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

Metropolis is a project by photographer Martin Roemers that consists of long exposure photographs that show the bustle and chaos of large cities.

Specifically, I’m looking at the small stories of the street vendor, the commuter, the passer-by, the market stallholder and other pedestrians, who populate the street or are a part of the traffic. Despite the megacity and its mega-commotion, their environment still maintains a human dimension. I present this by photographing busy locations from above. Moreover, every photo has a long exposure time so that the big city’s vitality is shown through the movement of people and traffic while the image literally focuses on the small story in question. Every megacity is a theatre and every city has a different stage and different actors, but in the end every single one of them is trying to make its way in today’s modern society. [#]

The project was awarded 1st prize in the 2011 World Press Photo competition in the category “Daily Life”.

You can see the rest of the series here.

(via BOOOOOOOM)

Image credits: Photographs by Martin Roemers and used with permission

Anna Franz, a researcher at the the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford, has won Nikon’s first annual Small World in Motion competition with an amazing video that shows the beating heart and blood vessels of a 72-hour-old chick embryo. Franz cut a window into an egg to expose the embryo, and then carefully injected ink into the yolk sac artery in order to visualize the beating heart and the vasculature of the embryo.

(via Nikon Small World via Feature Shoot)

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.

You’ve likely seen plenty of images of giant waves from above the surface of the water, but have you ever seen what it’s like to pass under a wave? Photographer Mark Tipple has an amazing project called “The Underwater Project” in which he captures epic photographs of swimmers diving deep in order to survive passing waves, which look like ominous storm clouds rolling overhead. In the interview and behind-the-scenes video above, Tipple shares how he was inspired by a powerful photo by Brian Bielmann, and how he goes about shooting his images.

The Underwater Project (via Fstoppers via Gizmodo)

For his project Life on the Edge, Detroit-based photographer Dennis Maitland seeks out high locations for vertigo-inducing shots of his feet dangling off the edges. Rather than use a remote shutter release, he captures all his photographs by hand. Once an acrophobe, Maitland now craves the adrenaline that comes from doing his photography.

Life on the Edge (via My Modern Met)

Image credits: Photographs by Dennis Maitland and used with permission

Swedish photographer Göran Strand created this amazing “little planet” photo (AKA a stereographic projection) that shows the Aurora Borealis overhead. He titled it “Planet Aurora”.

(via APOD via My Modern Met)

Image credit: Photograph by Göran Strand and used with permission

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

Malaysian photographer Peiling Lee captures beautiful, dreamlike macro photographs of tiny critters she finds in her garden. She uses a Canon 50D and a 100mm Macro lens. Her work reminds us of Nadav Bagim’s Wonderland project that we shared last year.

You can find the rest of the images in her Flickr set titled “Small small world“.

Small small world (via Colossal)

Image credits: Photographs by Peiling Lee and used with permission