clever

This article is about how you don't always need fancy lights for photo shoots: I recently shot the outdoor nighttime fantasy photo above, titled "The SpellBinder" and featuring Kara Markley, using only the light from candles and iPhone flashlights.

A professional camera store in Palo Alto, CA opened the store on Monday morning to find a nasty surprise: they had been robbed through a hole some crooks had cut into the wall behind the Nikon display case.

Here’s a humorous video that’s making the rounds online: a guy named Mikey …

Here's the story of how I recently proposed to my girlfriend using the back of my film camera.

Two pixels on a hard drive were having a conversation. Here's how it went...

Enjoy looking at lighting diagrams to see how photographers light their photos? Check out the way photographer Joey Hernandez shares his. Instead of sharing simple 2D layouts showing his gear and placements, Hernandez shoots behind-the-scenes photos of his shoots and overlays helpful (and humorous) labels across important (or random) things in the shot.

"Stages" is a photo project by 65-year-old photographer Laura Hofstadter, who recreated some of history's famous portrait paintings as creative self-portraits.

Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke is on a mission to bring film back, and his business card reflects that: it's literally a strip of 35mm film that has his information displayed on it.

Photographer and programmer Saulius Lukse made this clever 22-second-long time-lapse video in which the windows of a large apartment building are used as a ticker to wish viewers a happy new year -- all while the time-lapse continues to run in the rest of the scene.

Photographer Freddy Fabris spent years wanting to pay homage to the legendary artworks of great Renaissance master painters, but figuring out how to do so with his camera was a challenge. Recently, he finally came up with an idea that blends the style of old with ideas that are new: it's a series of portraits of car mechanics in a repair shop, created with the look and feel of Renaissance paintings.

Here’s a clever new video by DigitalRev TV that imagines photography as a …

Bangkok, Thailand-based photographer Chompoo Baritone recently created a clever series of images that pokes fun at how Instagram users often use carefully framed photos to make their lives seem more glamorous or exciting than they actually are.

Each of the photos in the series shows a picture-perfect Instagram snap, except we get to see the less-perfect world outside the little frame. The project is titled "#slowlife."

There's a new rising star on Instagram. A clever account called Socality Barbie is attracting quite a bit of attention for posting satirical hipster Instagram photos featuring a fashion forward Barbie. If you've ever browsed through artsy, hipster Instagram photos, you'll likely recognize many of the generic shots being referenced.

You’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Well, perhaps not always. Redditor …

Tripods are often designed for stability rather than ease of use, which can make operating them a slow and complicated process. Traditional tripods are also often difficult to set up with one hand.

The London-based product designer who goes by the name Product Tank decided to try his hand at inventing a tripod that's friendlier to use. What he came up with is this clever prototype that can easily be expanded, adjusted, and collapsed with a single hand.

Over in Japan, the electronics chain Yodobashi Camera places these creative ads on the sides of buses that turn the rear wheel into a lens for a giant camera. Kevin Warnecke spotted this one in Kyoto, Japan.

Upon first glance, the images in art director Stephen McMennamy's #combophoto project may look like surreal photo-manipulations created using Photoshop. They're actually the result of a much simpler process.

For each one, McMennamy carefully shoots two photographs and creatively arranges them side-by-side to create imaginative new scenes.

There's a new viral photo fad that's sweeping the world in the wake of Jurassic World's blockbuster opening. One of the heavily publicized scenes from the film shows actor Chris Pratt with a few dinosaurs inside an enclosure. Now real-life zookeepers (and ordinary folk) at major zoos around the world are doing their best to recreate that shot in humorous parody photos.

Ad agency brand strategist Derrick Lin has developed a creative way to vent about all the little annoyances of his office job. Using an iPhone, a desk lamp, and miniature figurines, he shoots miniature world photos that capture his real world frustrations.

Olympus has launched a bizarre and humorous new ad campaign to promote its mirrorless cameras at the expense of "heavy DSLRs." The ads feature a made up medical condition called DSL-ARM: "the affliction of having your arm stretched by using a heavy DSLR." Check out the 30-second ad above.

"Makeup Transit Authority" is an ongoing portrait series by Brooklyn-based artist Lydia Cambron, who finds defaced advertisements in the New York City subway system and then recreates them in new photos.

Hobbyist photographer and motor racing fan Carlo Bingen was at a race at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium yesterday when he cane across this photographer taking pictures over the chain link fence. While many people would be content with shooting through the fence gaps with a telephoto lens, this guy created a DIY platform that lets him stand over the top.

"Animated Photography" is an ongoing project by photographer ErAn Croitoru, who stages and shoots creative scenes with everyday objects that turn them into living creatures.

Photographer Dustin Thompson of Riverside, California, recently became the proud father of a new Sony A7II... so he decided to do a photo shoot to commemorate the happy event.

Mike Mellia is an advertising and fine art photographer based in New York City. Over the past year, he has been working on a project titled "A Selfie a Day Keeps the Doctor Away." It's an ongoing series of self-portraits captured in a studio and shared through Instagram.

Mellia poses as a wide range of fictional personas and includes clever and humorous captions to go along with each image. He says the photo above shows "that one time an affluent divorcee invited me to clean her pool."

The band Guster recently released this video version of their entire album Evermotion.

This isn't related to still photography, but we occasionally share some creative ideas from the world of video. The short film above by Eran Amir is titled "This Video is in Reverse." It may look relatively straightforward at first glance, but get this: everything you see was captured in a single take and then played backwards.

German photographer Marion Luttenberger was asked by Moodley Brand Identity to shoot a series of infographics for Caritas Kontakladen, an Austrian organization that assists drug addicts. The resulting images convey facts and figure in clever ways through carefully arranged physical objects in the frame.

For her project "Crazy Cat Lovers," photographer Andréanne Lupien used clone photography to turn ordinary cat owners with one cat (or sometimes two or three) into crazy cat people with an army of cats swarming their homes.

Spinning some burning steel wool around on the end of a rope is popular as a way to create dazzling long exposure photographs. It can also be used for dazzling video as well.

Photographer Richie Johnston created the video above by capturing a woman spinning steel wool in a forest and then reversing the footage. It's titled "Ignition Sequences."

One second per day videos have gotten quite popular in recent years, and now there are even apps that can help you do the project. Ben Schmidt of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada decided to take the concept to the next level by delivering a speech over the course of a year by saying one word to his camera per day.

Photographers Chris Limbrick and Francesco Fragomeni both work for the website hosting company Squarespace. During times in which they're not hard at work, the duo has been shooting a lighthearted photo project called foolsdoart.

Each photograph is a recreation of a famous painting with Limbrick and Fragomeni as the subjects and with their office as the stage.

Samsung has launched a clever new marketing campaign to promote its tiny NX Mini mirrorless camera. The ads imagine a few famous self-portrait paintings as a result of selfies captured with the company's camera.

Here's a clever idea we've never seen before: a card that "loads" as you open it. Pull the card out of the sleeve and watch as the progress bar magically "works."

How many different ways can you capture a car on camera? That's what Toyota's marketing team sat down and brainstormed last year when planning a commercial for the 2014 Toyota Corolla.

The 1-minute ad they came up with (it aired late last year) attempts to use every trick in the book.