rooftopping

Photographer Austin Hou visited Tokyo a number of times between 2017 and 2018 and spent his nights rooftopping and photographing the city from above.

The best Urbex photographers in Europe—13 young shooters from the cities of Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague and Bratislava—are the subject of the latest documentary generating some hype in the photo world. It's called Run The World, and its first trailer is dripping with a devil-may-care attitude.

The dangerous practice of rooftopping photography has claimed yet another victim, this time in New York City. 24-year-old Conner Cummings was killed yesterday after climbing the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown Manhattan and then falling from the 52-story building.

A 17-year-old boy in Russia has died after falling 9 stories from a rooftop while engaging in extremely dangerous "rooftopping photography." The goal of the stunt was another eye-catching photo for his Instagram account.

Rooftopping photographers have gotten a lot of attention and notoriety in recent days for climbing to extremely high points in cities and shooting photos while often teetering on the edge. It turns out photographers were already pulling similar stunts nearly a century ago.

The picture above (by an unknown photographer) shows a photographer taking a picture of New York City streets while standing high above on the corner of a skyscraper. It was taken sometime in the mid-1920s.

Rooftopping: we have all seen the dozens of media articles and blogs about this, so this one surely is not the first, it won’t be the last, and it is not going to be the best.

Three photographers, including rooftopping pioneer Tom Ryaboi, were arrested this past Monday after allegedly breaking into the rooftop observation deck of a downtown building in order to take pictures.

The word "rooftopping" first appeared in a book called "Access All Areas" in 2005 by author Jeff Chapman. In this book Jeff refers to this activity as an offshoot of urban exploration. It's been called skywalking, roofing, and most recently New York Magazine called the people who do this "outlaw Instagrammers.”

Call it what you will, people have been going on roofs for decades (and probably even longer) for their own reasons, from Dan Goodwin's stunts to Philippe Petit's rope walk across the World Trade Center towers. Exploring rooftops is nothing new.

So it has been an amazing run. I owe a lot to my 'rooftopping' adventures. I've sold prints, had gallery shows, been on TV, in magazines, on the front page of the Toronto Star, and most importantly the rest of my work got more attention as a by-product of it. People really seemed interested - they liked these types of images and the attention was nice. It is hard to turn away the likes and faves. It was addicting to an insecure photographer just starting a new career in photography. Rooftopping was my security blanket.

Rooftopping -- taking photos from the top of tall structures, often illegally trespassing to get there -- is a favorite pastime of many daredevil photographers, but it's also dangerous and could land you in a whole heap of trouble, as one Russian tourist is quickly finding out.

Now there's a selfie you don't see every day. Rooftopping photographers Andrew Tso and Daniel Lau recently climbed to the very top of The Center, the fifth tallest skyscraper in Hong Kong. While at the top, Lau pulled out his "selfie stick" (AKA a retractable handheld monopod) and captured the crazy shot above.

If you're going to illegally climb tall buildings and other structures, and then do backflips while you're up there, expect to attract some attention of the police variety. But here comes the pro tip: when you do get caught, telling them you were taking 'panoramic photos' won't get you out of trouble if they saw the backflips.

When Kirill Oreshkin first started capturing photographs from the tops of the tallest buildings in Russia, he was afraid of heights. As the video above goes to show, that fear is long gone... in fact, these days he has no problem hanging off the top of a building with only one hand.

A 16-year-old New Jersey kid is making headlines today after embarrassing the Port Authority, NYPD and private security this weekend for the sake of some rooftopping pictures that ultimately led to his arrest.

Editor's Note: This goes without saying, but we neither condone nor encourage you trying this at home. Be Safe!

I'm a firm believer in a healthy respect for gravity, but Russian rooftopping daredevils Vitaliy Raskalov and Vadim Makhorov don't have that problem, and to be honest, they get some spectacular photos because of it. Case in point, check out the video above in which they take you on a POV journey up the second tallest building in the world, where they shot some incredible images.

Rooftopping photography is a dangerous new fad in which daredevils climb to extremely high (and often off-limits) urban locations in order to shoot vertigo-inducing photographs. Two of the most famous practitioners in the world right now are Vadim Mahorov and Vitaliy Yakhnenko, two young Russian daredevils who have attracted a great deal of attention for their images (they're the same guys who recently snuck to the top of Egypt's Great Pyramid).

If you want to see how the duo works, check out the short 6-minute documentary film above (warning: there's a bit of strong language). It's titled "Roofer's Point of View," and was created by HUB Footwear.

Rooftopping photography enthusiasts enjoy climbing to locations that would make most people's legs turn to jelly, pointing a camera straight down, and snapping a photo that commonly shows feet, a ledge, and a huge drop. While in Dubai for Gulf Photo Plus 2013, famed National Geographic photographer Joe McNally managed to snap the mother of all rooftopping photos, seen above. The Instagram snap was captured from the tip of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest manmade structure in the world.

Earlier this year, we wrote about a dangerous new Russian photo fad called "skywalking," in which thrill-seeking climber-photographers seek out the highest man-made structures they can find, climb to the apexes without proper safety equipment, and then shoot photographs of themselves and the view once they're there.

Two of the photographers who have been generating a lot of buzz in this niche are Vitaly Raskalov and Alexander Remnev.

Less than a week removed from the train photographer tragedy in Sacramento, California, another sad story has made its way across our desks. A 23-year-old man named Nicholas Wieme died in the pursuit of a "rooftopping" photograph yesterday after he fell into a building's smokestack in Chicago.

Toronto-based photographer Tom Ryaboi is one of the godfathers of "rooftopping", which involves climbing to the tops of skyscrapers, pointing a camera off an edge, and capturing cities from high perspectives that most people never experience. It's an activity that's not for the faint of heart; rooftoppers sometimes even dangle their feet off the edge of buildings.

Over the past year, Ryaboi has been working hard at combining rooftopping photography with his newfound passion of time-lapse photography. The result of his efforts was City Rising, the gorgeous time-lapse video seen above (be sure to watch it in HD).

One year ago today I took a photograph that would change my life. A single frame turned my whole world upside down, and brought on a storm of media attention, praise, criticism, confusion, wonder, and doubt. After one hell of a ride this past year, I think today is a good day to finally tell this photo's story...

For his project Life on the Edge, Detroit-based photographer Dennis Maitland seeks out high locations for vertigo-inducing shots of his feet dangling off the edges. Rather than use a remote shutter release, he captures all his photographs by hand. Once an acrophobe, Maitland now craves the adrenaline that comes from doing his photography.

When we shared the practice of “rooftopping” (climbing to the tops of skyscrapers and taking pictures from …

Thrill-seeking photographer Tom Ryaboi is one of the pioneers of "rooftopping", the practice of climbing to the tops of skyscrapers and shooting pictures off the edge. Photographers who participate in this new craze aim to visit the tops of every tall building in their city, capturing the incredible -- and adrenaline-pumping -- views that they afford.