Gina

Justin Van Genderen gets hired to do a lot of advertisements and photo processing for big companies; his work often features paint splashes, light trails, and smoke effects. While most of those works are bright and exuberant, there’s something about his personal works that are darker and much more interesting to me. I’ve seen a lot of shoddily done photo manipulations in my days- lord knows Deviant Art is full of emo girls who spend hours carefully blowing out the contrast and slapping multi-hued butterfly wings on photos just this side of homegrown. Justin’s are anything but, with carefully created landscapes and environments that toe the line on the border of dark and slightly malevolent. Check out a gallery of his fascinating work after the jump.

As Occupy Wall Street continues, the emotions for everyone involved are running higher with each passing day. With the addition of veterans, solidarity statements from around the world, and other cities experiencing their own versions of the protest, we know this is a standoff that won’t end easily. Regardless of where you stand and how you feel about any of the participants and their actions, this incredible display is going to change the world we know. It’s one thing to see the thousands of amazing photographs of this important slice of history, but London artist Guy Denning has begun chronicling these world altering events in simple swirls of charcoal and conte. There’s a tremendous sense of emotion and movement in these incredible pieces, even though they appear hastily sketched on whatever was close at hand. Check a gallery of these dramatic works after the jump.

Who didn’t want to be an astronaut when they were a kid? We dreamed of aliens in bubble helmets and laser guns in rockets, but as we get older we see the strange dichotomy of heightened public and professional interest and waning monetary support for space exploration. Regardless, most of us will never get up there, and what we see is filtered down to us with less chest bursters and moon civilizations, but infinitely more wonder and beauty than we could have ever imagined. This video, carefully crafted by Michael Konig, is a stunning skim over the incredible views we never imagined as children.