There are selfies, and then there are self-portraits. Make no mistake, these are two very different things, in the same way that a photograph differentiates itself from a snapshot. So while the word 'selfie' might be in the midst of experiencing its 15 minutes of fame, it would be an injustice to call photographer Kyle Thompson's gripping self-portraits 'selfies.'
Rest easy, future astronauts. If occasional filmmaker and full-time tinkerer Mark Rober and his pals are any indication, NASA engineers can MacGyver their way into or out of any situation.
Swiss photographer and artist Fabian Oefner calls his Disintegrating series of exploded car photographs 'possibly the slowest high-speed images ever taken."
One of the most recent videos to go extremely viral over the past several days involves a behind the scenes look at how a portrait of Morgan Freeman came together... and when we say came together, we mean created from scratch on an iPad by finger-painting!
Stunning, breathtaking, Oh Em Gee, however you want to put it, the photos in this post are incredible to look at and incredibly difficult to capture. Not because it takes any crazy skills to properly photograph the Grand Canyon, but because the atmospheric conditions necessary to make these photos possible happens only about once per decade!
Try all the tricky ski moves and skateboard jumps you want, but it'll be hard to beat the latest action video auteur -- a curious Australian sea eagle who snagged a wildlife camera to create a brief but exciting aerial tour of his neighborhood.
It's not necessarily the way you expect to go viral when you're a photographer, but one of NYC wedding and lifestyle photographer Sascha Reinking's photos is racing across the Internet at warp speed today after actor Zach Braff (of Scrubs fame) photobombed his newlywed shoot in the middle of NYC.
I’ve been shooting photos for 20 years. I’ve made my living in the profession for the last 15. I can count on one hand the number of times that everything lined up perfectly and a truly rare image was created.
We don't typically share two time-lapses in the same day, since most people see that genre as over-saturated as it is, but today we have good reason to. The first is a landscape time-lapse so gorgeous National Geographic took notice, and this one, well this one may completely change the way you look at tilt-shift where time-lapse is concerned.
The squeaks and grunts whales make are still mysterious, but at least now we know what whale-speak is for "Get that thing out of my face!" That would be thanks to diver/photographer Chris Coates, who had a close encounter of the paparazzi kind while observing humpback whales off the eastern coast of Africa recently.
"You should've seen it! I was that close to the dude's teeth!" No doubt there was some pretty excited talk going around a South African seal colony recently, after a young pup narrowly escaped a shark attack by balancing on the great white's nose.
Irish wildlife photographer David "Baz" Jenkins captured the decisive moment in an image that's quickly gone viral worldwide.
Before today, if you were to ask me who would win in a fight, an eagle or a deer, I would probably have bet on the deer given the obvious size advantage. But recently released shots from a wildlife camera set up in a remote corner of Siberia show how wrong I would be.
Never let anyone tell you to stop taking photos of your food... not because you should be proud of the habit, but because it might someday lead to an accidentally awesome photo like the one above: a wasp photobomb.
The video above is equal parts mind-blowing and unsettling. Created by filmmaker Anthony Cerniello with help from a couple of animators and a photographer, it's a timelapse-like animation that captures the process of aging in a way we've never seen before.
Swedish photographer and retouch artist Erik Johansson creates amazing photo manipulations -- in fact, we've actually featured his work before. This, however, is the first time we've had the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how these manipulations come together.
In the video above he gives us a glimpse at how he created the manipulation Drifting Away, all the way from the first sketch to the final 123-layer manipulation.
"Impossible" stories don't seem to be all that impossible where cameras are concerned. For example, you might remember the Canon compact that found its way back to its owner after drifting 6,200 miles across the ocean to Taiwan.
Today's impossible story isn't quite so international, but no less amazing. After losing $1,300 worth of camera equipment to an alligator at the Everglades Alligator Farm eight months ago, another alligator was kind enough to return amateur wildlife photographer Mario Aldecoa's gear to him last week.
Earlier this year, Swiss photographer Philipp Schmidli attracted a good deal of attention for a series of photos showing the silhouette of a biker in front of a gigantic moonrise.
The photographer received many comments about how the photos resembled the cover of the movie ET. Although that was never Schmidli's intention, he decided to follow up the original series with an actual ET-inspired shoot!
Got a few dozen spare DSLRs and fistful of startup capital? Then you, too, could get into the emerging field of 3D selfies, as pioneered by Texas photo studio Captured Dimensions.
Photographer Jordan Williams started the business a few years ago after becoming convinced there was more to 3D printing than making industrial prototypes and the like. He fashioned a 360-degree photo studio in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, outfitted with more than 60 DSLRs, all remoted-out for simultaneous shutter release.
Hey aspiring storm chasers -- want to dramatically improve your lightning shots? Try getting an elevated view. Like about 400 miles up. That's the approximate orbital height above Earth of the International Space Station, which is producing an impressive library of images showing what lightning looks like from way above.
Camera-toting birders are flocking to a remote area of New Mexico to capitalize on what's being described as "the best photobomb in history." At least for people who are really into birds.
The mandate for Documerica was intriguingly broad -- "photographically document subjects of environmental concern" -- and photographers responded with striking images covering everything from pot-smoking form to toxic smog.
So you want to create stirring nature documentaries. You could go the National Geographic way and risk trench-foot, snakebite and more in pursuit of the scenic wild. Or you could take the Boris Godfroid route: Schlep a few hundred pounds of bricks into a spare room, cover it with moss and other forgiving plant life, and let nature run wild in miniature.
