(Really) Stunning Pictures and Photos

Smashing Magazine:
Photography is a very powerful medium and a very difficult craft. Excellent photos don’t only display some facts — they tell stories, awake feelings and manage to share with the audience the emotions a photographer experienced when clicking the shot button. Taking excellent pictures is damn hard as you need to find a perfect perspective and consider the perfect timing. To achieve brilliant photography you need practice and patience. However, it is worth it: the results can be truly stunning.
Below you’ll find 50 brilliant photos and stunning pictures — some pictures tell stories, some are incredibly beautiful, some are funny and some are very sad.
All pictures are copyright of their respective owners. Please explore the further work of the photographers by browsing through their work. We’ve tried to cover different themes so that everybody will find something interesting and spectacular for himself / herself. All screenshots are linked und lead to the pages from which they’ve been taken.
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(Really) Stunning Pictures and Photos
1. Water and a Girl
Beautiful composition, excellent scenery, amazing play of colors.

2. The Ball is Coming!
Analogue shot with Seagull 6×6 (Chinese clone of Rolleiflex), made in 1983. “The gulfball is suspended on a fishing line in front of the camera. It was…

Inspirational Hyperreal Vector Artists and Images

Smashing Magazine:
by Sean Hodge
Hyperrealism is an art movement,which requires the same level of technical ability as photorealistic illustration. To get an idea what is actually meant by that, you can take a look at some excellent examples in the post The World’s Most Photorealistic Vector Art. While Hyperrealism brings a similar level of skill to images, this style allows the artist to creatively interpret an image. In Hyperrealism artists utilize ethereal lighting effects, depth of field techniques, and camera style perspective to depict the images. They create images that are imaginatively realistic.
Often artists that work in Hyperrealism have other interests as well. These vary by subject matter and style. Some of the artists listed below are interested in Vexel styles, Digitalization, Classic Airbrush Painting, and have been influenced by a myriad of other styles. We’ve included work that ranges from strong Hyperrealism to work that is more a stylization of reality.
This kind of artwork is often created using Illustrator’s Gradient Mesh Tool, though not always. You’ll see that some of the artists create artwork with a fantastic level of detail, using many flat shapes. Illustrator is the most popular program for creating Hyperreal Vector art. Artists also use Flash and other vector programs as well.
Hyperreal Vector Artists
Cristiano Siqueira
Chistiano is an accomplished illustrator from Brazil. He has multiple vector stylistic influences. He has some works in vexel styles, cartoon styles, realistic styles, hyperrealistic styles, and various mixtures of these. The work depicted below has a…