Portraits

Ryan Zinke Unveils Official Portrait Featuring National Monument He Shrunk

It’s portrait season in Washington, DC. The latest Trump official to get the official portrait treatment is scandal-plagued former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. He unveiled his official portrait (as well as an unofficial joke one) that will serve as a reminder of his greatest accomplishment during his tenure: shrinking a national monument that tribes hold…

Earther Brian Kahn Dec 9

Watch an Artist Spend 90 Hours Drawing a Million Dots to Make a Portrait

Artists David Bayo’s skills are all the more impressive when you lean it to get a closer look at his work. Instead of carefully applied brush strokes, he creates lifelike portraits by laying down dots, millions of them, in a painstaking process that required over 90 hours of work for this simple black and white…

Sploid Andrew Liszewski Jul 21

Creepy photoshopped portraits of human-plant hybrids

French artist Cal Redback is a master of digital photo retouching. His new work, called Treebeards, is a collection of creepy hyper-realistic portraits of human-plant hybrids and a clear proof of his amazing Photoshop skills. Cal Redback is a profesional photographer and retoucher based in Paris, France. You can follow his work on Behance, Fliker,…

Sploid Omar Kardoudi Feb 23

Timeless Portraits Created On Obsolete Floppy Disks And Film

Floppy disks and film negatives get a second life as the canvases for British artist Nick Gentry’s portraits. While his materials may consist of obsolete technology, the results are haunting and often curiously futuristic. Infinite Echoes, 2009 Navigator, 2010 Auto Emotion, 2010 History, 2010 Status, 2010 Time Machine, 2011 Residual Memory, 2011 Lucid heart, 2011…

io9 Vincze Miklós Nov 4

These Street Portraits Are the Most Beautiful Tribute to Halloween

We are all bombarded with droves of kitschy, over-the-top representations of Halloween every year. That’s why it’s so refreshing to look at the stunning work of the photographer who calls himself Joey L. His black and white portraits taken in Brooklyn in 2010 embrace the softer side of our bizarre dress-up rituals. In Joey L.’s…

Tech News Michael Hession Oct 31

How to Make People Feel Comfortable In Front of a Camera (With Science)

Many people, even those who are usually confident and outgoing, can shrink into themselves in front of a camera. In this video, headshot photographer Peter Hurley teams up with psychologist Anna Rowley to explain how you can overcome that problem. Calling the topic Psyphotology—clever—the pair recount during this TEDxCambridge talk how Hurley once even struggled…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe Oct 31

Shooting Challenge: Halloween Costumes

It’s the greatest holiday of the year. You get to freak people out, and you get unlimited candy for it. So for this week’s Shooting Challenge, photograph a fantastic Halloween costume. The Challenge Take a photo of someone (or someones) dressed up for Halloween. And, you know, make it look cool or interesting somehow. The…

Tech News Mark Wilson Oct 30

This Photographer Documents the Faces Of a Single Harlem Street Corner

Taking pictures of strangers is hard no matter where you are photographing. On the streets of Harlem, Khalik Allah takes the utmost care to approach his subjects with confidence and purpose in order to capture his wonderfully evocative portraits of the New York neighborhood. This video from Time’s Lightbox show’s Allah at work. Photographing the…

Tech News Michael Hession Oct 15

Can you guess the rock bands pictured in these surreal portraits?

Ludovic Ismaël and Nicolas Delille propose these playful series of portraits mixing photography and 3D. The goal is to guess the name of the famous rock&roll bands pictured in each of these portraits. I struggled to figure out two of them. How about you? SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on…

Sploid Omar Kardoudi Sep 22

Upside-Down Portraits Of Human Faces Look Like Creatures From Space

How do you make the human look inhuman? Photographer Anelia Loubser inverts and carefully crops photographs of people’s faces, transforming them into bizarre alien creatures. Loubser’s Alienation series is all about challenging our perspective by presenting something familiar in an unfamiliar way. Once we see those human eyes, we search for a face in the…

io9 Lauren Davis Sep 3

Slow motion video captures people’s faces as they get hit with tasers

Photographer Patrick Hall took a series of portraits of people getting hit with a 300,000-volt taser. What’s even better: He also made a super-slow-motion video of the process for our enjoyment. According to Hall, the taser was strong enough to get the facial expressions he wanted but it couldn’t hurt them in any way. Check…

