The Good Old Cup of Joe, Reimagined as Galaxies and Oceans

Victoria Siemer's Instagram captures the entire world in a single cup.
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Forget a tempest in a teapot. Victoria Siemer puts the ocean in a coffee cup. Her wildly imaginative, often outlandish Instagram coffee mugs make your artfully foamed lattes look downright boring.

The Brooklyn graphic designer's caffeinated creativity started while experimenting with the idea of microcosms in Photoshop. She's manipulated images to make surfers defy gravity and reflect mountaintops in the sky. It wasn't long before she wondered what it would be like to hold the universe in her morning mug. "I was just playing with the idea of creating my own little worlds," she says.

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At first glance, her Instagram images look like every other photo of a coffee cup posted by someone with too much time on their hands. Look closer, though, and you'll find wonderful scenes. Surfers riding a wave. Waves crashing ashore. Entire galaxies spinning in the cosmos. “The coffee cup manipulations are a nice way to wake up my creativity for the day.” she says.

Siemer started with photos of coffee cups she found online, but grew frustrated because many stock photos "suck." They're often bizarre, clichéd, or too expensive. “I realized if I was ever going to make the images that I wanted I’d have to start shooting them myself,” she says.

She still occasionally uses pictures of cups found in the public domain, and shoots the rest with her Nikon D1500 or Canon 5D Mark III. She usually surfs the Internet for pictures of the ocean, and all the space stuff is from NASA. Siemer plans to start using a drone soon, so she can user her own aerial images instead of stock photography.

Siemer shoots whatever she's drinking, wherever she's drinking it. She doesn't follow a fixed schedule, choosing instead to make images when the mood strikes. The biggest satisfaction (beyond the flavor and caffeine, that is) comes from sharing her work. Siemer posts her images on everything from Facebook and Twitter to Tumblr and Instagram and even Ello. "I really love when people send back photos inspired by the series, it's been fun to see what other people imagine in their morning coffee," she says.

And if you're wondering, of course she loves coffee. "I’m very big on the iced coffee, even in the winter," she says. "Sometimes I just need the caffeine to hit my system as fast as possible."

Don't we all.