creativity

I love photography. I love the idea of capturing a moment in time, an event, an abstract scene or just a snippet of life that would otherwise go unrecorded, only to be forgotten over time. I have no formal training, no gallery exhibitions, no commissions and not even a particularly large following on Flickr or any other social media.

However, this does not deter me. Like the vast majority of other amateur photographers, my efforts will never be recognised, but that does not stop me from trying to improve my work, to add meaning to my pictures and to get that long awaited recognition.

Here’s an interesting TED audition by artist Phil Hansen, who speaks on embracing …

Admittedly, Michael Wolff is not a photographer, but this six minute Intel Visual Life documentary is still worth watching …

Here’s a 35-minute lecture by English actor and comedian John Cleese on the …

Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style is a spontaneous portrait project that photographer Nina Katchadourian started while traveling by plane in 2010.

German ad agency Jung von Matt created this brilliant series of photographs for a LEGO advertising campaign titled "Imagine". The images show famous characters from children's television shows in simplified LEGO form. Can you figure out each of the shows?

Singapore-based photographer Aw Zinkie's photo series "Republic of Pulau Semakau" explores the idea of a trash bin being an essential part of an individual's personal space, and a way of examining their identity. Her portraits show the subjects in their personal environments with their faced replaced by held up trash bins. The series also highlights issues of waste management in Singapore, and the fact that every individual's trash causes them to become a "founder" of the offshore Semakau Landfill.

Photographer Mario Zanaria created this contact sheet …

Here’s a quote by photographer Richard Benson on …

Everything is a Remix is a fascinating four-part video series by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson that explores the concept of creativity, and how everything created has some degree of copying, transforming, or combining of old ideas. While the series isn't specifically directed towards photographers, the ideas are quite relevant to the discussion of "original" work.

These photos might look like they were computer generated, but they're actually unmodified photographs. Ron Brinkmann took 6 mirror tiles and made a box with them with the help of some duct tape. He then placed a camera inside and triggered shots using the timer.

Address Is Approximate is a beautiful and creative stop-motion video by Tom Jenkins of …

Here's another cool example of what's possible when you combine creativity with an insane amount of dedication: animator Jonathan Chong spent hundreds of hours creating this stop motion video for the song "Against The Grain" by the Australian band Hudson. He animated everything by hand, and captured 5125 individual photographs of 920 pencils for the three-minute long finished product.

Want to see what pure dedication looks like? This music video for the song "In Your Arms" by Kina Grannis is a stop-motion animation done with a background composed of jelly beans. It's a crazy project that required 22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, and 288,000 jelly beans. They could have used CGI, of course, but each frame was carefully created by hand and photographed with a still camera. It's even more mind-blowing given this fact: none of it was done with a green screen.

Here’s a super-awesome way of using stop-motion photography to announce the birth of a new baby.

Mouthpiece is a series of photographs by photographer Justin Quinell in which he documents some of his life's experiences as seen by his mouth. The photographs were captured using a custom pinhole camera created from a 110 film cartridge. It's a unique perspective of the world that we don't often see in photographs.

Update: Looks like the video was taken down due to a copyright claim. You can watch it …

Here’s an interesting video in which Jack White — singer and guitarist of …

Nokia held a competition with a $10,000 prize this year asking filmmakers to …

Here’s a nice bit of encouragement for times when you feel like everyone else is coming up with neat …

Have you been running low on creative juices lately? Fill up again with these 29 simple ways to stay …

London filmmaker Temujin Doran created this great little video for Lego that doesn't involve any flashy effects or fancy camera techniques -- just a child-like imagination. It won a prize at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2010.

OK Go, an LA-based rock band, makes some of the most creative music videos you'll ever see, from the treadmill video that amassed over 50 million views on YouTube to their gigantic Rube Goldberg machine one that dropped jaws around the world. Their latest video for the song "End Love" is yet another display of pure creativity, as they blend stop motion and slow motion techniques in strange and awesome new ways.

This stop-motion video will blow you away. Students in Japan created this video of Super Mario for a school …

Sony recently hired Superfad to create a video for its global "make.believe" campaign, and got its money's worth. This jaw-dropping video was created with a Phantom HD cinema camera shooting at 1,000 frames per second, and blends live action and CGI into ethereal scenes that are sure to leave you take your breath away.

This amazing pinhole camera is so small that it’s amazing it actually works.

Here's a video that's so creative and awesome it's sure to get your artistic juices flowing. OK Go just put up the music video to their song "This Too Shall Pass", and it's one of the coolest music videos I've ever seen. Basically the whole video shows a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption built in a warehouse, with the timing and placement of every person and element perfectly integrated into the song.

Here's a dose of creative inspiration: a hand animated video of parkour. Created by Serene Teh and Noel Lee, parkour motion reel is a pretty unique take on the flip book style of animation.