experiment

In Lebanon, 14-year-old children can get married without their parents permission, and marriages involving 12-year-olds are not rare. But not everyone approves of the idea of child brides -- in fact, it seems that a majority doesn't.

The video above is a social experiment staged by the rights organization KAFA recently. They had a 12-year-old girl pretend to be a child bride, posing for a wedding photo shoot with her new husband... who looks old enough to be her grandfather. Hidden cameras nearby documented the reaction of passersby who noticed the photo shoot.

Photographer Mathieu Stern did this short experiment with capturing the full image circle from a 180-degree fisheye lens. You'll need a smaller image circle on a larger camera sensor. For this video, Stern used a Kenko 180° fisheye lens, screwed onto a 55mm to 52mm filter, screwed onto a Canon 50mm f/1.4 FD lens, screwed onto a NEX adapter, mounted to the Sony a7II.

Artist Shea Glover recently did a social experiment. The 18-year-old Chicago-based artist took …

Photographer Mathieu Stern found an interesting way to shoot digital photos through the plastic lens of a 1950s toy camera. After removing the back of a Photax Heanar Type V camera, he simply strapped it to the front of his Sony a7II using rubber bands.

Canon Australia has been conducting a series of experiments that are "designed to shift creative thinking behind the lens." For the latest one, titled "Evolution," the company gathered 6 professional photographers and gave them everyday objects to photograph. But there was one simple rule: the same composition cannot be shot twice.

The results can be seen in the 2-minute video above.

After using a vintage 1910 lens on a modern Sony a7II, Paris-based photographer Mathieu Stern is back again with another interesting lens experiment.

This time he created "bokeh madness" by attaching a Russian Jupiter 9 85mm f/2 lens onto his Sony a7II using a M42-to-E tilt adapter.

Requests for free spec work is a big problem for photographers, who lose out when clients demand free photos in exchange for "vague to nonexistent compensation." To show how ridiculous the idea of spec work is, Toronto agency Zulu Alpha Kilo had a guy approach people in other businesses with requests for free spec work to sample their products and services before actually committing to paying. A barista, chef, personal trainer, and architect all responded with indignation; watch their reactions in the 2.5-minute video above.

Canon conducted an interesting experiment on the power of perspective in portrait photography. The camera company enlisted the help of 6 photographers and asked them each to independently shoot portraits of a man named Michael. But there was a twist: each photographer was told a different thing about Michael's background.

What do you say as a photographer when you’re asked to shoot for free? What if the one asking is a good friend, an old friend... a friend who really ought to know better?

What if they promise great “exposure”?!?

Did you know the International Space Station has a RED Epic Dragon in its camera arsenal now? The 6K camera was delivered to the station back in January 2015, allowing astronauts to capture footage at 300 frames per second and 6 times more detail than before.

To show off their new recording abilities, astronauts have posted a couple of videos in which they play with floating orbs of water in the microgravity environment of space. The experiments have been a hit: the 1-minute video above has gotten nearly half a million views in just the past few days.

A few months ago I stumbled upon a very interesting article on PetaPixel titled "Why I Stopped Using The DNG File Format." In this article the author mentions that Capture One give us a better starting point for color processing. This point made me excited about the whole idea that my portrait images could turn up a lot better and that I only need to start using Capture One.

Photographer Kotama Bouabane of Toronto, Canada, has a camera that attracts strange stares when he uses it in public. He shoots with a coconut.

Toronto-based cinematographer Jon Simo created this trippy portrait showing how an infrared camera sees things compared to an ordinary camera.

I always tell people that the problem with phone cameras is the lenses. This isn't a thesis that is easy to test because you can't swap the lens on a phone without destroying it. But now the Raspberry Pi has a camera module that's basically a phone camera sensor. It's also easy to get an Raspberry Pi camera module with a C mount so you can easily change lenses.

I also own a Nikon DSLR camera for which I have a few lenses, so I bought a C mount to F mount (Nikon) lens adapter so I can use the big DSLR lenses with the Raspberry Pi camera

I’ve been a user of VSCO Film for Lightroom for several years now. I’ve been happy with the results, but I wanted to see how close VSCO's settings are to actual film, so I decided to do my own tests.

This whole experiment was a learning experience for me, especially regarding the digitization of a film negative. For this casual experiment I shot some Portra 400 film on my medium format Fuji GA645, snapped a few similar frames on my Nikon Df, and did a side by side with the VSCO Portra 400 setting from Pack 01 straight out of Lightroom.

Photographers often use UV filters for lens protection, but how much are they actually able to prevent your lens from getting damaged? Photographer Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery recently decided to find out... by breaking a large number of filters and lenses.

In the video above, Perry cuts through the haze surrounding UV filters and shows what they actually do and don't do for your precious glass.

Lately, drones have been the topic of many privacy concerns. Notably, one Kentucky man gunned down a Phantom that he thought was taking photos of his teenage daughter. But are drones any more creepy than existing technology?

Last year, journalist Esther Honig published a viral series of images showing how photo retouchers in 27 countries around the world "enhanced" a portrait of her according to their cultural preferences. Inspired by that project, the UK medical website Superdrug Online Doctor just published a similar experiment that explores body image.

