projects

10 Astrophotography Ideas You Can Do From Your Backyard

With many of us stuck in lockdown, quarantine, and self-isolation, I thought I’d share 10 ideas for astrophotography that you can do from home, even if you live in a light-polluted town or city. If there’s one thing that this pandemic has taught us, it’s that we’re all in this together and astrophotography and astronomy only help to solidify that sense of unification.

5 Projects to Push Your iPhone Camera to its Limits

For the past few years, I have been really enjoying pushing the iPhone camera as far as it can go, to do photography projects that many people might not have realized you can do with an iPhone. I also use other cameras, but there’s something fun about the always-in-your-pocket aspect of iPhone photography.

Staying Busy as a Photographer, Even When Busy

It’s been a busy past couple of months for me, full of photo experiments and metadata blunders. But even when I’m busy with assignments, I’m still looking for a project.

I’m better at short-term projects, something I can set up quickly and shoot in a few hours. Coming up with these projects can be mind-numbing, so I look for outside inspiration. Fortunately, being with Wonderful Machine, I get ideas sent to my inbox.

10 Photo Projects and Products Sure to Make Your Mom Smile This Mother’s Day

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, it’s probably a good time to share some inspiration for gift ideas. So, we’ve put together a little collection of items, both DIY and available for purchase to make your life a bit easier come May 11th.

We’ll start from least expensive and work our way towards the more expensive gear. Along with each project or product will be a short summary of what it is and an accompanying link to find out how to make it or where to purchase it.

Get Educated: Recommended Projects and Tutorials

As with most fields that are technology driven, in photography, if you don't keep moving you'll quickly find yourself dead in the water. This is why seasoned pros and amateur hobbyists alike should always be learning and expanding their abilities. It's really the only way to stay competitive. And I don't even mean that in a financial sense, I mean that just in terms of your skill set.

Photographer Capturing the 40th Parallel All Across the United States

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.

Bob Carey on Using Tutu Self-Portraits to Support Women with Cancer

Back in March, we wrote about photographer Bob Carey's Tutu Project, which consists of self-portraits Carey created while wearing only a pink tutu. The project started out as a fun image made for a non-profit ballet organization, but soon transformed into something much more after Carey's wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The folks over at PocketWizard recently interviewed Carey, creating the touching short film above that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the project came about (warning: you might want to have some Kleenex nearby).

Portraits of Athletes Who Competed at the 1948 Olympic Games

New York Times photographer Damon Winter shot a neat portrait project earlier this year during the London Olympics. Titled Their Golden Years, the Times tracked down former athletes who represented the United States of America during the 1948 Olympic games, which were also held in London. The project provides a neat little biographical glimpse into each athletes life, using before-and-after photos, a brief description of what they did, and short audio interviews in which they share some memories.

Voyeuristic Portraits of New Yorkers Seen Through Apartment Windows

The photographs in photographer Gail Albert Halaban's series Out My Window are unsettling and beautiful at the same time. Each of them shows people framed by open apartment windows in New York City -- quite creepy if the images are actually of unsuspecting strangers. At the same time, the voyeur is quite a photographer, as each shot perfectly balances the lighting of the subject inside with the cityscapes and brick walls outside.

The scenes were actually all staged, and are intended to share something that Halaban says New Yorkers can relate to: "connecting" with neighbors through apartment windows.

Photographs of Various Workspaces

Photographer Joseph O. Holmes spent four years between 2007 and 2011 documenting the place where a person's personal and professional lives meet: their desk. He traveled around to various companies and businesses making photographs of workspaces exactly as he found them.

100 Portraits of Women and Men Between the Ages of 1 and 100

1 to 100 Years Project is an awesome portrait project by Belgian photographer Edouard Janssens in which he photographed 100 women and 100 men at each age between 1 and 100. His goal was to show the aging process in a positive manner and to provide an interesting visualization of the link between generations. He didn't handpick the subjects either -- all the participants volunteered through the project's website (excluding the kids, of course).

Woman Aims to Meet and Photograph Her 626 Facebook Friends in Real Life

After amassing 626 friends on Facebook two years ago, Tanja Hollander began to wonder how many of them were actually friends in the conventional sense. She then set out to answer the question by meeting each one of them and photographing them in their homes. The portraits are published on a website set up for the project, titled The Facebook Portrait Project, and each photo includes some information about the subject and their relationship to Hollander.

