It's no secret that I have had an anti-Apple attitude in the past. As much as I may have made jokes at their expense, I have nothing against them. My perceived bias stems more from a fierce loyalty to the PC; I use to custom-build gaming rigs as a kid. Ever in search of more gaming power, I saw Macs as boring, work computers. However, now that I'm older, what I truly need a computer for is exactly that -- work.
A fascinating behind-the-scenes video details how cars are destroyed in Hollywood movies.
In these brief but incredible videos, award-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda discusses behind-the-scenes footage, logistics, and shares stories from the set of the 2022 blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick.
I’m sure photographers out there are one of two minds. One is that Peter Parker being both a photographer and a superhero is amazing and that we wish we could get those crazy angles. The second is that by taking pictures of himself for money, he is a total scam artist that raised the bar on pictures of Spider-Man no one could hope to accomplish.
Photographers can learn a lot about composition and color theory from great cinematography. Case in point: in this video, filmmaker Sareesh Sudhakaran of Wolfcrow explains how great movies will often use the 'Three Color Rule' to capture and keep a viewer's attention.
Want to see which cameras are used by characters in movies and TV shows? Product Placement Blog is a website that tracks brands that appear on screen, and one of the categories on the site is cameras.
Aspiring filmmaker Vugar Efendi has created a fascinating video for history and film buffs alike. In it, he places famous movie clips right next to the historical news reels and TV clips that inspired them, showing us just how incredibly accurate some of Hollywood's period pieces really are.
UK couple Dave and Sarah love both films and felines, so they've launched an Instagram project that combines the two. Called @moviecats, each photo they shoot is a scene from a famous movie recreated with the help of their two cats.
Want to see the composition concepts used in famous scenes from famous movies? Raymond Thi of Composition Cam has been taking still frames and overlaying neon pink lines to show things like symmetry, thirds, quadrants, triangles, diagonals, and more.
At some point, Facebook became the de-facto hub to share a photo... or two... or sixteen with your friends. Unfortunately, the interface is poorly designed for scrolling through multiple photos. Enter Facebook's new 'Slideshow' feature.
Phil Grishayev is an LA video producer with an interesting hobby: he revisit iconic locations from his favorite films and recreates the same shot to show the location "then and now."
Over on Tumblr, there's a new blog called Guns Replaced with Selfie Sticks. As the title suggests, the site features movie stills from action films with all the guns Photoshopped out and replaced with selfie sticks.
Want to recreate that "Martian" look? Or maybe it's the "Moonrise Kingdon" look you're going for, or your latest photo project needs the "Annie Hall" look. Whatever cinematic feel you're trying to capture, Cinema Palettes can help you achieve it.
What would it be like if, instead of Tom Cruise and Daniel Craig and Matt Damon, the biggest blockbusters in Hollywood all starred Asian actor John Cho? That's what 25-year-old digital artist William Yu set out to find out in his series and social movement #StarringJohnCho, a protest against whitewashing in cinema.
Lens flare was once considered a problem in filmmaking and something that should be prevented with well designed lenses and special coatings, but now it's something that's embraced and seemingly in every movie that hits the silver screen. How and why did this change happen?
Did you know that Star Wars: The Force Awakens villain Kylo Ren used to be a National Geographic photographer? Okay, not really. But kind of.
[re-]Mixing Hollywood is a project by American photographer Antoine Tempé and Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop, who shot elaborate portraits inspired by famous American and European movies.
Many of the scenes are instantly recognizable, except they feature models from Dakar, Senegal, and Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where the photos were shot.
Cinema and photography are two close-knit relatives that help us to tell stories through the use of a camera and mindful composition. This week, we are taking a look at the visual style heavily relied upon by the film noir genre that was most prevalent in the mid 20th century. Through the exploration of Hollywood's film noir visuals, we can learn a bit more about the history of cinema while finding inspiration for our own work.
We first featured the Cardboard Box Office project back in 2013 as parents Lilly and Leon Mackie were attracting quite a bit of attention for their creative recreations of Hollywood films with their baby boy, Orson. In the year-and-a-half since, the family has continued shooting low-budget photos, branched out into TV shows, begun doing commercial shoots with their concept, and been nominated for a Webby award.
Here's a second, deeper look at some of the work they've been creating as a family.
French photographer Francois Dourlen gets creative using nothing more than his surroundings and an iPhone, but he's not an iPhoneographer. No, his iPhone is a subject of every one of his images, a little window into the magical world of movies and television inserted creatively into drab scenes in the real world.
Have you ever watched a movie and wondered what single frame could perfectly summarize the entire film? Well, Geoff Todd did and his resulting creation is One Perfect Shot, a Twitter account that does just that.
At a time when digital production workflows are becoming more and more ubiquitous within Hollywood, the news of a director utilizing an analogue workflow on a big production always seems to strike a chord with those who appreciate the aesthetic and feel of film.
Thankfully, for those of you who do enjoy such news (myself included), two major directors are choosing film over even the highest-of-res digital for their upcoming (and already released) blockbusters.
Artist Jon Burgerman thinks there are too many violent film posters greeting us everywhere we go. These posters of movie and TV show characters holding weapons are all too common, and most of them show the protagonist brandishing their weapon right at the viewer.
And so, Burgerman decided to fight back using a little bit of fake blood, a sense of humor and photography.
LEGO and baking powder, that and some Star Wars inspiration is all Finnish photographer (and PetaPixel reader, we might add) Vesa Lehtimäki needs to blow your mind and send you into a nerd frenzy that'll have you digging up your old D&D set.
Well, at least that's how we feel about it, because we couldn't have geeked out any harder than we did when we stumbled across Lehtimäki's miniature movie scene photography.
I don't have kids just yet, so I can't say from experience, but it seems one of the benefits of having a child is the ability to feature the adorable little guy or gal in creative photography projects. Examples abound: from Queenie Liao's wondrous naptime photos, to Nagano Toyokazu's series My Daughter Kanna.
Now, another great project has popped up on our radar. This one is called Cardboard Box Office, and it's the result of a parenting duo's creativity, an excess of packing materials and the addition of a baby boy to the family.
If you don't really think about it, it's easy to take video for granted. After all, you can pull out your cell phone and be recording video in a few seconds flat (even fewer if you have Pressy). But what if you were limited to older photographic techniques? No, we don't mean film, we mean wet plate photography.
Capturing even a 12fps animation for only a few seconds would seem an enormous task, and yet, that's exactly what director Kellam Clark and his 40-person crew -- altogether The Living Tin -- are doing. They're shooting video made entirely of collodion tintypes.
No, the creepy face above isn't a still frame of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named taken from one of the Harry Potter films. It's actually a composite portrait of countless faces found in the 2009 James Cameron science fiction film Avatar.
Want to watch a non-fiction film about photography? Here's a list of documentaries (and some other stuff) concerning photography that I've collected over the years.
Sitting in a movie theater is probably a very familiar experience to most of you, but what's it like to watch the movie from the projection room -- that room with a small window at the back of each theater that holds the projector.
New York City-based photographer Joseph O. Holmes has a new project called The Booth that offers a glimpse into these rooms and the people who work in them.
Supercuts of movies are all the rage these days; here's one that'll be of interest to photography and camera enthusiasts. Simply titled "Photographers," the video was created by English artists Mishka Henner and David Oates, who spent hours upon hours watching more than 100 movies. The duo extracted short snippets from each one and spent months turning them into the giant whirlwind tour seen in the video above (warning: there's a dash of language, violence, and risqué business).