhan Corridor. The intimacy of this everyday life moment, shot inside of a family yurt, is in total contrast with the harsh environment these nomadic tribes live in. On the right we notice a television and a sound console. These tribes live weeks away from any village by foot. In spite of being located at an altitude of 4,300 meters in one of the most remote areas of Afghanistan they are equipped with solar panels, satellite dishes and cellphones. Ancestral ways of living, with touches of modernity.

The image was submitted into the category Sense of Place (the other categories were: Travel Portraits, Outdoor Scenes, and Spontaneous Moments).

Have you always dreamed of soaring high above the Earth... and dive-bombing other birds? If so, this might be the next best thing: some falconers over in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi recently created a pint-sized helmet cam designed specifically for their hunting falcon.

Capturing a single shooting star can make for a brilliant photograph, but what does it look like if you composite multiple meteors into a single image? Fort Collins, Colorado-based nature photographer David Kingham decided to find out recently during the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. The amazing photo seen above is what resulted.

Melbourne, Australia-based wedding photographer Lakshal Perera shot this stunning wedding photograph a few days ago showing the newlywed couple in the foreground and the Milky Way floating in the night sky. The scene was extremely dim, allowing for a clear view of the sky. Perera captured it in a single exposure using a Canon 5D Mark III and 16-35 f/2.8L lens at 17mm, 71 seconds of exposure, f/5.6, and ISO boosted up to 4000 (wow). The couple is relatively sharp given that they had to stand still for 71 seconds!

A couple months ago we shared a creative photo project that showed various interior spaces from directly overhead, as if they were photographed by a fly on the ceiling. German photographer Michael H. Rohde has a similar project, except his photographs are shot from the opposite direction: directly below.

The next time you're out in a non-light polluted place with your family and your camera, try using our galaxy as a backdrop. Hawaii-based photographer John Hook shot this ridiculously awesome photograph of him, his wife, and his daughter staring up at the Milky Way. As if that weren't perfect enough, there's also a shooting star photobombing the portrait in the lower right hand corner!

Filmmaker Daniel Mercadante and his team at Everynone created this short film titled "Ball" using hundreds of photographs of spherical objects found through Google Image Search. The images are grouped by themes that beautifully transition from one to another.

Computer generated imagery is becoming ubiquitous in the world of filmmaking, but some people still prefer some good ol' fashioned elbow grease. Los Angeles-based filmmaker Vu Hoang of Westscape Media spent 7 months creating this stop-motion love story, titled "Love Drama". Why did it take so long? Well, Hoang and his small crew of 3 people created all the animation seen using 3,000 photographs -- photos that were shot frame by frame and individually cut out by hand.

San Francisco-based photographer Lee Materazzi doesn't just take pictures of people jammed into uncomfortable spaces. She also photographs people with their heads stuck into random locations for photos that make them look strangely headless. The quirky images have titles that include "Head in Table", "Head in Rug", and "Head in Sand."

While working as a fishing guide in Tofino, British Columbia, Matthew Thornton captured this wild photograph of a humpback whale calf leaping out of the water an extremely short distance away (estimated at 10-30 feet). In his submission to the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest, Thornton writes,

On our way in from fishing for halibut we noticed a few humpback whales playing in the distance and we stopped part way in to watch. It was quite an experience to see something completely airborne so close to the boat. The lucky thing was I got the photo I submitted. A fellow boat also got a picture of the whale close to mid air and it was also all caught on video. Was an amazing day.

Filmmakers Derek Kwok and Henri Wong of Parabucks created this ridiculously awesome stop-motion short film titled "Batman: Dark Knightfall" using highly-realistic 1/6-scale collectible action figures by Hong Kong toy company Hot Toys. Be sure to turn on HD when you watch it.

The cinematic lighting and sound effects give this film a realism that you'll be hard pressed to find in a stop-motion video -- at times you won't believe that what you're seeing isn't showing real actors.

Wanting to see how she and her siblings have changed over the years, Helsinki-based photographer Wilma Hurskainen decided to gather her three sisters together and recreate photographs of the four of them taken by their father decades ago.

On Monday, a group of four friends went on a fishing trip in the Pacific Ocean. Taking their boat "A Salt Weapon" 20 miles west of Santa Cruz, Mark Peters, Jeremy, Dave, and William were expecting a fun-filled day of albacore tuna hunting. What they ended up capturing was so much more.

Wanting to save some memories of their trip and film their battles with tuna from underwater, Peters decided to bring along a GoPro Hero 2 camera fitted inside a $50 custom-made torpedo.

The photographs in photographer Gail Albert Halaban's series Out My Window are unsettling and beautiful at the same time. Each of them shows people framed by open apartment windows in New York City -- quite creepy if the images are actually of unsuspecting strangers. At the same time, the voyeur is quite a photographer, as each shot perfectly balances the lighting of the subject inside with the cityscapes and brick walls outside.

What happens if you take photos of synchronized swimming shot at the Olympics and flip them upside-down? Ethereal beauty, that's what.

