Most photographers ply their trade by capturing snapshots of reality and preserving them on film. Through careful framing, posing, and a bit of luck, they seek to distill the essence of foreign lands, exotic vistas, war zones, and even distant planets.

But what about the places we visit in video games? Games contain striking panoramas, impossible vistas, and dramatic action, all of which a properly equipped documentarian could theoretically capture with a flexibility that would make any real-world photographer green with envy. From machinima filmmakers to in-game photojournalists, a certain subset of gamer steps outside of the prescribed videogame experience with an eye towards documentation.

Duncan Harris, the Chippenham, England-based games journalist who operates the website DeadEndThrills, is one such video game photographer. (In his twitter bio, he cheekily refers to himself as a "Videogame Pornographer.") DeadEndThrills presents a regularly updated collection of breathtaking screenshots (and I don't use that term lightly—this is some seriously beautiful stuff). Each one has been painstakingly captured from within heavily modded PC versions of popular games; some of my favorites are in this post. Kotaku has shared several of his recent, hugely popular Skyrim shots, and his site has become a go-to destination for those searching for lovingly crafted video game renditions and desktop backgrounds. Earlier this week, I chatted with Harris about his process and philosophy.

"I think what it boils down to is that there's just an awful lot of dumb shit in videogames," he told me in an email, "much of it by necessity, underneath and between which is some truly stupendous art. We know, or at the very least /suspect/ that it's there, but as players it's impossible to know its extent. A really bad analogy would be something like Mount Rushmore. An incredible and iconic feat of construction, a really commanding spectacle - but have you ever actually been there? The observation point's miles away! But then you watch North By Northwest or buy a postcard and it's magnificent again."

In addition to that, there's the distraction of the game itself. "Imagine the view from the Mount Rushmore lookout post," he said, "and put a man in fancy dress in front of it tea-bagging a mannequin, reading lines from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace like they were Shakespeare.".

At DeadEndThrills, Harris is very open about his process, which generally involves tweaking a game's PC build with a number of mods like FXAA injectors, texture enhancements, and increased field-of-view. He often uses what's called a "debug camera," which untethers the in-game "camera" from its usual place behind the protagonist (or within the protagonist's eyes) and lets him position it wherever he wants. Often, these tweaks will make the games unplayable—Skyrim normally lowers the quality of its far-off textures, but with a number of adjustments, Harris is able to push the game far past its normal stability point. Running with such huge swaths of the world fully loaded means that the game will frequently crash, but not before he's able to snag a couple of truly epic shots.

Harris says that stripping away the video game noise and distraction is the easy part. "Where things get fun is when you start tapping into what makes photography so interesting," he said, "like how you can create or embellish the narrative of a scene. What I want to do in Skyrim, for example, is stand on top of the tallest mountain in the driving snow, an epic vista in the background, going one-on-one with a dragon, fending off its fiery breath with one hand. everyone who plays Skyrim has that image in their head of Gandalf versus the Balrog from the Lord of the Rings movies—the fire, the snowstorm, the widescreen landscapes.

"That happens in a regular Skyrim game, but not in any cinematic capacity. Skyrim doesn't really let me appreciate that I'm doing those things at all. I'm not facing the epic vista, I'm taking stupid amounts of damage from the flames in my face, I'm probably going to fall off the mountain, and there's always the chance the dragon will fly backwards. Only in the screenshot can I really do those incredible things, then share them with the community because that's what those games are really all about. They're about saying, ‘Look how fucking badass I was today.' They're about pretending, one way or another."

Of course, video game screenshots are nothing new—we see promotional shots posted at gaming sites like this one every day. They're often released by companies as part of a game's pre-release campaign, and they are carefully chosen to show a game in its most flattering light. (Ubisoft, in particular, releases some exceptional screenshots for its Assassin's Creed games). But Harris is doing something different—in a great shot from Bulletstorm (above) that Harris calls "Crank," the character Trishka drops her boot into the side of a guy's head.

In the image's caption, Harris writes:

The problem with most official game screenshots is that the people taking them regard 95 per cent of the job as being more like 5 per cent. Getting Girl A to kick Bloke B in the chops is the hard part, right? Erm… Actually, the hard parts of a shot like this include: getting the right ratio of light and shadow on both characters to flatter the models and make them foremost in the scene; spacing girl, bloke and muzzle flash in such a way as to balance everything from left to right; getting the muzzle flash ‘right' (if a bit lo-res); making sure the foot isn't clipping through the neck, or the fingers through the gun; using foreground particles and background fog to convey 3D space; having the guy actually look like he's being kicked in that special place where Brock Lesnar tickled Randy Couture. A good screenshot, like a memory, is a liar by omission. I almost got this one right.

That caption gives a good sense of Harris's approach—focused and thoughtful, with a photographer's eye and a modder's gift for tweaking. I've been trying to put my finger on why Harris's screenshots, particularly his Skyrim shots, are so evocative. The biggest difference between what he's doing and the work of a National Geographic photographer is that every scene that Harris catalogues is a scene that any of us—anyone with a computer or game console can theoretically relive. He gives us a beautiful, carefully composed perspective on the same things we do every time we play games, and that allows us to see our gaming experiences in a welcome new light.

As he puts it: "I suppose it's like being handed a postcard of a place you've never seen photographed. If the only concept of a place you have is the view from the ground - from your own eyes - seeing it with those constraints removed can be pretty mindblowing"

It sure can.

DeadEndThrills [Duncan Harris]

I've yet to see convincing evidence that a first-person shooter (or indeed, any kind of non puppet-based shooter) could work on the Xbox 360's Kinect motion controller. That said, if I had to pick an FPS that would work well with the hardware, it would probably be People Can Fly's highly physical Bulletstorm.