Photographs of Airplanes Hovering Over the Heads of Sunbathers

Maho Beach outside of Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten is famous for the fact that landing airplanes fly overhead at minimal altitude. It's one of the only places in the world where airplanes can be viewed in their flightpath just outside the end of the runway, and therefore is very popular with tourists and plane spotters. Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner has a project titled "Jet Airliner" that consists of photos of massive jet airliners hovering over the heads of sunbathers on the beach.

Fully-Functional Twin-Lens Reflex Camera Created Using LEGO Bricks

After seeing the LEGO large format camera we featured last year, Norway-based photographer Carl-Frederic Salicath set out to create his own LEGO camera. Rather than go with large format, he decided to build a more complicated Rolleiflex-style twin-lens reflex camera that uses 120 film. Aside from LEGOs, he also used some matte ground glass, a mirror, and lenses taken from a binocular.

Maddie the Coonhound Balancing on Things Across America

Atlanta-based photographer Theron Humphrey is currently on a year-long trip through each of America's 50 states, and is using a unique photo project idea to document it: he has his coonhound named Maddie -- his travelling companion -- balance on various things in the different places they visit.

Happy At One Hundred: Emotive Portraits of Centenarians

For his project titled Jahrhundertmensch, German photographer Karsten Thormaehlen shot portraits of elderly men and women who have reached the ripe old age of 100, also known as a "centenarian". In 2009, the UN estimated that there are only about 455,000 centenarians in the world.

Feet First: Creative Travel Photos From a First-Person Perspective

Most people like to stand inside photos taken during travels, but photographer Tom Robinson documents his adventures by showing his family's feet. Robinson started his project Feet First back in 2005 while sitting on a beach which his girlfriend Verity, and has added over 90 photos captured from all over the world since then. In 2011, his photos began showing an extra pair of feet: those of his daughter Matilda.

Magical Photos of Insects Shot Using Ordinary Household Objects

The photographs in Nadav Bagim's project "WonderLand" might look like paintings or computer generated images, but they're actually real photographs captured at home using ordinary objects and creative artificial lighting. His tools and props include things like vegetables, plastic bags, flowers, and leaves, and he captures the images using a Canon 60D and 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Getting his "subjects" into the positions and poses he wants requires countless hours of patient encouraging.

Portraits of Soldiers Before, During, and After War

For her project titled Marked, photographer Claire Felicie shot close-up portraits of the marines in the 13th infantry company of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps before, during, and after their deployment from 2009-2010. She then arranged the portraits into haunting triptychs that show the toll war has on a person's eyes and face.

Amazing Photographs of Wrapped Trees

Photographer Zander Olsen creates amazing optical illusions by wrapping trees with white linen, lining up the ends of the material with the horizon line in the background.

Portraits of Online Gamers Next to Their Alter Egos

For his project Alter Ego, photographer Robbie Cooper traveled around the world to shoot portraits of online gamers. He then combined his portraits with screenshots of the gamers' avatars in the various games they play, showing an interesting side-by-side comparison of what the people look like in the real world compared to what they choose to look like in their fantasy worlds. The project got its start back in 2003 after Cooper did a shoot with a CEO who used the game Everquest to communicate with his children after getting divorced.

Photographer Collects Photographs of Identical Twins

Diane Arbus might have one iconic photograph of identical twins, but Spanish photographer Maria Zarazua has devoted much of her career to finding and photographing them. Her goal is to show the intimate relationship between them, and their individualities despite being genetic carbon copies.

Crowdsourced Panoramas Tracking How Locations Change Over Time

Picture Post is an interesting (and NASA-funded) citizen science project that turns photographers into citizen scientists, crowdsourcing the task of environmental monitoring. Anyone around the world can install a Picture Post:

A Picture Post is a 4”x4” post made of wood or recycled plastic with enough of the post buried in the ground so it extends below the frost line and stays secure throughout the year. Atop the post is a small octagonal-shaped platform or cap on which you can rest your camera to take a series of nine photographs.

People who walk by can then use the guide on the post to capture 9 photos in all directions, and upload them to the Picture Post website. The resulting panoramas can then be browsed by date, giving a cool look at how a particular location changes over time.

How to Make Your Gloves Compatible with Touchscreen Cameras

We've featured special gloves and mittens designed for photographers before, but what if your camera uses a touchscreen instead of physical controls? Here's a video by Make's Becky Stern showing how you can sew some conductive thread into your glove to make it compatible with capacitive touchscreens.