crazy

This is pretty crazy if it's real: an ammunition company called Snake River has just announced a new product called the Drone Munition shot shell: it's a shotgun shell designed specifically for shooting down camera drones.

If you thought photographing a NASCAR race from up close was wild, check out this video. Captured by photographer Marcel Langer at Gatebil Rudskogen, Norway's top drift racing event, the video shows how close photographers get to the cars as they screech by on the track.

Steel wool is often done by lighting a small ball of steel wool on fire and then swinging it around in a long exposure photo while it burns. But what happens when you take it to the extreme? The folks over at Joby recently decided to see what you get when you burn a giant 2-foot ball of burning steel wool.

This photographer was spotted taking pictures at an anime street festival in Osaka, Japan, with a crazy DIY camera rig that covered his upper body. The kit included three DSLRs, three off camera flashes, multiple action cameras, a smartphone, an external hard drive, and more.

If you don't mind shelling out $880 on a single memory card and putting all your eggs in one basket, you can buy Lexar's 512GB CF card (or SanDisk's 512GB SD card for $600). To give you a better idea of just how massive these capacities are, photographer Jared Polin stuck his 512GB card into his Nikon D4s and documented it in the video above.

Photographer Calder Wilson recently did some experimentation by attaching fireworks to a drone and then flying it around in a long exposure photograph. The results are beautiful to look at.

Earlier this month, we shared a video showing the incredible reach of the Canon SX60, a superzoom compact camera with a 65x lens. If you thought that video was crazy, check out this one featuring the new Nikon P900, which packs an even longer 83x optical zoom lens -- the equivalent of a 24-2000mm lens in 35mm terms.

It's not just the megapixel war that's raging in the world of digital cameras. One of the big competitions going on is the battle of powerful zoom lenses on compact cameras, and the zoom capabilities on the latest "superzoom" cameras are pretty ridiculous. The video above shows what the new Canon SX60 can do with its 65x optical zoom (and 4x digital zoom tacked on at the end).

At the Adobe MAX 2014 conference this past week, Adobe showed off some of the crazy technology current brewing in the company's labs. Two of them offer a glimpse at what may soon be available to photographers in Photoshop: changing the time of day (i.e. lighting) in photographs with a simple slider and removing haze from a scene automatically.

Now that Sony's QX1 -- basically a smartphone add-on that lets you use E-Mount lenses with your phone -- has arrived, it was inevitable that people would take these new interchangeable lens capabilities to comical extremes. Enter Facebook user Usperedi, who created the image above for Sony Alpha Rumors.

Here's something that will blow your mind: scientists have figured out how to extract audio from images captured with a camera. By looking at the extremely small vibrations captured by a high speed camera, researchers have been able to recreate music and speech from nothing but visual information.

Sometimes, the right shot requires a beautifully minimalistic approach that subtly tugs on the heart strings... other times, you throw the freaking kitchen sink at it and come out with something that defies adjectives. The video above falls into the latter category.

We don't typically share two time-lapses in the same day, since most people see that genre as over-saturated as it is, but today we have good reason to. The first is a landscape time-lapse so gorgeous National Geographic took notice, and this one, well this one may completely change the way you look at tilt-shift where time-lapse is concerned.

Want to see some mind-blowing research into photography (from the mid-2000s)? Check out the video above about "Dual Photography," a Stanford-developed technique that allows you to virtually swap the locations of a camera and a projector, allowing you to take pictures from the perspective of the light source instead of the camera sensor.

Ever since photography was invented in the 1800s, there have been people willing to risk life and limb to bring images to the public eye. Among the craziest examples are prisoners of war during World War II -- people who built makeshift cameras out of smuggled parts in order to capture what life was like inside their prison camps.

If you're afraid of swimming in the ocean due to a fear of the unknown below you, you might want to skip over the post. A group of divers off the coast of California got a scare recently when they had an extremely close call with large humpback whales. They almost found themselves in the mouths of the feeding whales, and multiple cameras were there to capture what happened (note: the video above contains some strong language).

Back in May, we featured the volcano photos of photographer Miles Morgan, a guy who gets so hot to lava that he's had his shoes and tripod melt. If you didn't believe that shoe melting fact then, check out the crazy photo above: it shows photographer Kawika Singson with his shoes and tripod in flames due to the intense heat of lava.

During the 2013 Moore tornado last week, a young man named Charles Gafford III stuck his cell phone through a hole in his storm shelter and captured close-up footage of the EF5 tornado as it passed by. If you thought that video was crazy, check out the footage above -- it shows what it's like to get hit directly by a massive EF4 tornado!

When the 2013 Moore tornado struck Oklahoma on May 20th, 2013, Charles Gafford III took refuge in a storm shelter. Once inside, he noticed that there was a small gap in the shelter that he could stick his smartphone through. He did, and ended up capturing the footage above that shows what it's like to have an EF5 tornado -- the strongest strength rating assigned -- pass almost directly overhead.

Want to snap a photograph of a rock climber that doesn't look like you're also pressed against the face of the rock? Just bring along a step ladder! The photographs above show how adventure photographer Corey Rich used one last year while shooting a Nikon D4 promotional video featuring free-climber Alex Honnold. He secured it perpendicular to the face of the rock and stepped out onto the end and a better view of the action.

Soviet photo equipment collector Vladislav Kern recently purchased this crazy camera contraption. Upon first glance, it might look like a 8mm motion picture camera that an ordinary tourist might use, but take a closer look (or open it up) and you'll see that the design is simply a façade. The device is actually a still camera that exposes 35mm film using a smaller lens on the right side of the body!

You may have heard that digital cameras can be made sensitive to infrared light by removing the IR filter found inside, but did you now that something similar can be done with the human eye? People who have aphakia, or the absence of the lens on the eye, have reported the ability to see ultraviolet wavelengths. Claude Monet was one such person.

This amazing photograph of sailor Alex Thomson walking on the keel of an 8-ton yacht was created with courage rather than Photoshop. It was an ad for fashion house HUGO BOSS, which has sponsored Alex Thomson Racing since 2003. The conditions for the shot had to be just right, and the skipper had to carefully keep the yacht at a 45-degree angle for up to a minute to avoid crushing Thomson and the jet ski driver.

Facebook officially filed to become a publicly traded company today and, in doing …

French artist Philippe Ramette captures surreal self-portraits in which he appears to be defying gravity. Rather than use digital trickery, Ramette -- who started his career as a sculptor -- builds metal support structures that allow him to stand or sit at impossible angles.

For a fine arts project at his university, art student Joel Brochu spent a whopping 8 months meticulously recreating a photograph using tiny nonpareils (the tiny sprinkles used on cakes and donuts). 221,184 individual sprinkles were placed on the 4-foot-wide board, which was covered with double-sided tape and a thin layer of glue. Each sprinkle was placed by hand using jewelry tweezers.

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.

Daily photo projects have become quite popular as of late, and a number of viral time-lapse videos feature people who take one self-portrait a day over many years. However, if you think taking a photo every day requires a crazy amount of dedication, you ain't seen nothing yet.