So it's nice to see that the guys in the video above used FAAST (Flexible Action and Articulate Skeleton Toolkit) to make a hack that lets PC Bulletstorm players control the game with their hands and feet.

In the video, you'll see the picture-in-picture player controlling the shooting and gun motions using his hands. But also, he can lash out the game's "leash" and kick out his left foot and cause his on-screen character to kick as well. Few games would benefit from a real-foot kicking option as much as Bulletstorm would, and despite the fact that I'd still rather play it with a controller, I could see myself trying this. Given that Kinect is officially coming to Windows PCs, I bet we can look forward to a lot more creative applications like this one.

Bulletstorm, released in February, is probably still 2011's most foul-mouthed game. It may be 2012's most foul-mouthed game, too. It popularized the term "dicktits" after all.

Adrian Chmielarz, the creative director at Poland-based People Can Fly, tells the latest edition of Game Developer magazine that he didn't know just how much swearing was going on until he read its Polish translation at the end of the game's development..

Chmielarz said hearing "I will kill your dick," and many other profane, vulgar and obscene words in its fratboy lexicon, had next to no impact because they were being said in a foreign language. "Being Polish, all the strong language in Bulletstorm was just exotic and fun to us," he told Game Developer.

He said Epic thought this was something People Can Fly really wanted and backed its creative vision wholeheartedly, "while we had no idea this vision was a bit more than we really wanted.

"It was only at the end of the development, when I read the Polish translation of the game, that I realized how dirty we were. I swear a lot. A LOT. And yet still I ...kind of blushed."

Bulletstorm didn't make any money for Epic, said Epic's Mike Capps. Offhand, the abundance of swearing and the bawdy tone may have overshadowed the game's distinctive qualities, which were a bit more subtle. Totilo liked it a lot, I thought it did something neat by how it, more or less, commoditized ammunition and made you play creatively. That doesn't get the same kind of attention as does calling someone "dicktits," though.

Game Developer's October Issue Debuts With Bulletstorm Postmortem [Gamasutra]

Epic Games has a common visual style running through all its games. Gears of War looks like Unreal Tournament which looks like Bulletstorm. If you've ever wondered why that is, well, wonder no more.

It's because of artist James "Hawkprey" Hawkins.

Hawkins is a concept artist employed at Epic who is responsible for that trademark "look" the company's games all share: the big boots, the clunky armour, the rustic weaponry. He's worked on all three of the Gears of War games, as well as the Unreal series and even done a little on Bulletstorm, the rest of that game looking like his work because, well, that's just what Epic games have to look like these days.

This is a great collection of work from all those games and series listed above, with character art and equipment designs ranging from rough sketches to the finished product.

You can see a lot more at Hawkprey's personal site.

To see the larger pics in all their glory, either click the "expand" icon on the gallery screen or right click and "open link in new tab".

Mike Capps, president of Gears of War development studio, doesn't regret Bulletstorm. That game got a lot of hype—and some extraordinarily odd press coverage—when it was released earlier this year. It was an odd first-person shooter that was vulgar in tone and creative in execution, rewarding players for, well, being creative in how they executed kills in the game—more points, for example, if you shotgunned a guy into a giant space cactus.

I played it, enjoyed it, and tell people it's one of my 2011 favorites so far.

But Bulletstorm could hardly crack 300,000 units in its first month, according to a financial analyst. Someone from its publisher EA recently told me the game "under-performed." And Capps told me yesterday that it "didn't make money for us."

A game to regret, though? No way.

Capps is keynoting Game Developers Conference Europe next week month, where he will deliver a talk on the topic of making high-quality games. Epic may be defined by some people as the Gears of War studio and by others as the profitable mechanics behind the widely-used Unreal graphics engine. But they've also turned out to be a studio that keeps making highly-regarded games, including the critically-acclaimed Infinity Blade, which is considered one of the best iOS games out there, and Bulletstorm which did very well with critics.

Capps' talk is called "Size Doesn't Matter: How Epic Brings AAA Attitude to Every Game, from Gears of War 3 to Infinity Blade." The idea, he told me, is to dispel myths people may have that Epic's games are high-quality due to infinite budgets or unlimited development times, neither of which the studio actually enjoys. He wants to emphasize that even back during Epic's Unreal Tournament days, the company did some of its best work thanks to an internal drive to keep polishing and experimenting. Headshots, a;t fire, triple kills—some of the signature elements of the first UT that other studios then riffed on—he said, were only added in the game's final six months.

These days, Epic is trying hard to make top games on a variety of machines, games that are certainly good ads for Epic's Unreal Engine on the various platforms on which it runs, but also just very good games. Some are hits. Some are not. Would it have been nice to make money on Bulletstorm? Sure. Capps says they could have taken the easy route all along, not done Bulletstorm and gotten People Can Fly, the Epic-owned Polish development studio on that game to just churn out Gears of War content. That's not what he wants those folks doing. That's not what he wants Epic doing.

"The studio has shipped AAA content," he said. "The next thing we do with People Can Fly will be great."

I hope Capps will use some of his talk to discuss why Bulletstorm didn't thrive, a topic we didn't have time to go into during our brief chat. I wonder if it was too short, too new in a crowd of shooter games or too lacking in addictive online gaming—it was the rare first-person shooter with no competitive multiplayer—but who knows. If only all the games that studios were proud of could be hits.

Capps' keynote will help kick off GDC Europe in Cologne, which runs August 15-17.