fun

It can often be a challenge explaining to others what we do as photographers, whatever genre of work we may be in. But where we often struggle to explain our vocation to friends or family, in wedding photographer Chris Thornton's case, it was his 3-year-old son whose understanding of what his dad did as a wedding photographer wasn't quite pieced together.

And so, he decided to put his creativity and photographic abilities to use and do what any good father would do: he put it into terms his son would not only understand, but appreciate.

Human photographers aren't the only ones dragging their cameras to every corner of the globe in search of the decisive moment. As it turns out, a little LEGO man spent a year doing the same thing as part of life-sized human photographer Andrew Whyte's fun 'The Legographer' series.

Here's something that'll help you start off the week with a grin (or a grimace, if you harbor an aversion to beards). Will it Beard is a fun photo experiment of sorts created by art director Pierce Thiot and his photographer wife Stacy Thiot.

They wanted to determine what household items 'will beard' -- meaning what random objects they could successfully pack into Mr. Thiot's beard -- and got a fun, viral photo series for their troubles.

We’ve seen some really creative time-lapse videos that take stock of a year or more in someone’s life. They …

Photographer Jan Von Holleben specializes in imaginary awesomeness, creating scenes that whisk you away to a different place where random objects can be used to turn dreams into reality.

For his most recent project, however, he and his friends set about doing something even more difficult than bringing 'Dreams of Flying' to life: they're trying to save the universe... with imaginary machines, of course.

Sorry, Mom, but playing with your food rocks. Especially if you do it with the imagination and exacting detail that French photographers Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle have poured into their series MINIMIAM.

The folks at Custom SLR are in the holiday spirit, there's no doubt about that. After all, why else would you take on the pointless (but awesome) task of creating the world's largest camera tripod Christmas tree?

Sometimes inspiration strikes when you're out in the wild, climbing mountains and taking in breathtaking vistas. Other times, it happens when you're looking after your 7-year-old daughter and playing LEGOs. You can probably guess how photographer Jeff Friesen's 50 States of LEGO series came about.

This might just be one of those services both the loves and haters of Instagram will like. Because while other services print your Instagram shots on magnets or postcards, Boomf prints them on... marshmallows.

So, you see, if you like Instagram you get to turn your favorite photos into edible confections, and if you don't, you get to eat all of those pretentious selfies, food shots and cappuccino pictures you so despise. As Michael Scott would say: "win win win."

The Bonzart Lit should look somewhat familiar since we shared its big brother, the Ampel, with you back in June. But even though the toy camera-style design is the same, the two cameras offer very different experiences.

The Ampel was a not-quite-toy camera with a tilt-shift lens built in, whereas the Lit is a very-much-toy camera that offers a fun and strictly non-professional photo experience on the cheap.

It's Labor Day here in the US, which means most people (read: not the PetaPixel staff) are taking the day off, siting at home and possibly getting ready to fire up the grill in the next few hours. Whether you're at home or at work though, if you're looking to kill some time, we've found a great solution for you.

The downside to being the photographer in any given group is that you inevitably wind up being left out of the majority of the photos. One simple little student concept camera seeks to change that by splitting in two and allowing both subject and photographer to take a picture at the exact same time.

Getting your camera noticed if it's not also a smartphone or a high-end shooter is getting harder by the day. And phones such as the newly announced Galaxy S4 Zoom are quickly shrinking the quality gap between the camera phone and the regular old camera.

Here's another curious photography-related novelty item for those of you looking to fill your house with them (i.e. those of you who purchased the lens shaped vacuum cleaner and lens-shaped humidifier that we featured recently): it's a lens shaped pepper mill.

Check out this brilliant marketing idea: to promote its professional sling-style camera backpacks, Kata designed a carnival/arcade-style game called Shootout. It's live contest that has been held in various store locations and trade shows around the world. Basically, participants engage a virtual cowboy photographer in a duel. Once the timer starts, one must swing their camera bag around, "unholster it", and snap a photo of the screen. If the time captured in your photo is less than the time achieved by Mr. Cowboy Photog (and faster than other participants), you win a pretty pricey camera bag.

There's an iPhone camera app generating quite a bit of buzz, and it's not Instagram or Camera+. The new rising star is Manga-Camera, a fun app that's been downloaded like hotcakes in recent days (okay, we made up that expression). It has been downloaded over a million times in just the past week, and is currently the number one most popular app in the Japanese App Store.

The app is similar to Instagram filters, except instead of making your photos look like they were taken with a retro or toy camera, it makes them look like they were drawn by a Japanese manga artist.

Want to see what you would look like as an outlaw from the 1800s? With Mugshot Yourself, you can!

It's a simple web app that takes your portrait and combines it with the face of an actual New York City criminal from 1864. You can provide a photo using your webcam, by uploading one, or by selecting a Facebook profile picture.

Yesterday we were whimsically wondering what life would be like if we could Photoshop away some of …

Looking for a weekend project? Try you hand at creating an anthotype, or …

If you've always wanted to be an astronaut photographer shooting images of Earth from a window of the International Space Station, Stratocam is an app for you. Created by Paul Rademacher, it allows you to snap your own photographs inside Google Maps' satellite view of our planet. You can also view and rate other people's photos, and browse the highest rated images from around the world.

Street View Stereographic is a fun little web app that creates a “little …

It looks like Microsoft is finally putting its war chest and brilliant minds to good use: the company has …

Here’s a fun entry to add to your brain’s collection of “totally random facts about the world”: Nikon’s 52mm …

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.

The Image Fulgurator is a brilliant device created -- and patented -- by Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck. It's an optically triggered slave flash that fires through the back of a camera, projecting a message or image on the film through the lens -- basically, it's an optically triggered projector. What this allows von Bismarck to do is prank unsuspecting photographers by adding random pictures or words into their photographs whenever they use their camera's flash.

John (AKA knife141) loves turning junk into unusual creations, and one day came up with idea of building a camera for the sole purpose of confusing strangers. He took a $15 digicam and transformed it into a Argus C3 from the mid-1900s:

My goal was to install a modern digital camera inside the housing of an old, obsolete camera. I thought it might be fun to pull this camera out in a crowd of people and make them wonder why in the world an old man would continue to use a camera that was obviously as old as he was, as opposed to something more modern.

[...] I've had a lot of fun with this camera, taking it places and watching people's puzzled looks as I appear to be using an old beat-up camera that was made about the time I was born! I have even had people approach me and ask if I can still get film developed -- with no idea that the heart of my camera is actually digital! I have also had people ask me how many pictures I can take with the camera, and they always look puzzled when I tell them, "Oh, around 4,000 or so."

Expose two images without advancing your film, and you have yourself an in-camera double exposure photograph. With …

Instructables user art.makes has a tutorial on how you can make a pair of paper iris glasses with adjustable apertures. You could definitely build upon the idea to make each side more like a camera lens (e.g. adding barrels, f-stop values) -- perhaps as part of a geeky Halloween costume?

Hayashi Natsumi’s levitation photos have received a lot of publicity as of late (check out her blog …

Last week we published a post asking whether anyone had made a “print” on their skin by …