Artist Yolanda Dominguez believes that there is something wrong with the way women are portrayed in fashion photographs. For her recent project titled Ninos vs Moda ("Children vs Fashion"), she asked a group of 8-year-old children to look at an assortment of fashion shots and to describe what they see in them. The reactions can be seen in the 4.5-minute video above.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the horror stories. “ONOZ! My lens got a scratch, it’s ruined!!” someone screams, then goes to quietly cry in a corner. “Welp, shoulda used a UV filter, if those get scratched you can just replace them, now you have to sell that lens for half what it's worth on eBay.”

What do you get if you mount a giant $60,000 broadcast lens to a tiny mirrorless camera? That's what YouTube user SirJonnyCargo recently set out to find out. He used a Fotodiox lens adapter to mount his Panasonic GH4 onto a Fujinon XA55 lens. The results were actually very impressive.

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.

Since 2012, photographer Kenneth Brandon has regularly ventured into the great outdoors at night to shoot time-lapse photos of the dark sky. He recently began to wonder what a time-lapse would look like from a point-of-view on his telescope rather than through it, so he attached a DSLR to the outside on a recent shoot in Panamint Valley, California. The video above is what resulted.

The Internet is teeming with photographs and videos of the starry night sky that dazzle the eyes and tickle the imagination, but have you ever wondered how the imagery compares to what photographer's naked eye actually saw while the camera was taking a picture?

Photographer inefekt69 recently decided to answer that question by creating the photos above. On the left is what the human eye could see in the dark, outdoor field, and on the right is the photo he shared online.

Short-film makers Adrian Morphy and Marissa Bergougnou of Rhymes with Orange did an …

This guy from Trollstation recently did an experiment to see what kind of …

Every time you post a photo to Instagram, it loses a tiny bit of quality. It's not really noticeable for a single upload, but if you save and repost the photo over and over, the quality loss becomes extreme. It's a concept known as "generation loss," and is the subject of artist Pete Ashton's project "I Am Sitting In Stagram (2015)."

In Japan, purikura refers to a photo booth in which you can pose for a photo with friends and decorate the portraits before receiving little printed versions.

One interesting thing that sets many of these machines apart from their Western world counterparts is the fact that they will quietly do beauty retouching on photos in an attempt to fix subjects' facial "flaws."

Here's a strange portrait showing what you get when you fire an off-camera flash that's shoved into your subject's mouth. Certain parts of the human face are more translucent than others, resulting in a creepy skull-like appearance.

24-year-old Belgian visual artist Stijn Eeckhout tell us he shot the photo after he was curious about what the effect would look like.

Here’s something else to file under “Strange things people are doing with camera drones”: …

Kevin McGloughlin of Sligo, Ireland created this captivating music video for the song "Never Knew" by Sunken Foal. He tells us his use of "lights and bokeh in an unconventional way" recently got his project selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick.

I visit San Francisco often to walk the streets with camera in hand, hoping to capture life as it happens. Invariably I am asked for change and/or a cigarette. For the most part I try to be generous, but as a non-smoker I’m not able to oblige. I then wondered what would happen if the situation was reversed: instead of being asked for a cigarette I would offer them to random people from all walks of life.

What does your ideal self actually look like? That's the question that photographer Scott Chasserot seeks to answer with his experiment, Original Ideal. By using portrait photography, Photoshop and brainwave scanners, he thinks he can pinpoint the version of your portrait that you find most appealing.

Dutch graphic design student Zilla van den Born recently conducted an interesting experiment on the power of phoney and misleading photos on social media. For five weeks, Zilla tricked her family and Facebook friends into thinking that she was on a long and exciting vacation through South East Asia. In reality, she never even set foot outside of her home city of Amsterdam.

The team over at COOPH today shared an insightful video that describes 7 DIY photography tips that use nothing more than items you have lying around the house. From can koozies to tights, a number of unusual household products make a cameo and help you add a unique, homemade element to your photo game.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if journalist Esther Honig has proven anything with her fascinating Photoshop project Before & After, it's that whoever 'they' are (it turns out, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford) is right.

What do Polaroids and Hot Pockets have in common? 99.9% of the time nothing. But, thanks to Berlin-based fashion and portrait photographer, Oliver Blohm, there’s that .1% remaining. To create that .1%, he has literally developed a way in which to combine Polaroid film with a microwave to create some very... unique photographs.

What's the best thing about a 365 project? Some would say it's that you develop the habit of shooting every single day. Others that you develop your skill because you're shooting more than you probably ever have. But for photographer Aliza Razell, the best thing about a 365 project is the ability to experiment.

And it's experimentation that led her to create the stunning images you see above and below. Images that combine watercolor and photography into something greater than the sum of its parts. Images that, as you probably already guessed, are spreading like wildfire.

The photograph above seems fairly straight forward: pretty model photographed in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. But that's not actually the case at all. The photograph was actually taken in a basement in Ohio.

I have a passion for automotive photography at night, but for the most part I'm forced to shoot static images. Long exposures require a stable support for your camera and that's only achievable when everything's locked down -- including the car. Sure, light painting, traffic trails and even the occasional star trail all help to introduce dynamism to static automotive images but sometimes there's no substitute for shooting the car whilst its moving.