Yesterday we shared an amazing time-lapse music video spanning 24-hours on a Parisian rooftop. While the video did, in fact, make my jaw "drop" (there's a pun coming), it got me thinking about one of the most amazing music videos I've ever seen: "Drop" by The Pharcyde.
Were you smiling a lot Friday afternoon? Hope so, because that's when you and your 7 billion planetary neighbors got a rare portrait session from the Cassini spacecraft. Orbiting above Saturn almost a billion miles away, the craft turned its camera towards to Earth to capture some spectacular images of our planet foregrounded by Saturn's rings.
It was the first time in nine years that Cassini has been in orbit and taking scheduled photos of our planet, prompting NASA and friends to promote a "The Day That the Earth Smiled" event via social media.
Spanish visual artist Sergio Albiac is offering the world a chance to meld with the universe in an innovative project that combines portraiture with images from the Hubble space telescope.
Albiac calls his "Stardust" project "an experiment in generative portraiture."
Check out this incredible photograph of a waterspout, a type of tornado that forms over a body of water. That's a huge column of condensation rising up from Tampa Bay into the clouds above. The photo was captured last Tuesday (July 9th, 2013) by 22-year-old Joey Mole in Tampa, Florida (here's a larger version).
Wildlife researchers now have a much clearer idea of how bats fly, thanks to the wicked-looking X-Ray video above that shows the animal's skeleton at work.
A beautiful photo of a partly cloudy day is, in and of itself, nothing special. When it's taken from the International Space Station looking down, however, it takes on a new meaning. The above photo was snapped by European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano the other day, and it shows what a cloud-covered Earth looks like from orbit.
On November 5, 1951, a 31 kiloton atomic bomb was dropped in the Nevada Test Site from a B-45 Tornado bomber. A camera in the air was documenting the test, and captured the video above showing what a large nuclear explosion looks like when looking down at it from above. Notice how the camera begins to shake when the shockwave of the blast reaches it.
Arizona-based photographer Mike Olbinski has been visiting the Central Plains of Texas for almost four years now in search of the perfect rotating supercell. A long-held goal of his, capturing one of these structures that look like massive, awe-inspiring "alien spacecraft" had always eluded him. That is, until his most recent trip.
Want to photograph or film a humpback whale underwater? Try listening for its "song." The video above, uploaded by YouTube user westh2o, shows a surprise underwater encounter he and a group of divers had with a large humpback whale back in October 2011 (the actual encounter is at 3m20s).
Born in 1922, photographer and writer Art Shay has had a career that most creatives only dream of. Between Life, Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Business Week, Parade, The New York Times Magazine and many more, Shay has shot about 1,100 magazine covers.
This video -- shot and produced by Bradley Rochford of Hanson Dodge Creative -- gives you a quick overview of the amazing life and work of this still-active 91-year-old photographer.
The Peregrine Falcon, also known as the Duck Hawk (a fact you won't soon forget after watching this video), is a spectacular bird of prey. Claiming the title of fastest member of the animal kingdom, a Peregrine Falcon can reach speeds in excess of 200mph during its characteristic high-speed hunting dives -- take that cheetah.
In the video above, YouTube user drhodie's falcon Dora happens to have a camera on her back as she performs one of these dives and takes an unsuspecting duck in mid-air.
A couple of weeks ago, we shared a sneak peek of Adobe's upcoming Shake Reduction Tool for Photoshop that has been dropping jaws ever since an advanced preview was debuted all the way back in October of 2011. The tool selects a section of the image, uses some complicated calculations to determine how the camera was moving when the photo was taken, and then remove the blur -- pretty incredible stuff.
But it looks like Adobe has been beaten to this magical release by the small startup Intelligent Imaging Solutions and their newly announced Photoshop plugin Piccure.
Photographer Ole C. Salomonsen loves shooting the northern lights or, as he calls them, the polar spirits. And for his most recent film he went all out by putting together time-lapse photography of the aurora above cities, in front of starry backgrounds and above gorgeous fjords with a couple of mind-blowing video captures thrown in for good measure.
Edith Widder is one of the three scientists that managed to capture the first high-resolution video footage of an actual giant squid. And about a month ago, her TED talk describing how she and her team did it (embedded above) was finally posted online.
Almost 2 stories tall, you would think that something that massive would have already been photographed or video taped. But it was Widder's common-sense approach that would yield the groundbreaking footage. So, how did scientists manage to finally catch a giant squid on camera? One word: quietly.
Tim Kemple is a well-respected action-sports photographer who we had the pleasure of interviewing in November of last year. In that interview, he told us about his passion for extreme photography while we did the easy part and shared his photos/asked the obvious questions.
Now, almost half a year later, Kemple is getting some well-deserved attention for the above video he did with Phase One documenting one of his trips to Mexico where he photographed some of the most talented kayakers in the world.
Polish photographer Marcin Ryczek captured this gorgeous black-and-white photograph of a man feeding ducks and swans in Kraków, Poland (here's a high-res version of the photo).
When your grandfather was Dr. Erhard Glatzel, one of the great lens designers of the twentieth century, it won't come as too much of a shock to find out that you've inherited two lenses that, by all accounts, don't officially exist. Other people? Well, they might be a little bit surprised... and a lot bit jealous.
Some photographers have made names for themselves by creating and photographing extremely detailed dioramas: miniature tabletop scenes that are so realistic that viewers often mistake them for the real world. Belgian photographers Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux of 354 Photographers have put an interesting spin on the diorama photo concept by Photoshopping real people into their miniature scenes. The series is titled "Box".