For Valentine’s Day this year, Samsung created this short film that features custom bokeh shapes shot with Samsung NX gear. They come up with some pretty creative ideas for various shapes: pop a balloon filled with glitter to create a firework look, or shoot out of a car window at night to capture spaceships flying through space! If you’re interested in learning how to customize your own bokeh, check out this video tutorial or the tutorial Samsung published alongside this video.
Do you feel like the quality of your photography falls short of where you want it to be? Don’t worry: every creative goes through a period in their growth in which there’s a disappointing gap between their “taste” and their work. Here’s an inspiring video in which Ira Glass encourages people going through this to push through and to not give up.
After her “Back to the Future” project went viral last year, photographer Irina Werning is back with a second set of time-bending photographs. Like in the first set, Werning finds decades-old photographs and recreates them as accurately as she can with the original subjects. Read more…
This behind-the-scenes video shows Montreal-based photographer Von Wong doing a photo shoot with a tango dancing duo. The shoot was spontaneous, with none of the locations preplanned, which gave Wong the opportunity to explore the environment.
“Idea Mine” is an upcoming iOS app by Canon that helps photographers save and generate ideas. The idea is that photo ideas can always be broken down into four components: location, subject, feeling, and technique. Provide the app with these four things, and it will store your idea for you to come back to later on. If you need some inspiration, hitting the “randomize” button will fill in the fields for you — kinda like a photographic mad libs. Read more…
If you’re looking for a photo idea, try this: grab a friend, find some sloped ground, and have them lean for a photo. Photographer Paul Octavious snapped these beautiful photographs of two of his buddies using this idea. Read more…
Australian college student Nathan Grant created this stop-motion music video for the song ‘Minister’s Daughter’ by the band The Good God Damned. After recording footage of the band playing using a Sony XDCAM, Grant printed out 3,433 photographs from stills in the video. He then spent six months turning the prints into this stop-motion video, capturing the new photographs with a Canon 600D.
If you think you can’t compete as a photographer because you’re past a certain age, think again. Here’s a fantastic quote by National Geographic Editor-in-Chief Chris Johns from an interview he gave back in 2005:
There are a lot of exciting photographers out there. Our new director of photography, David Griffin, and assistant director Susan Smith are making a much stronger push than we have in the past to identify young, emerging talent. They’re not necessarily age-specific either. Often photographers start to find their traction in their 50s.
Johns also says that photography’s transition to digital has also helped photographers develop more quality; getting feedback is easier than ever, and many of the prohibitive costs are no more.
Want to create a photography-related costume this halloween? Here are some fun costume ideas to give you some ideas. The above is a standard Canon point-and-shoot that has a tiny camera in the lens. Read more…
Night photographer Ben Canales made this image by stacking together roughly 50 different exposures in order to show all of the star trails across the sky. Regarding the color seen in the stars, Canales writes,
The different colors of the star streaks are from the “temperature” of light that the stars burn at. Just like a candle gives and orange light, and a gas stove burns blue- the stars in our sky shine all different sorts of colored light.
A while back, we featured a video tutorial by Canales on how to photograph the night sky. Give that video a look, find a still lake on a clear night, and you can make one of these photographs yourself!
