Luis Caldevilla creates beautiful time-lapse videos and publishes them to his website, timelapses.tv. He recently received his 1 millionth video view, and created this montage video to celebrate the occasion. It can give you quite a few ideas for things to make time-lapses of.

Despite what your eyes tell you, the above image is a photograph of a real person, not a painting. It was taken by Peter Kun Frary, a music professor at the University of Hawaii. He tells us,

Recently I walked by the Ala Moana Center Mac (cosmetic) store and noticed a crowd of Japanese tourists gawking and snapping pics. A model in full body paint was posing against a set on an open air stage in front of the store. I thought she was a darn good simulation of a late 19th or early 20th century French oil painting. Although there were no stage lights, natural sunlight light was diffused through white cloth canopy to reduce shadows and contrast.

We can imagine an artist doing a whole series of photographs that look exactly like paintings. Has this been done before? Link us if so!

(via Gizmodo)

Image credit: Photograph by Peter Kun Frary and used with permission.

Our jaws dropped when we came across Matthew Albanese’s work. He uses everyday materials to create astonishingly detailed small-scale miniatures of stunning landscapes, and then photographs them using forced perspective techniques.

Here’s his statement and a taste of his work:

My work involves the construction of small-scale meticulously detailed models using various materials and objects to create emotive landscapes. Every aspect from the construction to the lighting of the final model is painstakingly pre-planned using methods which force the viewers perspective when photographed from a specific angle. Using a mixture of photographic techniques such as scale, depth of field, white balance and lighting I am able to drastically alter the appearance of my materials.

Tornado made of steel wool, cotton, ground parsley and moss

Paprika Mars. Made out of 12 pounds paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder and charcoal

Volcano, “Breaking Point”, made out of tile grout, cotton, phosphorous ink. This model volcano was illuminated from within by 6-60 watt light bulbs.

Aurora Borealis. This one was made by photographing a beam of colored light against a black curtain to achieve the edge effect. The trees were composited from life ( so far the only real life element in any of these images) The stars are simply strobe light through holes in cork board.

Fields, After the Storm. This model is simply made out of faux fur(fields), cotton (clouds) and sifted tile grout(mountains). The perspective is forced as in all of my images, and the lighting effect was created by simply shifting the white balance.

To see more of Matthew’s work, you can visit his website.

American Pixels is an experiment by Jörg Colberg that uses a special kind of image compression algorithm to create a distinct look. Here’s Colberg’s statement:

These “American Pixels” are an experiment. Image formats like jpeg (or gif) use compression algorithms to save space, while trying to retain a large fraction of the original information. A computer that creates a jpeg does not know anything about the contents of the image: It does what it is told, in a uniform manner across the image.

My idea was to create a variant that followed in the footsteps of what jpegs do, but to have the final result depend on the original image: in a very direct way the computer algorithm becomes part of the image creation. The idea was to build a hierarchical compression algorithm, where the compression – in effect the pixel size – depends on the information in each uncompressed pixel and its neighbours. So adaptive compression (acomp) is a new image algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting.

[...] What is more, it produces images that have spatial depth: as you zoom in you can see more and more details. acomps are designed for a wall: The viewer has to be able to walk back and forth in front of them.

Basically, the algorithm leaves detail where there needs to be detail, and compresses areas of less detail. By doing this, the resulting image doesn’t look entirely realistic, yet doesn’t look entirely artificial either.

Freezelight is a Russian group that creates light painting photographs and animations. They have a pretty interesting blog showcasing their work, and opened up a Vimeo account a few days ago to showcase their films.

The above animation is titled “Freezelight Magic Forest“, and consists of roughly 300 photographs shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, EF 50/1.4, and EF 24-70/2.8. They also have a pretty interesting behind-the-scenes video showing the creation of a light painting animation.

This would have surely been included in our 13 creative light painting animations post a couple weeks ago had they been online then.

(via Gizmodo)

Here’s a dose of creative inspiration: a hand animated video of parkour. Created by Serene Teh and Noel Lee, parkour motion reel is a pretty unique take on the flip book style of animation.

While this video isn’t directly related to photography, the concept can definitely be done with photographs instead of being hand-drawn, and might make for some pretty awesome animation. Photographs have already been used in this kind of animation, but usually using stop motion (i.e. The PEN Story and stop motion with wolf and pig.)

If you have any examples of photographs being animated by hand in this manner, please link us!

(via Laughing Squid)

This interesting collection of images by Indonesian artist Agan Harahap, titled “Super Hero”, features famous superheroes (and villains) inserted into iconic war photographs.

Though it’s not “photography” per se, we found this set of images quite amusing.

Here’s his statement on the work:

Have you ever wondered what life would have been like if Superheroes and Villains actually existed? For the most part, all we can do is ponder the infinite possibilities, often courtesy of video games, books, television, movies and, most importantly, our very own imagination.

Agan Harahap, a photographer and illustrator from Jakarta, Indonesia, has taken the concept of Superheroes and brought them into a pseudo-reality. By incorporating infamous characters into iconic World War II photographs, Harahap has managed to blur the lines between fiction and truth. In so doing, he has managed to merge the fantastically impossible with our past physical existence, in order to create a Superhero adorned alternate reality.

Harahap’s latest collection, aptly titled ‘Super Hero’, consists of memorable political and wartime scenes from the mid-20th century, but with one difference: the inclusion of notable Superheroes (or Villains?). This extraordinary combination is a true juxtaposition in effect.

For the rest of the images in this collection, check out the SUPER HERO Flickr set.

Image credits: All images by Agan Harahap and used with permission.