The Huffington Post did this experiment yesterday using photographs shot by Getty and AFP photographers. The results are magical.

In Russian art museums, older ladies are hired as guards for the pieces in the collections. Photographer Andy Freeberg noticed that these women were a constant part of the visitors' viewing experience, silently hovering near the artworks as they're being enjoyed. Finding these women "as intriguing to observe as the pieces they watch over", he decided to photograph them alongside the works they're tasked with guarding. The project is titled "Guardians of Russian Art Museums".

Using a novel technique he developed himself, artist Christian Faur turns photographs into giant prints created by using crayons as pixels. When exhibited, the size and three-dimensional nature of the work make for an interesting viewing experience for visitors. The space appears to be full of photographs, but the images turn into abstract and colorful sculptures as the visitor gets closer. Each piece is composed of hundreds of crayons of different colors.

Photographer Hannah Stonehouse Hudson of Stonehouse Photography made a splash on the Internet this past week after sharing a heartwarming dog photograph through Facebook.

When you think about photographs from the early 1900s, you probably think about boring monochrome photos of locations or portraits of people with humorless expressions and rigid poses. Photographs costed more in terms of time, effort, and money back then, so photographers didn't waste them on silly photos, right? Wrong.

This series of photographs was created around 1905 by an unknown artist. Titled Bulldogs in Fancy Dress, it's being preserved for eternal chuckles in the Library of Congress' photo archives.

Reuters photographer Luke MacGregor doesn't know much about astronomy, but he had the idea recently of photographing the full moon rising up into the Olympic Rings found on London's Tower Bridge. Armed with a phone app that informed him of moonrise times, he spent two evenings trying and failing to create the photo. Finally, on the third evening, he succeeded:

I readied myself at the predicted angle to the rings. The moon would be rising at 8:50pm and would hit the rings by about 9pm. As the moon had been rising later each evening it had become darker than the previous evenings. I wished I had my tripod. Nonetheless, using the Canon 5D MkIII meant I could push the ISO a little further than I would normally have chosen for a late evening shot. Exactly on time the moon began to show itself over the horizon, a lovely peachy color. I had to keep an eye on a changing exposure, balancing the brightness of the moon with a rapidly darkening sky. As it rose I had to keep moving along, mercilessly pushing tourists out of the way who had stopped to look, in order to keep the moon in line with the rings. Finally, after three days, I had the picture I had been trying to achieve.

What did famous movie characters look like when they were kids? That's the question answered by a series of cute advertisements by Brazilian ad agency Globalcomm.

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?

San Francisco-based photographer Lee Materazzi shoots photographs of people whose bodies are stuffed uncomfortably into random spaces. Her subjects are seen smushed between two doors, smothered by a garden hose, and even squeezed into a tunnel under a pathway.

The subjects in portrait projects are often selected for something they all have in common. The people seen in Brooklyn-based photographer Caroll Taveras' project You Are Here have this in common: they were lost at the Olympics. Commissioned by Mother London, Taveras finds tourists at the Olympic games who are hopelessly lost, and then guides them to their desired destinations in exchange for a portrait.

Photoshopping gets a lot of bad press due to the fact that it's often used to "make skinny models skinner and perfect skin more perfect", but there are also people out there using it for good. The video above is a recent TED talk given by retoucher Becci Manson on how Photoshopping was used to bring joy and memories back to those affected by the devastating 2011 tsunami in Japan.

The World Wildlife Fund created this beautiful commercial with the message “We Are …

Have you ever wondered how Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson made Frodo Baggins the hobbit so much smaller than Gandalf the wizard? Aside from using CGI and child body doubles, the filmmaking team also employed brilliant forced perspective techniques that tricked viewers with optical illusions.

Scott Lamb of BuzzFeed created this exceptionally moving video that asks the question, …

We’ve seen some very heavy-duty gear lugged out to cover the Olympic games in London this year: some …

It seems like everything is cooler in super slow motion, and fire-breathing is certainly no exception. Vancouver-based still photographer …

Here’s an interesting TED audition by artist Phil Hansen, who speaks on embracing …

Photographer Michael Bodiam and set designer Sarah Parker were recently commissioned by NOWNESS to shoot a project called "A Day on My Plate: Athletes' Meals". The goal was to document Olympic athlete meals, but with a twist: instead of standard perspectives, the massive amounts of food were placed onto oversized place settings created with laser-cut MDF, cardboard and paper.

Photography enthusiast Sterling Parker created this abstract image by averaging all the photographs …

Atomic Overlook is a startling series of images by photographer Clay Lipsky that shows tourists enjoying the beauty of mushroom clouds at atomic bomb tests.

The 2012 London Olympics is pretty strict about how the Games' branding is used, prohibiting the unauthorized use of everything from the Olympic symbol to the word "Olympic". Enforcing the rules is another story, as businesses both near and far use Olympic branding extensively to promote their own interests. Photographer Craig Atkinson recently decided to start a project documenting illegal uses in London through a photo project titled Illegal Olympics.