Photographer: Maya Beano
Based in: Cambridge, UK (originally from Amman, Jordan)
Username: @mayabeano
Number of followers: 68.4k
Website: mayabeano.com
Signature style: Surrealism with heightened pinks and blues
Why we love her: Maya has an extraordinary way of looking at ordinary things, transforming entire landscapes into surreal dreamscapes of shocking colours and floating shadows. We love the way she turns mundane everyday things into art.
Who: Olimpia Davies
Based in: Chester, England
Username: @olimpia_davies
Number of followers: 3k
Website: artisanfoodphotography.com
Photography subject: Food
Why we love her: Olimpia is a food stylist and we absolutely adore how she makes even ordinary food, like these cherry popsicles, look gourmet through her pictures. We also love how she styles both fresh and cooked food, and proves the old saying true: we really do eat with our eyes first!
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Who: Chris Burkard
Based in: Pismo Beach, California
Username: @chrisburkard
Number of followers: 3.1m
Website: chrisburkard.com
Photography style: Vast aerial landscape shots, often nocturnal ones
Why we love him: Nobody captures the beauty and the expanse of nature quite like he does. We love how he sometimes combines several shots to create images like the one above.
Who: Emma Tempest
Based in: London/New York
Username: @emstempest
Number of followers: 44.1k
Website: emmatempest.com
Photography style: Unique portraits
Why we love her: She’s shot for various international magazines but her best work is still her self-portraits or personal portraits of her friends and models taken in between shots, such as this one. Her avante-garde approach to portraits is visually breathtaking, and she creates it all with very simple props —such as a single plastic sheet!
Who: Tobi Shinobi
Based in: London/Chicago
Username: @tobishinobi
Number of followers: 137k
Website: tobishinobi.com
Photography style: Urban architectural symmetry
Why we love him: Tobi refuses to share the locations of his shoots, because he wants us to go exploring for ourselves and find the patterns in the city around us. We love the dark tones of his pictures, and we also love how he not only inspires us but also encourages us to become creators ourselves.
Who: Daniel Rueda
Based in: Valencia, Spain
Username: @drcuerda
Number of followers: 393k
Website: danielrueda.net
Photography style: Bright, colourful optical illusions
Why we love him: He and his partner, artist Anna Devis, did a photo series in which they found architectural quirks in buildings in and around their hometown and places of travel, and posed with them. We love the whimsical photo series and the way in which they utilised already existing patterns of colours in buildings.
Who: Nicholas Scarpinato
Based in: Los Angeles
Username: @nicholasscarpinato
Number of followers: 41.9k
Website: nicholasscarpinato.com
Photography style: Pastel-coloured surrealist photos with the strongest element being nature
Why we love him: Nicholas’s photos create an otherworldly realm in our own reality with his use of colour. His distortion of our perspective of the world, in the most artistic way, is inspiring.
Who: Damon Baker
Based in: New York City
Username: @damon_baker
Number of followers: 522k
Photography style: Black and white portraits
Why we love him: Damon has taken intuitive, insightful portraits of our fave celebs, like this one of actor Cole Sprouse (above). We love the chiaroscuro in his images and their charcoal sketch-like look.
Who: Tony Kelly
Based in: Los Angeles
Username: @tonykellyworld
Number of followers: 212k
Website: tonykellyworld.com
Photography style: Surrealist glamour
Why we love him: He plays with perspective to create surreal, sensual images of the glamorous world of Hollywood, often playing with nudity. Many of his pictures feature shades of the colour red — the colour of starlets and divas, and they all have the element of surprise.
Who: Brandon Woelfel
Based in: New York
Username: @brandonwoelfel
Number of followers: 2.3m
Website: brandonwoelfel.com
Photography style: Bokeh Why we love him: He creates starry images with string lights and other props, and, what’s better, he shares the raw footage before the editing process and the finished product as well in his stories, so we know how to replicate it by ourselves.
Who: Sarah Palmer
Based in: San Francisco
Username: @heysp
Number of followers: 483k
Website: heysp.com
Photography style: Object photography with bright, solid-coloured backgrounds
Why we love her: We absolutely adore her #36daysoftype series, in which she creates letters of the alphabet with objects whose names start with the letter — for example, D for dominoes, M for matches or N for nickels. Her pictures are cheerful and innovative.
Who: Yener Torun
Based in: Istanbul
Username: @cimkedi
Number of followers: 153k
Website: yenertorun.net
Photography style: Architectural patterns with bright colours
Why we love him: Yener’s use of colour is simply brilliant and we love how he manages to spot unique geometric patterns in the existing architecture of his city. From composition to framing to editing, his work is superb and inspiring.
Who: Hiroaki Fukuda
Based in: Tokyo
Username: @hirozzzz
Number of followers: 560k
Website: hiro.photo
Photography style: Layered images with enhanced colours
Why we love him: He frames all his subjects within several separate backgrounds and foregrounds, creating layers of distances from the viewer’s perspective in all his shots. We love how bright and sharp the colours are, making the images so life-like that we feel like we’re stepping into the photograph! He’s even shot music stars like A$AP Rocky.
Who: Jennifer Medrano
Based in: Washington
Username: @wat.ki
Number of followers: 534k
Photography subject: Pets
Why we love her: Who can not love the adorable gang of Watson, the English cream labrador retriever, his best friend Kiko, Harry the cat and London the hedgehog? Jennifer showers them with love and regularly discusses their personalities via her stories. We love her genuine concern for her furry friends and we adore watching their happy adventures!
Text: Rushati Mukherjee
