In June 2021, a photograph of a heart-shaped sunset over a beach went viral on social media. Though we’ve managed to track down the original artist, an Instagram user who posts under the handle Phantamos, we’re not entirely sure how this picture was created.
Here’s the original June 2020 posting from Phantamos’ Instagram page:
Phantamos, whose real name is Ethan Hunt, is a popular Instagram artist with close to 75,000 followers. Many of his images are processed with the Lightroom, a photo-editing tool, to make them more dramatic or even surreal. In much of their work, it’s obvious that the image has gone through some digital edits. This picture of a skull in the moon, for example, was made for Halloween:
Another artwork featuring various civil rights leaders is a composite of multiple photographs:
Hunt told the photography news website Musecam in 2017:
I am a Photographer in the field of Urban Exploration. I started with using Photoshop CS3 back in 2006 because I’m an artist first therefore I am entirely self-taught. This allowed me to create with freedom and incorporate urban exploration as one. it’s a beautiful thing!
[…]
Ultimately my goal is to evoke emotion and provoke thought. So I take my time when it comes to editing, I am obsessed with my artistic creations… I call them my masterpieces.
While we suspect that the sunset photo also underwent significant post-processing changes — for one, it appears that there are two light sources: One on the lip of the horizon and another just behind the cloud — we’re not certain how much the original photograph was altered.
We reached out to Phantamos for more information, and will update this article accordingly.
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