The Girl With 7 Horses is a creative project by photographer Ulrika Kestere that shows a girl traveling to various landscapes in search of her “invisible horses”:

Once upon a time there was a girl who had 7 invisible horses. People thought she was crazy and that she in fact had 7 imaginative horses, but this was not the case. When autumn came the girl spent a whole day washing all her clothes. She hung them on a string in her garden to let the gentle autumn sun dry them. Out of nowhere, a terrible storm came and its fierce winds grabbed a hold of all her clothes and all seven horses (authors note: since they are invisible they obviously didn’t weigh much). The girl was devastated and spent all autumn looking for each horse spread around the country, wrapped in her clothes.

You can see the entire series here.

The Girl with 7 Horses (via Colossal)

Image credits: Photographs by Ulrika Kestere and used with permission

Chilean artist Diego Castillo Roa used a giant wall decal to turn this circular window into a camera lens looking out into the world. It’s a submission in Lipton’s inspirARTE contest.

Image credit: Photograph by Diego Castillo Roa/Lipton

City Silhouettes is a beautiful project by Beijing-based photographer Jasper James that consists of portraits of city dwellers blended with the cityscapes in the background. There’s no Photoshop trickery involved — James uses reflections seen in glass and the images are composed entirely in-camera.

City Silhouettes by Jasper James (via Feature Shoot)

Image credits: Photographs by Jasper James and used with permission

Don Hong-Oai was a San Francisco-based Chinese photographer who created beautiful images that resembled traditional Chinese paintings.

The photographs of Don Hong-Oai are made in a unique style of photography, which can be considered Asian pictorialism. This method of adapting a Western art for Eastern purposes probably originated in the 1940s in Hong Kong. One of its best known practitioners was the great master Long Chin-San (who died in the 1990s at the age of 104) with whom Don Hong-Oai studied. With the delicate beauty and traditional motifs of Chinese painting (birds, boats, mountains, etc.) in mind, photographers of this school used more than one negative to create a beautiful picture, often using visual allegories. Realism was not a goal.

Hong-Oai was one of the last photographers to use this technique, and was also arguably the best.

You can find more of Hong-Oai’s work in this Flickr set and over at Gallery 71.

Don Hong-Oai (via Feature Shoot)

Image credits: Photographs by Don Hong-Oai/Gallery 71 and used with permission

Nine years ago, during his final year as a fine art photography student in Melbourne, Martin Cheung came up with a strange idea: seeing how roast duck was a symbol of Chinese cooking, he wanted to see how the duck saw Melbourne’s Chinatown. He then bought a roast duck, turned it into a pinhole camera, and — after a couple of failures and adjustments — used it to photograph Melbourne’s Chinatown gate. You can find more info on the project (and a step-by-step guide on making your own roast duck camera) over on Cheung’s website.

How a Roast Duck Sees Chinatown [URBANPHOTO]

Johan Rijpma spent six months creating this two and a half minute time-lapse video showing rolls of transparent adhesive tape slowly unwinding. For one of the shots, he spent hours standing in the wind and rain, turning a plate 0.4 degrees every 30 seconds and then snapping a photo. Some of the sequences took as long as 12 hours to develop.

(via Laughing Squid)

Math major and photo enthusiast Kris Hollingsworth created this beautiful photograph in which he light-painted an entire poem! It took patience and perseverance: practicing the technique took 15 hours, while the actual light painting took another two hours. The image is actually 9 separate photographs in one — eight lines of poetry and the self-portrait of Hollingsworth.

Here’s his detailed explanation of how he went about creating this image:

First I tackled the writing with light. As with any long exposure work, a tripod is an absolute must have. Then I worked on this in a darkroom with the camera set to bulb exposure using a mechanical shutter release to hold it open. I tried several different methods of getting the writing correct, from cutting guides out of cardboard to compositing individual letters to make a light-writing font. In the end though, it just came down to patience and practice. I don’t know if you have ever tried to write out the word “enwrought” legibly and without being able to see where you have already written, but it is definitely an exercise in frustration.

The method that worked best was to mark off the writing area using light stands for visual reference of the frame. The camera was set around f/11 and the lowest ISO. Then, I used a mini-maglight with the bulb uncovered, the breaks between words were created with a piece of black mat board. It took about 15 hours of practice to get consistent, readable hand-writing in the air. It took another couple of hours to write out all the lines, as I did each line of text as one exposure.

Once the light-writing was done, I went outside with two tripods, one with the camera and one with a speedlight. I used a radio trigger to sync and set the camera to the 10-second timer. I used a small paper bag with a hole cut into the bottom to fit over the speedlight as a gobo, which creates the spotlight effect.

Heading into post, I had my nine completed images (the self-portrait plus eight lines of poetry). Using photoshop and layers (the ‘lighten’ blending option is a blessing in this sort of project) I quickly composited the image together. It was a lot of work, but I feel it was well worth it. While I’ve seen some truly amazing images with this technique, I have yet to see any other light writing as detailed and elaborate, but I’m hoping that will change! It’s a wonderful creative process for any photographer to add to his or her arsenal.

(via Photojojo)

Image credit: Yeats by Trianglehead and used with permission

Photographer Ian Richardson made this paper camera out of the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens, with a small glass pot serving as the lens.

Too bad it doesn’t work as an actual pinhole camera like these vintage hardback books do.

(via Photojojo)

Image credits: Photographs by Ian Richardson and used with permission

Did you know that you can turn any wall magnetic by painting it with magnetic primer? Communications company M Booth did this with one of its walls, then sent out employees onto the streets of NYC with Fujifilm Instax cameras. The result is this impressive wall displaying 800 instant photos!

Four coats of the primer were used to get the magnets to stick firmly. Coat a wall in your house and you’ll instantly have a wall that you can decorate and use like a fridge door!

(via Make)

Image credit: Photographs by Matt Richardson

This compact camera is only one dollar… literally. Won Park, an artist that does origami using money, folded this camera using a dollar bill without cuts, glue, or tape. You can find more of his creations here, though this is the only photography-related one.

Image credit: One Dollar Camera by Won Park