Gazing at any one of these stretched-out, gravity-defying landscape photos, you feel like you’re at the pinnacle of a rollercoaster, about to zoom down to ground level. Except instead of being elevated on an artificial track, you’re on flat ground, positioned at the high end of a nearly 90-degree angle with no care for gravity. Turkish artist Aydin Büyüktas warps American landscapes, nearly doubling them in half to show multiple perspectives at once.

A continuation of the ‘Flatlands’ series, which previously saw similar manipulations of urban Turkey, the images draw on a satirical sci-fi novella by Edwin Abbot entitled ‘Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.’ To create the images, Büyüktas flies drones over his chosen setting to capture aerial images and then uses 3D software to stitch the images together.

The scenes chosen for Flatlands II include the pits of mines, desolate desert roads, junkyards, train yards, farms, bridges and empty parking lots. Büyüktas flew his camera-equipped quadcopter total of about 10,000 miles to capture thousands of photos. The finished series required about two months of planning, a month of photography and many more months of digital composition.

“We live in places that most of the time don’t draw our attention, places that transform our memories, places that the artist gives another dimension; where the perceptions that generally crosses our minds will be demolished and new ones will arise,” says the artist. “These works aim to leave the viewer alone with a surprising visuality ironic as well, multidimensional romantic point of view.”

Reality is malleable and nothing is quite as it seems in the surreal world of photographer Erik Johansson, who takes hundreds of photos of a single subject, merges them together and digitally manipulates them to produce optical illusions and the strangest of scenes. Often, these subjects are creating the illusions themselves, changing their environment in unexpected ways.

A single woman spreads a snowy landscape by way of a giant white quilt, while a man climbs a ladder to erect pleasantly sunny surroundings like wallpaper to replace his dreary reality. Roads cut with giant scissors curl like fabric. Houses and streets are seen from multiple perspectives at once, M.C. Escher-style.

The Swedish-born, self-taught photographer starts with a sketch and begins the planning process, which can take months or even years for each shoot. “This is the most important step as it defines the look and feel of the photo, it’s my raw material,” says Johansson. “This step also includes problem solving, how to make the reflections, materials etc. realistic.”

Curious about the whole process? Johansson offers a layer-by-layer breakdown of his image “Let’s Leave” in the video above. Check out some of the artist’s earlier work, too.

Murdered gangsters, car crashes and four-alarm fires are nearly forgotten in the peaceful present day, but this photo series reminds us that the past is not so far away. Photographer Marc A. Hermann, a historian with the New York Press Photographers Association, lays old New York City crime scene photos on top of their present-day locations for dramatic juxtapositions of time period and mood.

Warning: these are real crime scene photos, and aren’t for the faint of heart. The very recently deceased are seen cradled in the arms of their loved ones, or sprawled out on the floor. The top photo depicts a distraught woman who climbed onto the ledge of her building; the second shows the Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary aflame.

The demise of gangsters Salvatore ‘Sammy’ Santoro and Frankie Yale can be seen after a shooting and a car crash, respectively. A woman hides her face in mourning of her sister in front of the ruins of a car. Firefighters battle a blaze at the Elkins Paper & Twine Co. that claimed the lives of six people.

In each photograph, the black-and-white historical image contrasts sharply with the modernized full-color setting. Tourists stroll past the scenes of some of the city’s most tragic disasters, completely unaware. The message seems to be that life goes on, but the ghostly imprints of those incidents remain. See the full series at New York Daily News.

Digital photography innovations have led to cameras that can capture images at the speed of light, see the world from the compound eye of an insect or describe scenes via speech for the visually impaired. Some of these strange and amazing digital cameras will even remember your preferred settings using iris recognition software, spit out descriptive text with the help of virtual workers around the world, or activate only at the touch of strangers.

Touchy Camera for Social Anxiety

The wearer of this odd-looking camera helmet is entirely in the dark – literally – until touched by another person. When continuous physical contact is maintained between the camera, ‘Touchy’, and an outside person, the eye-hole shutters are activated. This gives the wearer back his or her own vision, and captures images every ten seconds. The creators note that we’re all separated into social bubbles, avoiding connection with strangers. “However, technologies like internet social networking or the mobile phone loosens social boundaries, hence dehumanizing physical communication. to a certain extent, it generates social anxiety such as the one experienced in the ‘hikikomori’ and ‘otaku’ cultures in Japan. Touchy criticizes this phenomenon and suggests a solution by transforming the human being into a social device: a camera. the touchy project investigates how such a device improves social life, presupposing that a camera is a known tool for sharing memories, valuable moments, enjoyment, emotions, beauty and so forth’.

Iris Camera

Iris is an eye-tracking camera that you control by blinking and squinting. It uses biometric technology to recognize users’ faces through their unique iris signatures, automatically loading their preferred settings including aperture, ISO and screen display. Zoom in and out by widening your eyelids, and take a photo by holding your gaze before double-blinking.

Panoramic Camera Ball

This incredible throwable camera captures photos of scenes from thirty-six individual lenses to create a continuous spherical landscape. The modules are mounted in a 3D-printed enclosure resembling a soccer ball, which is padded with foam and contains an accelerometer that helps predict rise time to the highest point of a throw. At that point, the exposure is triggered. Once the ball is caught, pictures are downloaded automatically via USB and shown in a spherical panoramic viewer so you can explore the full representation of the scene.

Descriptive Camera

Imagine having an army of virtual slaves at your command who help you organize your photo collection by printing a description of what each picture contains. That’s essentially what the Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson achieves, taking advantage of people who perform menial online tasks for a few pennies at a time via the Amazon Mechanical Turk API. You take a photo and a worker receives it instantly via IM, typing up a description that the camera will then print on a receipt. The whole process takes three to six minutes, and the quality of the description may vary. One example: “Looks like a cupboard which is ugly and old having name plates on it with a  sturdy lamp attached to it.”

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Photofuture 13 Innovative Intelligent Digital Cameras

People around the world shed a little tear when Polaroid announced that it would stop producing the instant film that had become synonymous with the company’s name. The folks at The Impossible Project took up the torch and began producing instant film for Polaroid instant cameras, but they also realized that the photography world has changed significantly. They set out to produce something that was distinctly Polaroid, but that would also cater to the new generation of photographers who use their iPhones as their primary cameras.

(all images via: The Impossible Project)

The Impossible Instant Lab combines the best qualities of instant film photography and iPhone photography to create something entirely new and kind of magical. The device is more or less an iPhone cradle that turns digital photos into instant analog photo prints that you can actually touch, write on, and hand off to friends.

The portable “lab” makes it simple to turn iPhone photographs into physical instant film photos. Using the Instant Lab iPhone app, you pick the photo you want to print. Place the iPhone on the cradle, open the device’s shutter, and push a button to eject the exposed photo. That’s it – your high-tech digital photo is now a retro, low-tech, completely awesome Polaroid.

There are, of course, plenty of wi-fi and Bluetooth photo printers that can spit out hard copies of digital iPhone photos. The Impossible Instant Lab isn’t for the people who are satisfied with those pictures. This gadget is for the people who have felt like something is missing from their lives ever since Polaroid abandoned their instant photograph fans.