Category: Photoworthy

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Arty Awesomeness Inspirational Designs Photoworthy

You Won’t Believe It’s Light Refractions

No CG shenanigans here. Research scientist and microscopist Alan Jaras creates the most beautifully vibrant images by sending beam of lights through a variety of transparent, textured materials and then photographing the refractions.

Here are the technical details from the man himself:

These are light refraction patterns or ‘caustics’ formed by a white light beam passing through shaped and textured transparent forms. The pattern is captured directly on to 35mm film by removing the camera lens and putting the transparent object(s) in its place. Colours are introduced by placing complex coloured optical filters directly in the light beam.

The processed film is digitally scanned for uploading. Please note these are not computer generated images but a true analogue of the way light is refracted by the objects I create.

Say what? The results speak themselves and you can find them after the jump.

Continue reading “You Won’t Believe It’s Light Refractions”
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Arty Awesomeness Eating and Drinking Photoworthy Weirdness

You Won’t Believe It’s Food Colouring

Seriously awesome. Designer Corey Holms uses household objects to create beautiful, otherworldly scenes. His photos are made primarily of food colouring, vegetable oil, and water. Have a look at some of them after the jump.

Continue reading “You Won’t Believe It’s Food Colouring”

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Arty Photoworthy

Creative Photos And How They Were Taken

Taking good photos can sometimes be like performing magic – the results are wonderful and you’re always wondering how the trick is done.

The creatives at Digital Photography School’s How I Took It section often take fantastic photos and then document how they took the shot. Have a look at a selection of photos below – click the images to read about the technique used.

See more great shots at Digital Photography School.

[via Digg]

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Arty Photoworthy Video Clips

Nikon D300s Perspectives

Photography, much like sex, can be done extremely well if you have the right knowledge and equipment ;-)

Camera manufacturer Nikon recently released their new D300s, a 12.3MP, USD 1800.00 camera that is also capable of shooting video up to 720p. To demonstrate the power of their new device, they handed it off to outdoor sports photographer, Robert Bösch, and photo journalist, Ami Vitale, and the results are unsurprisingly impressive.

Robert Bösch

Ami Vitale

See the footage after the jump.

Continue reading “Nikon D300s Perspectives”
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Arty Photoworthy

The Bitter Girls – A Place in Your Life

Easy there tiger. There are no nasty ladies here (although you might want to visit this post for tattooed girls).

The Bitter*Girls is the work of Japanese photographer Jyune who uses tilt-shift photography to take real scenes and transform them to look like miniature models. Whilst there may be a glut of such tilt-shift photos on the Interwebs, the micro-worlds created by Jyune somehow look more charming to me. Check out a small gallery below.

See more of Jyune’s fascinating tilt-shift photography at The Bitter*Girls blog.

[via Paintalicious]

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Arty Awesomeness Featured Photoworthy

A Celebration of Colour at Holi

If there was a ever a festival I wanted to be a part of, it would have to be Holi. Also called the Festival of Colours, Holi is a popular Hindu festival that is celebrated on the last full moon day of the lunar month Phalguna, which usually falls in early March.

In a welcome to spring and the triumph of good over evil, people lose their inhibitions and get together for what looks like a massive water fight in the street, playfully throwing coloured paint, water, and powder at each other. Here are some striking images by Indian photojournalist and documentary photographer, Poras Chaudhary.

How rad does that look? See more images at Chaudhary’s Holi gallery.

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Arty Cautionary Tales Photoworthy

Pieter Hugo in Nollywood

The last time we featured South African photographer Pieter Hugo, he was hanging out with the Gadawan Kura or ‘hyena handlers’, a group of minstrels who wander the towns of Nigeria, entertaining people and selling traditional medicines. It seems he has returned to Nigeria to explore yet another facet – the phenomenon that is Nollywood.

The film industry in Nigeria has become the second largest in the world, ahead of Hollywood and behind Bollywood. Shot on location all over Nigeria, a staggering 200 videos are released onto the home video market every month!

In Hugo’s latest series, he explores the Nigerian tradition of story-telling by asking a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets.

His vision of the film industry’s interpretation of the world results in a gallery of hallucinatory and unsettling images.

The tableaux of the series depict situations clearly surreal but that could be real on a set; furthermore, they are rooted in the local symbolic imaginary. The boundaries between documentary and fiction become very fluid, and we are left wondering whether our perceptions of the real world are indeed real.

Here’s a small gallery.

See more of Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood. [some content NSFW – exposed boobies & penises]

[via Between 1 0and 5]

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Arty Awesomeness Photoworthy

Elemental Light Art

Lightmark is made up of the twosome Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke who like to travel around the world and create beautiful light art photos as they go along. They use different light-sources ranging from LED lights to various kinds of fire. See some of their shots in the gallery below.

More of their long exposure shots can be found at Lightmark.de.

See more light graffiti and photography at WebUrbanist.

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Arty Photoworthy

High Speed Bullet Photography Makes a Colourful Mess

Spotting a speeding bullet with your naked eye is almost impossible, and normal photographic flash units can’t truly capture the impact that a bullet makes after hitting an object. Flickr user alan_sailer knows a thing or two about high speed photography – not only does his super-duper flash unit produces a flash of light around a microsecond (a millionth of a second) but his setup also uses an automatic trigger mechanism.

His photographs are taken in darkness, and as the bullet passes through a laser beam, the flash is triggered, and the image is captured. Here’s a small gallery of this shots:

See more of alan_sailer’s photography on Flickr.

[via futurebackwards on Twitter]

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Arty Awesomeness Featured Photoworthy

Okinawa Soba and his Photos from Old Japan

I could easily spend many hours looking through the photostream of Flickr user Okinawa Soba. He has posted hundreds of interesting photos of the 19th and early 20th century life in Japan, China, America, and Africa.  His comments are pretty insightful as well.

Here are three I quickly picked out from old Japan – click to embiggen.

Taken from his SWIMSUIT GIRLS of OLD JAPAN set, this photo is of the popular geisha, Miss Koman.

In 1904, out of thousands of Geisha in the Tokyo area, she was considered by Japanese writer and poet YONE NOGUCHI to be one of the top five in popularity, commanding top price to entertain you, and having legions of adoring fans who could only hope to catch a glimpse of her.

From his PROSTITUTES of Old Japan set, this circa 1890-1900 image shows caged prostitutes and a prospective customer. If the customer finds a prostitute he is interested in, he will light his pipe and pass it through the bars to her. She takes a puff as a sign of acceptance and passes the pipe back through the bars to seal the deal.

Lifted of his SAMURAI, SWORDS, and ARMOR set, this image shows three samurai posing, and yes the one in the middle has a tail. Why? Perhaps he is gay. Apparently the real Samurai held GAY LOVE in high esteem, and encouraged it saying it was considered beneficial for the youth, teaching him virtue, honesty, and the appreciation of beauty.

……..Shudō is the Japanese tradition of age-structured homosexuality prevalent in samurai society from the medieval period until the end of the 19th century. The word is an abbreviation of wakashudō (若衆道), “the way of the young” or more precisely, “the way of young (若 waka) men (衆 shū)”. The “dō” (道) is related to the Chinese word tao, considered to be a structured discipline and body of knowledge, as well as a path to awakening.

See many, many more photos on Okinawa Soba photostream.