Photography meets Illustration

See the full photo set here

chris jordan

Chris Jordan is a US based photographer who is doing some really interesting portraits of America. His fascination with patterns in consumerism have driven him to take pictures of the effects of our ceaseless consumption upon our environment. Often his work is only revealed upon closer inspection as you look closely at the work and see that what looks like a beautiful and colourful pattern is in fact a mass of plastic bags. His work is often significant in the numbers he uses: the quantity of cell phones thrown away each week, for example. Some of his work is photoshopped and some isn't. His reflection on the devastation of Hurrican Katrina shows his interest in the way mother nature can wreck havoc back on her unworthy inhabitants. Powerful stuff. And some genuinely unique photography and artworks.

running the numbers

intolerable beauty

in katrina's wake

javier ferrer vidal

I am totally blown away by this site for photographer Javier Ferrer Vidal who is in himself a fantastic photographer who concentrates on portrait work. This flash site is slick to the enth degree. The opening view of the kid in glasses has been broken up in Photoshop and put on layers within flash to create this really slick parallax effect. Little details like the plane flying through the sky really add to the drama of this shot. This kind of parallax thing is VERY in vogue at the moment and I can think of quite a few examples of this being implemented really well (check out this months winner over at the IAB for a good example). I am actually deeply involved in a project now for a client who wants this effect to showcase their product.

As you delve deeper into this site you get to the photography which is all laid out in a 3D space in a haphazard manner. Rolling over one image turns it to greyscale and blurred (god bless flash 8) and clicking on an image gives you an enlarged version. The navigation throughout is simple. One click to zoom in and another to zoom out. This style of navigation is quite intuitive these days and it is pretty much a given that by clicking on the background it will take you back out. I think this kind of work will lead nicely into any multi-touch work that may come in the future as we figure out what kind of gestures will work for this new interface (check out my other blog posts on multi-touch).

And then to finish off there is the contact section with an underlying bit of video as a background of some people on a merry-go-round. As you move your mouse right they playhead goes forward and as you move left it goes back. Yes this is really simple to implement but the effect is perfect especially given the subject of the video. Oh and underpinning all this work is a sound track of considerable talent. It is perfectly fitting and really quite catchy. All round a great site, perfectly exectued in my mind.

photographing kids

It was an absolutely gorgeous day yesterday and quite a surprise for April. It was like a hot summer's day without a cloud in the sky. I took the opportunity to do some photography as we were visiting my Aunt in Sussex, it being my neice's 5th birthday and my cousin's 16th. Naturally the focus of the day was on the kids and I got chance to use my trusty Canon 350D SLR. I set the camera to black and white mode. Now I know I could do this in Photoshop but there is some satisfaction gained from shooting in B&W from the outset as you are really looking for movement and pattern over colour. It is also great when previewing as I am often inspired to take different shots to when I shoot in colour. It's not an obvious work flow for having a digital camera but one I find satisfying. You do have to be careful when doing this as no colour information is recorded and no way of turning a b&w image into a colour one. So taking photographs of kids....my advice: stick the camera on continuous shutter mode and fire away. You will need a big memory card but the results are worth it. Yes you are going to discard 95% of your images but you will capture that glint in the eye or that look of total amazement which you will never capture any other way. Get the kids busy as well. Have an activity. There is nothing worse than posed kids pictures. They are much more alive when playing and immersed in something. I also set my camera to manual focus for most of the day so that I could really keep the attention on what I wanted to whilst blurring background elements out. It is also really interesting to have the focus on something else and have the kids blurry as often they are bouncing about anyway. Check out my flickr photoset here.

denis darzacq

I am really liking Denis Darzacq's photography. He manages to capture a snippet of time and reveal it to look like something else. Here he captures his subjects as they seem to float in the air. The effect is stunning. Obviously what he is doing is capturing gymnasts mid flight with a fast shutter. But there is something about these floating bodies juxtaposed against the urban backdrop that make this photo set really interesting....

milk meets coffee

Check out this superb set of macro photographs. Taken as a drop of milk hits the hot surface of a cup of coffee. The results are spectacular and is a great way to view a normally mundane event. Enjoy ;)

seb przd

Check out Seb Przd's flickr set here. This guy is a master of using some extraordinary camera techniques to create some startling images. He has some great panoramic equipment coupled with some powerful photoshop plug-ins to create these gems. He has Escherized some pictures to create awesome spiral comped images like this one. His Stereographic Projections like the example pictures I have included can be seen here. And some great cloning work is found in this flickr set of his.

sky view

With an emphasis on colour and pattern this photo set really is absolutely gorgeous. I seem to remember a book called Earth from Above and I hope that this site isn't just a blatent copy of images from there. I absolutely love the photographer's (of which I'm sure there are many) eye for capturing the beauty that surrounds us, be it a focus on colour, texture or shape. Some absolutely jaw-dropping sites to be seen here.

lapses in light

This is worth watching if only for the Ferris wheel at the start and the night's sky at the end. I'm assuming that this is done by piecing together time-lapsed photographs. Very nicely done and a great effect. As you can tell if you follow my blog I am a bit obsessed with time-lapse and stop-motion at the moment. I feel a project coming on :)

crazy creations

Some weird and wacky 'what if' pictures here. Ok some are brilliant and some aren't so good but the ideas are all wonderful. The first set features what might happen if God were a little more sadistic in his nature and thus create these bizarre mutations. The second set shows Mother Nature's more twisted side as animal meet vegetable to generate these twisted veggies. And the last set falls into the hands of man as he toils away in his lab to meld animal and machine into these crazy cyborgs.

Between you and me

This movie was filmed in what is in my mind a new medium. Stop motion burst photography. So by using a digital camera's burst mode you can fire off a series of images one after the other. By piecing these images together you create a stop-motion effect. I think this achieves a rather unique look and would be great to use in a viral ad campaign.

Between you and me has won loads of awards including the SeNef Mobile Grand Prix at Seoul Film Festival, Best Experimental Film at the Tiburon International Film Festival, Best Cinematography at the Gotham City International Film Festival, Best Short Film at the Vilnius Independent Film & Video Festival and in the Experimental Film category at Big Apple Film Festival. It was written and directed by Patryk Rebisz.

mono face

Happy New Year!!!! I can't actually believe it is 2007. But it is so I guess that means another chance to get it right. I stumbled across this site today and had to share (click here to access monoface). It really is just buckets of fun. A simple premise made even better by gorgeous photography and a tight clean layout. Swap the heads, eyes, mouths and noses around to create some weird and wacky Frankenstein's monsters. There are 759,375 possibilities and I want to see yours. Email me your version and I'll stick it up on the blog (screen grab the image: Shift, Apple 4 on a mac and press Print Page button on a PC I think).

Jeremy Willmott



Michael Parsons



Thomas Major