Photographer Ben Thomas’ vivid snapshots color-bomb reality

You’ll need to look twice. At first glance, the stunningly colorful images crafted by Australian photographer Ben Thomas look like illustrations, with a vivid glow that wouldn’t feel out of place on the storyboard for a Wes Anderson movie.

But they are, 100% percent, actual photographs of mostly urban landscapes from around the world – Sydney, Melbourne, Florence, New York, Paris, Dubai.

The works, dominated by extreme pastel colors, belong to an ongoing series called “Chroma” – meaning color in Greek – which Thomas started in 2015.

Usually shot on very bright, sunny days, the images are the result of digital processing and offer a commentary on urban life, much like Thomas’ previous series, “Cityshrinker,” which miniaturized cities through the use of tilt-shift.

Below, Thomas describes his technique and his motives, and how the project itself started.

Ben Thomas

Australian photographer Ben Thomas turns urban landscapes into stunning painterly artworks. "This is the rooftop of a car park at Melbourne airport that was closed to cars at the time. I jumped up to get the shot, but I don't know if you can quite tell you've got the Melbourne skyline off into the distance," he said in a phone interview.

Ben Thomas

"This was shot with a zoom lens of Fifth Avenue. The Art Deco yellow at the top of that building is absolutely incredible. This is probably one of the most popular images from the series."

Ben Thomas

"This is a pool called Icebergs, which is one of these amazing ocean/pool venues at Bondi Beach in Sydney. It's just people going about their diary kind of routine, enjoying the water."

Ben Thomas

"This is part of the new series that I've been working on based off a trip to [the Italian island of] Procida. It's kind of documenting the beginning of the process, so catching the ferry from Naples over to the island."

Ben Thomas

"This is the top of the boat from the previous image. The buildings belong to Naples and these are the tourists and locals looking to make that commute over to Procida."

Ben Thomas

"Another image from Procida. This shot is pretty conducive of what life's like there for the locals, it's a pretty amazing scene where each building has got its own color."

Ben Thomas

"The thing that's really nice about this photo is that it's actually a bit meta, because the lady that's having the hot dog on the left hand side is also being photographed by another camera outside the frame. It's a posed photo. So it's me taking a photo of the photo, essentially."

Ben Thomas

"I was down at Coney Island, really early in the morning, when it wasn't too busy. I went with a minimalist kind of feel with this one, that gives it a really cool graphical look."

Ben Thomas

"This is the back of a stationery store in Melbourne. I was really searching for these pockets of color -- other than this building, here, this is a sea of gray concrete."

Ben Thomas

"I was a on location shooting some work for the New Yorker magazine and this is one of the outtakes. It was taken at this incredibly massive theme park in 45 degrees Celsius weather, so it's kind of appropriate to see the melting ice cream on the building. You wouldn't think it's Dubai either, when seeing this image."

Ben Thomas

"I got invited by McLaren to go shoot with them earlier in the year. I was lucky enough to be able to get full access to the Formula One Grand Prix at Melbourne. This shot was a really hard one to get. I had 2.7 seconds to do it and I was shooting on a relatively slowish, medium format camera that's not really designed for sports photography. So it was a real effort to get that lined up. But the thing that's most interesting is that about 90% of the people that are looking at this moment, in the background, are looking at it through the screens of their phones."

Ben Thomas

"This is just a wall in Paris -- I was interested in pushing things more into a kind of abstract space and looking for hidden areas of color in public spaces."

Ben Thomas

"This is just a magical moment, after a storm came through in Florence. You can actually see that off in the distance. There was this amazing golden light coming through and just the perfect kind of scenario, lighting this fantastic canary yellow dress walking across the road."

Ben Thomas

"Adelaide is my hometown and it's having a real renaissance moment in terms of its architecture and urban design. I was there earlier this year with my family and it's a really great thing to go back there and see what's happening."

Ben Thomas

Ben Thomas

CNN: Where does your inspiration come from?

Ben Thomas: I got inspired by the paintings of Jeffrey Smart, who grew up in my hometown of Adelaide. I was really drawn to his use of perspective and color. It got me thinking, there are a lot of painters and illustrators out there that are trying to create hyper-realistic images. What if I was to go the opposite way, with a photograph? Take something that’s real and kind of push it back into something that’s more graphical and painterly. So I spent spent probably three, four months building a process to do that. There was a lot of trial and error.

And what’s your technique?

The weather conditions are really quite important. It’s not the typical conditions that photographers want: I’m looking for bright, harsh sun. That’s the first component. Once I’ve found the location I want to shoot, I need to get the image at the right time, to take advantage of those conditions. Then there’s pretty extensive post-processing, I’m using quite a bit of software to individually manipulate each of the colors, but also the light and the darkness of the image as well. The process really does come down to breaking these images down to core components, looking at each of the individual colors and how they work together, and bringing them forward in a way that produces that illustrative kind of aesthetic that I’m looking to achieve.

Is there an underlying message?

One of the common themes in my work has been looking at the spaces that we live in, our built environment, and how people interact with it – and how that differs from city to city and country to country.

How long does it take to complete each image?

It varies, but probably about four to five hours of actual processing. Although I might do five or six iterations of the image as well. Typically speaking, I’ll do a first pass edit on the image, and then I’ll put it away for a couple of weeks. That means I could be working on each for a couple of months before they get released.

How do you find your locations?

It’s a mixture of things. It could just be a pure discovery. I might be in a city for reasons other than photography. And I would take my camera out, put the headphones on, and just go out and explore and start talking to people about their city. There are also some places that are simply aesthetically incredible. I’ve spent some time lately in Procida, an island that’s just a short ferry ride off Naples. That’s a really incredible location that’s been built up over the last couple of hundred years.

What kind of reaction do these images produce in the people who see them?

I’ve got quite a big body of work from New York, and it’s really fascinating to see people from New York going through it and almost rediscovering some of these areas that they wouldn’t ordinarily look at. I’m hoping that people see environments that they are quite used to, but in a slightly different way. Other than that I also want to showcase some amazing places that people might not have been to. One of the real classics for me is one of the first images in the series, from Bondi Beach in Sydney. The reactions are always super strong around that. That was a scene I shot, I think, on a Friday, it wasn’t even a weekend. It’s full of people, it’s the way of life there. So that starts an interesting conversation about the different ways that people live and interact with the places they call home.

Browse through the gallery above to see more of the Chroma series.

Top image: Bondi Beach, Sydney.