When BBC Future approached design company Conran with a challenge to “redesign any object,” Senior Product Designer Jared Mankelow chose the camera. He believes that the form factor of our cameras hasn’t kept pace with their function, and so his square creation harkens back to the film cameras of old, while simultaneously catapulting the camera into the future. Read more…

Check out this quirky photo project by photographer Fabien Nissels titled Blocks. Nissels first photographed his friend Johan in a studio from four different directions for each part of his body (i.e. head, arms, torso, waist, legs). They then printed out the photographs and fixed them onto styrofoam blocks, placed the blocks in various locations and in different arrangements, and re-photographed Johan as a block dude.
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Directors Ian & Cooper created this clever music video for the song “Back to Me” by Joel Compass using cinemagraph-style shots. Each scene is a strange fusion of motion picture and still photography, as some areas look like a photograph, while other portions look like video footage. If you’re not familiar with the term “cinemagraph,” check out other examples of the technique we’ve featured in the past.

(via John Nack)

Photographer Ernie Button has a unique project called Vanishing Spirits in which he photographs the bottom of Scotch glasses once the whisky has evaporated way. The residue creates textures and colors that make the photographs look as though they’re images of otherworldly planets.
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Did you know Instagram’s mobile app can be used to view movies? Okay, okay, you won’t be able to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster on it, but it’s possible to enjoy glimpses of old school silent films.

The clever idea was discovered Canadian advertising agency Cossette to promote the upcoming Toronto Silent Film Festival, and involves using the app’s slideshow view to zip through still photos as if they were images in a flipbook.
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Photographer and director Greg Jardin made this creative music video for the song “New York City” by Joey Ramone. It’s a stop-motion video that features 115 people (some of them random pedestrians yanked off the street) traveling backwards through various locations in New York City.
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If you enjoyed that backwards stroll through Jerusalem we shared a few days ago, you’ve got to check out this backwards video created by high school students in Taiwan. It’s a four minute stroll through the school grounds at the National Miaoli Senior High School, with students doing all kinds of things that look awesome when reversed.

Thanks for sending in the tip, Wai!

Photographer Nick Fancher tells us that he recently came up with an interesting way of customizing the catch light in subjects’ eyes. If, in your portraiture, you place white or black foam boards to control the amount and direction of bounce light, you can also use white and black gaffers tape to control what goes on in your subjects’ eyeballs!
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Messe Kopp sent us this awesome and mind-bending video he shot on the streets of Downtown Jerusalem. It it’s a backward-is-forward video that shows a man getting up from bed and taking a stroll down a city street, interacting with various people and objects along the way. The entire 2.5-minute video was shot in a single take.
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Stephanie and her husband Jonathan are huge fans of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. When the two got engaged and married in 2011 and 2012, respectively, they decided to use the comic as their theme for both their engagement photo shoot and their wedding. To capture the images, they recruited San Francisco-based photographer Junshien of Junshien International.
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