Sploid Omar Kardoudi Aug 26

A Poignant Look at Life in America’s Trailer Parks

A lot of people turn their noses up at trailer parks. That’s unfair, and David Waldorf’s photo essay about the Brookside Trailer Park in Sonoma, California show us that there’s beauty everywhere, trailer parks included. Waldorf spent years driving to Brookside in a Uhaul that he’d set up to be a mobile studio. The accomplished…

Tech News Adam Clark Estes Aug 15

Donuts that look like people

I’m used to seeing portraits of dogs that look like their owners, but donuts that look like the people that eat them (ish), man, that’s something I’ve never seen in my entire life. The video was made by Brandon Voges for the National Restaurant Association’s annual food show. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome…

Sploid Omar Kardoudi May 26

Artist speed paints a painting you can’t see until the very last second

Speed painting can be purposefully misleading but it’s always fun to have your brain pump in that delayed “Ohhhh” reaction once you realize what’s going on. You feel like a complete idiot with your mouth open until you see it. And even then, you’re not completely sure it’s not sorcery. Here’s one of those sorcery…

Sploid Casey Chan Mar 20

Portraits of people deformed by Scotch tape are hilariously freaky

Jenna Garrett at Feature Shot highlights these great portraits by Albuquerque-based photographerWes Naman, who uses transparent tape Scotch tape to deform his subjects into comical monsters. Never taking more than 10 minutes to apply his effect, Naman uses photography to stretch and squeeze everyday people into fantastically freaky creatures. SPLOID is a new blog about…

Sploid Jesus Diaz Mar 5

Creepy Portraits of People Taken by a Desktop Scanner

When you put sandwiches in a desktop scanner, the result is delicious. When you put humans, the result… lies somewhere in the uncanny valley. German artist Till Koeeneker created these full-size portraits of her closest friends and family members with an ordinary desktop scanner. Each one of these scanner portraits gets up close and personal,…

Tech News Sarah Zhang Jan 22

Artist embroiders portraits into his own flesh—and then tears them out

Some people get portrait tattoos, but artist David Catá has a different way to pay tribute to the people who have marked his life—by marking his hand. He embroiders their faces into the palm of his left hand, and then pulls them out in cringe-inducing fashion. Catá calls his Under the Skin project an “autobiographical…

io9 Lauren Davis Jan 17

Ghostly Thermal Imaging Portraits are Eerie and Fascinating

A few years ago, photographer Linda Alterwitz was inspired by an episode of Cops to start taking photos using a borrowed thermographic camera. The results are compelling and a bit eerie. The photo above is Alterwitz’s German Shepherd, Ruby. This photo is part of Alterwitz’s Thermal Series, specifically the canine subseries. Shot with the thermographic…

io9 Katharine Trendacosta Oct 13

Shooting Challenge: Inked

Taking photos of other people’s art is generally not good photographic practice. But what about when art melds with the human form? For this week’s Shooting Challenge, you’re going to photograph a tattoo. The Challenge Take a photograph in which a tattoo is the focus. The Method Most tattoo photography is pretty horrible. Some dude…

Tech News Mark Wilson Aug 28

The Amazing Art of Perfect Portrait Photography

A well-shot portrait is an amazing thing: it can reveal hidden depths of personality and convey layers upon layers of emotional complexity. This video tries to get to the bottom of what makes the perfect portrait photograph. Perhaps understandably, that’s no easy task, and there’s talk of philosophy and feelings as much as insight and…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe Aug 22

Portraits

Ryan Zinke Unveils Official Portrait Featuring National Monument He Shrunk

Watch an Artist Spend 90 Hours Drawing a Million Dots to Make a Portrait

Creepy photoshopped portraits of human-plant hybrids

Timeless Portraits Created On Obsolete Floppy Disks And Film

These Street Portraits Are the Most Beautiful Tribute to Halloween

How to Make People Feel Comfortable In Front of a Camera (With Science)

Shooting Challenge: Halloween Costumes

This Photographer Documents the Faces Of a Single Harlem Street Corner

Can you guess the rock bands pictured in these surreal portraits?

Upside-Down Portraits Of Human Faces Look Like Creatures From Space

Slow motion video captures people’s faces as they get hit with tasers

A Poignant Look at Life in America’s Trailer Parks

Donuts that look like people

Artist speed paints a painting you can’t see until the very last second

Portraits of people deformed by Scotch tape are hilariously freaky

Creepy Portraits of People Taken by a Desktop Scanner

Artist embroiders portraits into his own flesh—and then tears them out

Ghostly Thermal Imaging Portraits are Eerie and Fascinating

Shooting Challenge: Inked

The Amazing Art of Perfect Portrait Photography

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