Caren Alpert makes a living taking recognizable photos of food. This led to her interest in showing the landscapes, patterns, and textures of different foods. Her intention was to create a completely new response to food from her viewers, and it sure has.
"Photographs taken with electron microscopes have seized my interest because of their mystery and simultaneous familiarity. This medium deconstructs, abstracts, and reveals the ordinary in a riveting way. The closer the lens got, the more I saw food - and consumers of food - as part of a larger eco-system.
There's so much rhetoric in our culture around food: food science, food journalism, food history, and food how-to. It is my hope that these photographs might transform our food obsession into a newfound closeness with what nourishes us."
Make sure to check out the rest of her awesome food closeups at her web gallery.
These are some great photos taken by Abelardo Morell using the camera obscura technique. Here's a good description taken from PDN's Photo of the Day:
"Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura technique has taken him from photographing his own living room to interiors across the globe. “One of the satisfactions I get from making this imagery comes from my seeing the weird and yet natural marriage of the inside and outside”, he says. In setting up a room to make this kind of photograph he covers all windows with plastic in order to achieve total darkness. Then he cuts one small hole in the materials that he uses to cover the windows. An inverted image of the view outside then floods onto the walls in the room. He focuses the large-format camera on the incoming image on the wall and exposes the film.
Morell recently designed a light proof tent that, via periscope type optics, makes it possible to project a view of the nearby landscape onto whatever ground is under the tent. Inside this darkened space he uses a view camera to record the effect. He says, “I think it is a rather wonderful sandwich of two outdoor realities coming together. This Tent-Camera now liberates me to use camera obscura techniques in a world of new places. I now have a portable room, so to speak.”"
I especially like the ones where the image is projected onto textured surfaces. They just give the images a unique and interesting look.