Nine years ago, during his final year as a fine art photography student in Melbourne, Martin Cheung came up with a strange idea: seeing how roast duck was a symbol of Chinese cooking, he wanted to see how the duck saw Melbourne’s Chinatown. He then bought a roast duck, turned it into a pinhole camera, and — after a couple of failures and adjustments — used it to photograph Melbourne’s Chinatown gate. You can find more info on the project (and a step-by-step guide on making your own roast duck camera) over on Cheung’s website.
Johan Rijpma spent six months creating this two and a half minute time-lapse video showing rolls of transparent adhesive tape slowly unwinding. For one of the shots, he spent hours standing in the wind and rain, turning a plate 0.4 degrees every 30 seconds and then snapping a photo. Some of the sequences took as long as 12 hours to develop.
Math major and photo enthusiast Kris Hollingsworth created this beautiful photograph in which he light-painted an entire poem! It took patience and perseverance: practicing the technique took 15 hours, while the actual light painting took another two hours. The image is actually 9 separate photographs in one — eight lines of poetry and the self-portrait of Hollingsworth. Read more…
Photographer Ian Richardson made this paper camera out of the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens, with a small glass pot serving as the lens. Read more…
Did you know that you can turn any wall magnetic by painting it with magnetic primer? Communications company M Booth did this with one of its walls, then sent out employees onto the streets of NYC with Fujifilm Instax cameras. The result is this impressive wall displaying 800 instant photos! Read more…
This compact camera is only one dollar… literally. Won Park, an artist that does origami using money, folded this camera using a dollar bill without cuts, glue, or tape. You can find more of his creations here, though this is the only photography-related one.
These ghostly figures you see in these photographs weren’t Photoshopped in, but are purely done through light painting. If you remember the creative 3D light painting technique using an iPad that we shared a while back, Croix Gagnon and Frank Schott took it a step further and put a slightly morbid twist on it. For their project “12:31“, they “painted” using a laptop and an animation showing cross-sections of a human body! Read more…
Photographer Denis Smith creates photos giant balls of light without any digital trickery, relying instead on light-painting. His technique is to spin a light around while slowly turning his body, creating spheres of light when seen in a long exposure photo. Read more…
Last year we featured a pretty neat slow motion video shot from a moving train. British band SixToes decided to use the same idea for a music video, placing people all along the platform doing various things, and slowing down 7 seconds of footage into an entire music video.
The idea could be improved on by having what’s happening on the platform reflect what’s being sung in the song, but would require tons of planning and perfect timing — though the end product would be totally mind-boggling.
