Photographer and makeup artist Nadia Wicker has a beautiful series of abstract photographs titled Ursides in which she captures self-portraits in which her face looks like exploding fireworks. While her method is secret, Wicker says that she uses her experience with makeup — rather than Photoshop — to create the photos.

Any idea how the images were created? You can see the rest of the series here.

(via My Modern Met via Flavorwire)

Image credits: Photographs by Nadia Wicker

SYNC is a creative short film that tells a love story with a “backward world” twist. It was filmed an original iPhone 4 (not the 4S), a Steadicam Smoothee, and a crew of 4 people.

Remember the hoopla last year after artist/programmer Kyle McDonald installed an app on Apple store computers to secretly snap portraits of customers? Outcries of “invasion of privacy” sprang up everywhere, and Apple got the Secret Service involved in putting an end to it. Well, photographer Irby Pace has done something similar, but instead of secretly capturing images, Pace simply visits Apple Stores and harvests self-portraits “abandoned” on the devices. Pace collected over 1,000 images in 2010 by emailing and texting them to himself, and is currently displaying them in a gallery exhibition titled “Unintended Consequences”.

Unintended Consequences (via Wired)

Photographer Brock Davis likes playing with food. Among his food related experiments are recreations of famous explosions done with cauliflower. The image above shows the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Here’s the original famous photo taken that day (the photo he referenced can be seen here):

The Hindenberg airship disaster in 1937:

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan in 1945:

Food Stuff (via kottke.org)

Image credits: Photographs by Brock Davis and used with permission

L.L.Bean recently decided to celebrate its 100-year anniversary by having commercial photographer Randal Ford recreated a classic 1933 catalog cover as a photograph. It’s amazing how faithfully Ford and his team was able to recreate the illustration — some of the vintage clothing had to be purchased off eBay!

Here’s a closer look at the photograph:

…and the cover it was based on:

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing how it was accomplished:

(via L.L.Bean via PopPhoto)

Image credits: Photograph by Randal Ford/L.L.Bean

Dutch illustrator Tineke Meirink likes to take a closer look at photographs and then draw whatever her playful imagination reveals to her. Her website stop:watch is a collection of these “what it is” and “what I see” comparisons.

stop:watch (via Coudal)

Image credits: Photographs and drawings by Tineke Meirink and used with permission

Are you a photographer who needs to dress nicely but loves to dress comfortably? Now you can have both! Check out these new Dress Pant Sweatpants by Betabrand: they look just like a pair of fine charcoal wool trousers, but they’re actually a super comfortable pair of sweatpants.

You can snag yourself a pair for $90 over on the Betabrand website.

Dress Pant Sweatpants [Betabrand]

AgeMaps is a project by photographer Bobby Neel Adams in which he does “photo surgery” on portraits to show two different moments in a person’s life in the same image. For each subject, Adams takes a childhood photo and a current photo, prints them at the same proportions, tears them in half, and glues the halves together. He says that this is to “telescope the slow process of aging into a single picture,” and that “a jump of time is established at the tear.”

You can see more photographs from this project here.

AgeMaps (via Visual News)

Image credits: Photographs by Bobby Neel Adams and used with permission

Antarctica – Glaciers & Caverns is a photo series by Belgian architect François Delfosse consisting of images captured from inside a white plastic bag.

Antarctica – Glaciers & Caverns (via Feature Shoot)

France-based photographer Fabrice Wittner has a neat project titled “Enlightened Souls” that consists of ghostly portraits created by light-painting with stencils (which are themselves created from actual portraits). Wittner first started the project in May 2011 after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.

I first thought of it as an artistic and morale contribution to the 6.3 quake’s aftermath. I used stencils to paint enlightened characters to remember human losses and to show the spirit of a wouned city. It turned out to be an intersting way to share ideas and feelings about society and life. After all, this is what street art is made for.

After completing his Christchurch series, he turned his attention to creating portraits of Vietnam’s village children in the country’s capital city.

Enlightened Souls (via Neatorama)

Image credits: Photographs by Fabrice Wittner and used with permission