Water Wigs by Tim Tadder

Inspiring photographer Tim Tadder and his series of Water Wigs photos.

These shots made his bald (or bald-capped) subjects look as if they had hair made of water, and required incredibly precise timing — and this video shows just how he did it.

Taking a look at the shapes of the “hair” in the resulting photos, it’s pretty easy to figure out how the pics are taken. Tadder’s assistants carefully place or drop differently shaped water balloons onto the models’ heads as he attempts to capture the ideal water wig shot.

Capturing the photos at the perfect time and freezing the action properly, however, is far from easy. His technique requires that the studio be completely dark (even a small flashlight can cause problems) and as much as we’re sure his models enjoyed having balloons thrown hard at their heads, Tadder eventually decided to start taping thumbtacks to their bald heads or bald caps to facilitate the perfect pop.

Each pop is unpredictable, and more often than not leads to an un-usable shot, but when he gets it right, the results are pretty darn cool.

Erik Johansson Photography

Photographer Erik Johannson creates impossible but photorealistic images that capture an idea, not a moment.

Erik Johannson is a self-taught photograher who learned how to retouch photos to make impossible and extraordinary images. Growing up with a grandmother who painted and a penchant for escaping into the other worlds of video games, he naturally blended the two into a technique using computers to generate images that couldn't be captured by a camera.

Check the website or TED talk.

Lithuanian photographer Tadas Černiauskas and his 'Blow Job' photography

Lithuanian photographer Tadas Černiauskas held a very special photo shoot. People visiting his studio (as part of Vilnius Design Weekend) were literally blown away by a strong current of air. Tadas called his photo session fittingly “Blow Job”.

Michael Hughes’ Souvenirs

Ben Heine and Jason Powell were both inspired by Michael Hughes' souvenirs photography series! Not surprised now, why when discovered all three of them I thought that something should be in common. Actually, I thought that is one photographer. Oops..

Michael Hughes, who works as a freelance photographer in Germany, has created a set of optical illusions in which tacky souvenir replicas of famous landmarks are placed in front of the real thing.

Jason Powell looking into the past

If you remember “Pencil versus Camera” project by Ben Heine then this is something really similar, however this time Jason Powell allows us to look into the past.

Images are made by finding old photographs of places, printing them out, and then holding the print up in the modern day location that the original photograph was taken. Jason says that so far, most of the historical images have been available for free at the Library of Congress.

The artist still continues to add new photos to his series, and even created a flickr group for people who want to do similar pictures.

Peter Menzel or 'what the world eats'

Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book "Hungry Planet".
In the book Hungry Planet, photographer Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio present a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week. Each family's profile includes a detailed description of their weekly food purchases; photographs of the family at home, at market, and in their community; and a portrait of the entire family surrounded by a week's worth of groceries.

To assemble this remarkable comparison, Menzel and D'Aluisio traveled to 24 countries and visited 30 families from Bhutan and Bosnia to Mexico and Mongolia, and recorded what they ate for a week. Menzel photographed each family in their kitchen with the week’s worth of groceries, while D’Alusio interviewed them about their food habits and family structure. Accompanying the portraits and narratives are detailed breakdowns of each family’s grocery list, more photographs of the family and home country, and statistics for each country visited.

Here is a selection of pictures from the book. Note: the book was made about 5 years ago, and the prices were of that time.

Japan: The Ukita family of Kodaira City
Food expenditure for one week: 37,699 Yen or $317.25
Favorite foods: sashimi, fruit, cake, potato chips

Italy: The Manzo family of Sicily
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11
Favorite foods: fish, pasta with ragu, hot dogs, frozen fish sticks

Hyper-Realistic acrylic body painting by Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade is a 25-year-old artist whose work lies at the intersection of painting, photography, performance, and installation.

Rather than creating representational paintings on a flat canvas, Alexa Meade creates her representational paintings directly on top of the physical subjects that she is referencing. When photographed, the representational painting and the subject being referenced appear to be one and the same as the 3D space of her painted scenes becomes optically compressed into a 2D plane.

Liz Hickok Jell-O photography

Liz Hickok is a San Francisco-based artist working in photography, video, sculpture, installation, and currently, Jell-O. Hickok received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. She earned a BFA and BA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. Hickok lived and worked in Boston for over ten years before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Hickok’s San Francisco in Jell-O series has become a popular subject of media coverage, such as The New York Times, NPR, and The CBS Early Show.

San Francisco-based installation artist Liz Hickok recreates famous skylines and landmarks using Jell-O as her construction material. “Remade in an unexpected material, seemingly permanent architectural structures are transformed into something precarious and ephemeral,” she explains in an interview with Inhabitat. “Their fragility quickly becomes a metaphor for the transitory nature of human artifacts.” Click through to check out her jiggly versions of New York City, San Francisco, and the White House.

Li Wei photography

Li Wei is a contemporary artist from Beijing, China. His work often depicts him in apparently gravity-defying situations. Wei started off his performance series, Mirroring, and later on took off attention with his Falls series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages and works with the help of props such as mirror, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics.

Once more, there is no photoshop involved!

  For this picture you can see the video about how it was created.

Victor Enrich

“If some day somebody makes buildings the way I paint them, I think that the world will have gone mad”

Victor Enrich is a Spanish photographer who rips all the science from architecture to create surreal and whimsical variations on existing buildings. A tower unzips, a road goes straight up, and multi-story slides protrude from balconies. These buildings cannot possibly exist, but in a sense, they do.

Enrich starts with his own photos of actual places, then he spends a month digitally editing each shot. The goal is “realism,” and by working wholly from real-world building blocks, his buildings come off as remarkably authentic and, often, almost possible. Much of his work is a mere half step from plausible, which makes it so much fun to the eye.

 

“Most architects respect the law 'form follows function’ … my 'buildings’ definitely don’t have an architectonic function … but they DO have other functions …” writes Enrich. That function is, more often than not, sly cultural commentary buried under a layer of Enrich’s sense of humor. He renders the Orchid Hotel of Tel Aviv with sprouting top floors, each in an arms race to have the best view. But, at a more visceral level, you feel like you’re looking at french fries--then look a bit closer, and you’ll spot the McDonald’s near the first floor.

Irina Werning

BACK TO THE FUTURE project by Irina Werning

CECILE IN 1987 & 2010, France

 PANCHO IN 1983 & 2010, Buenos Aires

 

Ben Heine

Belgium artist and photographer - Ben Heine!
It was him that started creating portraits from circles (http://www.flickr.com/photos/benheine/sets/72157623553428960/detail/)
But today I want to tell you about his ‘Pencil vs Camera’ series! More than 60 captures.. and it’s just amazing!