A single sweeping shot seems to capture an entire spring season of blooming flowers in this artfully directed time-lapse video, which took three years to record and complete. Filmmaker Jamie Scott captured almost all of the footage on a soundstage in the closet of his New York home, often against a black backdrop, placing the flowers in stark relief as they unfurl.

The sped-up result almost makes them look like sea creatures waving around under the sea, tentatively opening and then closing again as the camera passes over them. Scott started out filming the flowers from the front, but realized the effect was more dramatic if he shot them from above instead, shifting focus as he went.

In a behind-the-scenes interview with F-stoppers, Scott explains that he made the film in contrast to his previous time-lapse work entitled Fall. The difference between the two films isn’t just the season, but also the close-up shots, shallow depth of field, classical score and placing the camera on a slider.

Looking at photographs of highways entirely eaten by vines and destroyed shops filled with trash and cobwebs, it’s easy to downplay their tragedy by comparing them to the set of a post-apocalyptic film. All of these images of Fukushima, Japan, taken four years after the earthquake and tsunami that caused the local nuclear power plant to melt down, almost seem too shocking to be real. But they are, and photographer Arkadiusz Podniesinski doesn’t want you to forget it. Within the exclusion zone, contaminated by radiation, lies a haunting ghost town with signs of its abrupt abandonment strewn everywhere you look.

If this all sounds reminiscent of another nuclear disaster, that’s part of the point of Podniesinski’s photo series. The photographer has visited Chernobyl a number of times over the past seven years, documenting its deterioration and subsequent reclamation by nature in the hopes that he could help remind the world that it’s human error that keeps causing these events to occur.

“It is not earthquakes or tsunami that are to blame for the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, but humans. The report produced by the Japanese parliamentary committee investigating the disaster leaves no doubt about this. The disaster could have been foreseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster.”

“I came to Fukushima as a photographer and a filmmaker, trying above all to put together a story using pictures. I was convinced that seeing the effects of the disaster with my own eyes would mean I could assess the effects of the power station failure and understand the scale of the tragedy, especially the tragedy of the evacuated residents, in a better way. This was a way of drawing my own conclusions without being influenced by any media sensation, government propaganda, or nuclear lobbyists who are trying to play down the effects of the disaster, and pass on the information obtained to as wider a public as possible.”

See dozens more incredible images and read the accompanying story of Podniesinski’s journey through the Fukushima Exclusion Zone on the photographer’s website.

The art of superimposition alters the way we see real-life environments, substituting cut-outs or figurines for 3D elements in the scene and capturing the resulting image on film. This technique can blur the lines between past and present, bring fictional characters to vivid life or otherwise mash up imagery that you wouldn’t normally see together.

We’ve seen striking war imagery juxtaposed with the same locations in the present day, monuments seemingly miniaturized, and Star Wars characters invading urban Paris. Now, Brazilian artist Lorenzo Castellini brings fine art to the streets of her home city of São Paulo by superimposing cut-outs of masterpieces onto real human figures and settings.

A Shell gas station logo becomes the shell from which Botticelli’s Venus springs. A man on the street holding a bottle of Coke turns into Albrecht Dürer. Dali’s melting clocks appear on rocks in the park, and a woman from Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ casually makes her way down a sidewalk.

Similar projects have brought classical paintings to modern contexts, like a fun Photoshop series by Alexey Kondakov that blends religious imagery with unexpected urban settings – putting the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus on the subway, for example, with violin-playing angels as buskers.

The secret lives of superheroes are far more mundane than you might imagine, with the Black Widow helping the Hulk trim his armpit hair, Spiderman scrubbing Captain America’s shield, Thor taking selfies and Wolverine getting fresh with the ladies. Indonesian photographer Edy Hardjo uses high-quality action figures and minimal Photoshop to create funny lifelike scenes of characters from the worlds of DC Comics, Marvel and beyond.

Intrigued by how closely some of the figures resemble the actors that play the characters on film, Hardjo began to wonder whether he could use them to tell some new stories of his own.

The figures are posed in comedic little scenes that play on each character’s personality.

Hardjo relies mostly on the lifelike qualities of the figures themselves, but also uses Photoshop just enough to digitally remove stands and obvious joints.

Behind-the-scene photos showing how each scene is posed can be seen on the artist’s Facebook page.

Movements that may happen to quickly for us to perceive in real time, like the imperceptible swaying of a portrait subject trying to stay still or the multiplication of microscopic crystals as they turn into snowflakes, are stunningly captured in these 14 (more!) time-lapse videos, images and sculptures.

Time Lapse Captures Triple Lightning Strike

Videographer Craig Shimala was filming a time lapse of a storm from his home in Chicago when he just happened to capture an incredibly rare triple lightning strike, with the Willis Tower, the Trump Tower and the John Hancock Buiding being hit at the same time.

Seagull Skytrails

The curves and patterns of seagull flight are revealed in this time-lapse video by Paul Parker, created using the ‘echo’ effect in video editing software After Effects.

Psychedelic Spinning Paint Time Lapse

Just try to look away from this video of the hypnotizing swirls of color created as artist Holton Rower pours paint onto a spinning block.

Paper Portraits by Ryuta Iida

Three minutes of imperceptible movement are compressed into a single layered portrait in this series by Ryuta Iida, in which many layers of photographs of a single subject are stacked and glued together. Each layer is a separate photograph taken over the tree-minute period in which the subject tried to stay still, but once they’re put together, it’s clear that even millimeters of shifting in place make a difference.

Yoga Movements Captured in Sand

Artist Katie Grinnan used sand, plastic and enamel to capture her own body’s movements during her morning yoga routine. “Mirage focuses on the concept of peripersonal space, the space that your body encompasses at its most extended point in every direction, which describes the body’s potential boundary.”

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