Photography by Mike Kelley, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
This composite by Mike Kelley shows a selection of the planes that departed from Los Angeles International Airport in a single day. (There were nearly 400 images for him to choose from.)
Photography by Richard Silver, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
In his "Time Slice Global" series, Richard Silver combines 36 photos taken at renowned sites to show the passing of time before, during and after sunset.
Photography by Noah Kalina, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
This long-exposure photo captures a single sex session. "Rather than documenting the physical reality of the act, like positions or motion, Noah Kalina uses long exposures to document an unseen emotional reality," Nicholas Felton writes in "PhotoViz: Visualizing Information Through Photography."
Photography by Roger Vail, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
This more family-friendly example of long-exposure photography, capturing a carnival ride in action, adds a new, otherworldly beauty to its subject.
Photography by Kevin Ferguson, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
The Harris shutter technique used here sees the same frame exposed three times, with a different colored filter applied each time.
Photography by Pelle Cass, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
No, this isn't the world's most intense basketball practice. Pelle Cass took countless images of the same basketball game, and created a composite using only players from one team, repeated over and over.
Photography by Richard Silver, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
If you have a panorama option on your smartphone, you should be able to approximate Richard Silver's shot at home. Instead of pointing the camera in front of him and rotating himself 360 degrees, he turned the camera upwards, starting at the alter and finishing at the entrance.
Photography by Dennis Hlynsky, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
Dennis Hlynsky traced a flock of birds' flight patterns on video. He then created this composite by layering the individual frames on top of one another.
Photography by Bill Lytton, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
Layering hundreds of tourist photos of London's attractions, Bill Lytton creates a ghostly shadow of the sites themselves.
Photography by Babak Fakhamzadeh, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
Placing colonial-era postcards depicting Freetown Sierra Leone over images of the city today, Babak Fakhamzadeh shows how the city has changed.
Photography by Mike Kelley, from PhotoViz, Copyright Gestalten 2016
"PhotoViz: Visualizing Information Through Photography" by Nicholas Felton, published by Gestalten, is out now.
CNN  — 

Images have the power to inspire, astonish and outrage. But when combined with data, they can also give us a new understanding of how the world works.

Playing with light, exposure, and creative post-production techniques, photography becomes a tool to represent complex concepts – movement, the passing of time and speed, for example – in a simple but engaging way.

The psychology of 'organization porn'

Sequential photos are cut and spliced to show the same site from sunrise to sunset. A bullet is caught at the precise microsecond it exits a rifle. Composite photos are layered to show a basketball team’s movements across the court.

It’s something designer Nicholas Felton has become increasingly fascinated by. He recently brought together some of the most ingenious examples of photographic data visualizations in his book “PhotoViz: Visualizing Information Through Photography,” published Gestalten.

“A photograph takes the chaotic, tangible, multidimensional world and reduces is into something flat and still,” writes Felton, who was one of the lead designers of Facebook’s timeline.

“Transforming data into a visual form makes it more accessible and allows for better comparisons and understanding.”

Look through the gallery above for photos that are as informative as they are artistic.

“PhotoViz: Visualizing Information Through Photography” by Nicholas Felton, published by Gestalten, is out now.