Brecht Vandenbroucke

Carl Warner's Foodscapes

At first glance, these images look like painted landscapes, including towering hills, mad sea and stormy weather in the background. However, if you look a little more closely you will see that the sea and storm were made of cabbage, in other photo trees are broccoli and the hills are baked potatoes. These aren’t paintings but true photos! Also everything you can see in the photograph is made of real food! Pictures were photographed by Carl Warner, a photographer who works in London, and who made specialty of these food landscapes or how I like to call them – ‘foodscapes‘. In recent years he has been commissioned by many advertising agencies throughout Europe to produce his distinctive images for clients in the food industry. Each scene is photographed in layers from foreground to background.
The process is very time consuming, and so the food quickly wilts under the lights. Carl originally began his career by going to art college, and thought he might become an illustrator since he had a talent for drawing. However he discovered that he really enjoyed photography as a fast and exciting medium to work in.
Carl says “I tend to draw a very conventional landscape as I need to fool the viewer into thinking it is a real scene at first glance. It is the realization of what the real ingredients are that brings a smile, and for me that’s the best part.” These images can take two or three days to build and photograph, with a couple more days spent retouching and fine tuning the images to blend all the elements together. Carl devotes a lot of time to planning each image before he starts shooting, and he spends a lot of time staring at vegetables in supermarkets, which can make him seem a little odd!

Towering Sculptures Made of Flowers on Display at Bloemencorso, A Flower Parade in Zundert, Netherlands

Aside from being consistently ranked as one of the best countries to live in on Earth, file this as reason #4,123 to stop by the Netherlands: Bloemencorso, the annual parade of flowers in Zundert. That’s right, every float here is made from natural flowers, specifically dahlias. From twisting architectural structures the size of houses to bizarre animatronic birds and puppets, and even animals made from swooping gestures reminiscent of graffiti, Bloemencorso seems to have a little bit of everything. Despite the relatively small nature of Zundert (a small town north east of Belgium with a population of about 20,000) the variety of and ingenuity of these sculptures seems to know no bounds. I’ve embedded an hour-long video of the entire parade from 2012 above, it’s worth skipping around a bit to see everything, and you can see more videos on the event website and in this gallery. Want to see it in person? You’ll need to wait until next year, the next event happens September 1 and 2 of 2013. (thnx, kjeld!)

Street Art By Shida