For a recent National Geographic story on giant sequoia trees, photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols was tasked with capturing a photograph showing the sheer size of one of the largest trees in the world. The video above offers a short but interesting glimpse into how Nichols and his team went about doing so.
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For the past three years, San Diego-based photographer Octavio Aburto has had a specific photo idea brewing in his mind. He wanted to photograph the incredible underwater tornado that forms when massive groups of fish congregate to reproduce. This past November, he finally got his photo opportunity while diving with his friend David at Cabo Pulmo National Park in Mexico. The beautiful 24-second video above shows what Aburto witnessed.
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Reuters has released this interesting behind-the-scenes look into what it was like to be a news photographer trailing President Obama as he made an official visit to the nation of Myanmar in November — the first by a US president. The video offers a glimpse into how hectic the job is, as photographers must rush from place to place, out of vans and into venues, in hopes of capturing a historic and newsworthy shot.
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Back in 2011 and 2012, Paris-based photographer Max Riché shot a creative series of portraits of athletes (including several Olympians) in the French National Sports Institute. Titled “Becoming an Athlete,” the project featured a strobed-style look that shows the athletes progressing from ordinary people to world-class athletes, all within single frames.

Riché has just released the behind-the-scenes video above that shows how he created the photographs.
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Fashion company Pierre Cardin did a marketing campaign earlier this year that revolved around the slogan: “Simply Cool.” It enlisted the help of Brazilian art director Cláudia Xavier and luxury still life photographer Norimich Inoguchi for a series of advertising photographs. The creatives decided to convey that “it’s cool to wear Pierre Cardin” in a very literal way: they photographed various clothing items and accessories frozen into large blocks of ice.
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New York Times staff photographer Fred R. Conrad was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of acclaimed color photography pioneer Joel Meyerowitz. Freelance videographer Elaisha Stokes went along to shadow Conrad, and captured this interesting behind-the-scenes video in which Conrad shares some thoughts on the experience of pointing a lens at a master of pointing lenses.
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Taking a page out of The Beatles’ book, Slovenia- and Croatia-based band Zebra Dots has an album cover for their debut record that features a zebra lane cross walk. Instead of strolling across it, however, the band members are lying on top of the thick lines, with their bodies blended into the zebra lines and their heads serving as dots. (You can also see it as musical notes on a staff).
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We’ve featured photographer Nick Fancher‘s pegboard backdrop experiments a couple of times now (see here and here), and each time the setup gets fleshed out a bit more. Yesterday, Fancher released the above time-lapse video that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how he constructed his “white room” inside his tiny basement (the ceiling is just 7-feet-hight).
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Bloomberg published this short feature earlier today titled, “The World’s Most Wanted Camera vs. the iPhone Era.” In the video, reporter Nejra Cehic takes us on a brief behind-the-scenes tour of Leica’s gear manufacturing headquarters in Solms, Germany, and discusses what the future holds for the brand.
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Back in August we shared a mesmerizing stop-motion video titled “Dream Music: Part 2″ and created by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams. The team spent 6-8 hours of work photographing every 3-4 seconds of the 8-minute music video. All in all, the project took six months to complete. The video above presents a behind-the-scenes look at how the whole thing was done, with director’s commentary, deleted scenes, and a bunch of time-lapses of the time-lapse being shot.
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