Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has released a Milky Way photo that took him nearly 12 years to create. The 1.7-gigapixel image has a cumulative exposure time of 1,250 hours.
“It was constant hustle for me the first three years (in business) full time.” I read this quote from a photographer-turned-business coach. It was advice in a Facebook group. I’m not certain the question that elicited this reply, but it doesn’t really matter. The statement stands alone.
This is the music video for the song "UnAmerican" by the indie rock band Said The Whale. The stop-motion video was created by hand without digital effects: it features 2,250 separate photo prints rephotographed over a period of 80 hours.
Snowflakes have become an obsession of mine as an extreme macro photographer, but I never thought I would be able to take it this far: 2,500 hours of work across 5 years, all presented as a single composite photo titled “The Snowflake”:
New York-based stop-motion artist Adam Pesapane, who goes by PES, has earned a great deal of attention over the past few years for his remarkable animations that are made with creativity, hard work, and still photographs from DSLRs. His viral shorts include "Fresh Guacamole," "Western Spagetti,", and "Submarine Sandwich" (his projects often involve ordinary things getting turned into food).
Honda recently enlisted Pesapane's services to create the ad above, titled "Paper." It runs just 2 minutes, but it took 4 months of work to create!
Movies on the big screen sometimes have valuable nuggets of wisdom that can be applied to photography (and life). We recently shared one such clip from the movie "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty." Here's another one from the movie "Boyhood."
In this 3-minute clip, the main character, Mason, has a conversation with his photography teacher, Mr. Turlington, in the class darkroom. It turns out to be a fatherly lecture about the importance of adding hard work and other qualities on top of natural talent.
Casey Neistat doesn't believe he is the best looking, tallest, most talented, most capable, best funded filmmaker. In fact, he's pretty convinced he's not, and there's nothing he can do about those things. What he can do is be the hardest working person in the room, and the way he sees it, "the hardest working person will always win."
These little nuggets of wisdom and a whole lot more are all shared in the inspirational video above, which Neistat created a couple of months ago for National Geographic and their $50,000 dream expedition giveaway called Expedition Granted.
It’s been a tough few years and people are frustrated with the state of the industry. Everywhere I turn, people seem to be saying that a photography career isn’t what it used to be and that budgets are tight. Many of the blogs I read and the message boards that I visit all seem to be repeating the same message: There’s no work, there’s no money, and the competition is too intense to succeed. To quote one frustrated photographer, “How do you f’ing make a living shooting pictures anymore?”
At TEDx Rio de la Plata, author Dan Ariely gave an interesting talk on motivation and how to feel good about our work. Challenging the conventional belief that money equals motivation, he shows how injecting meaning into our work -- be that by making the work itself harder or having others acknowledge it -- has a huge impact on why and how we stay motivated.
The video doesn't specifically mention photography, but the lessons still apply. Without meaning, motivation dies; and the ways we get meaning are either by having others acknowledge/use our photography or by challenging ourselves to push the limits of our skill.
Want to see an example of what dedication to a photography project looks like? Check out The Fortieth Parallel, an ongoing series by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photographer Bruce Myren. It's a set of photographs captured across the 40th degree of latitude across the United States, at every whole degree of longitude. See those markers on the Google Map above? Those are all the photo spots that Myren aims to photograph.
Dream Music: Part 2 is an amazing stop-motion and time-lapse video by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams that features a technique they call "lyric-lapsing". Using still photos, they somehow planned the time-lapse sequences just right, so that the singer in the video is actually mouthing the words as he scurries around to various locations. They state that the video is a "musical voyage into the depths of the subconscious", and that it was designed to "transport the viewer from their own reality into a world of dreams and at the end, [...] awake to wonder how we were able to take them there."
The magnitude of the effort is what's truly impressive. The creators spent six months shooting the photos across two states. Every 3-4 seconds seen in the video required about 6-8 hours of work to create.
Computer generated imagery is becoming ubiquitous in the world of filmmaking, but some people still prefer some good ol' fashioned elbow grease. Los Angeles-based filmmaker Vu Hoang of Westscape Media spent 7 months creating this stop-motion love story, titled "Love Drama". Why did it take so long? Well, Hoang and his small crew of 3 people created all the animation seen using 3,000 photographs -- photos that were shot frame by frame and individually cut out by hand.
Stop-motion projects often require mind-blowing amounts of work and preparation. Just how mind-blowing? Music duo Daniel Larsson and Tomas Redigh (AKA Rymdreglage) recently poured out 100 boxes of LEGO pieces that each contained 650 blocks. They then had two cameras snap a photo every 20 seconds as they spent a whopping 71 hours sorting by color. The time-lapse video was created using the 12,775 photos that each memory card ended up with.
Here's another cool example of what's possible when you combine creativity with an insane amount of dedication: animator Jonathan Chong spent hundreds of hours creating this stop motion video for the song "Against The Grain" by the Australian band Hudson. He animated everything by hand, and captured 5125 individual photographs of 920 pencils for the three-minute long finished product.
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.
Australian college student Nathan Grant created this stop-motion music video for the song ‘Minister’s Daughter’ by the band The …
Photographer Nathan Seabrook made this creative stop-motion music video for the band Yuba …
Here’s an interesting video in which Jack White — singer and guitarist of …
Here's a story that was shared over on the Photo.net forums recently:
Client : Nice shot. You got it in 15 minutes. But isn't 1,000 bucks for that a robbery?
Photographer : Yes, you are right, but to get it done correctly in 15 minutes it took me 15 years of hard work and dedication to master this art of "robbery".
When people see photographers at work, they often assume that the results must not be worth as much as other forms of art, since pressing the shutter to capture an image seems so much faster and easier than painting a photograph.
Introduced in 1967, the Lite-Brite is a children’s toy where colored pegs are …
This stop-motion video will blow you away. Students in Japan created this video of Super Mario for a school …