Ideas

When the devastating hurricanes started hitting the United States recently, celebrity photographer Jeremy Cowart wanted to do something but had no idea what to do.

In New York City, one of the things you'll often see on street surfaces is cryptic and colorful scribbles left by utility companies. Photographer Joseph O. Holmes decided to turn these scribbles into artistic street photography (literally). His project is titled "Tracing the Underground: Street Utility Markings in New York City.”

When you go "live" on Facebook, there's actually a delay of several seconds between when your camera records video and when it gets broadcast through Facebook. The band The Academic came up with the absolutely genius idea of using this delay to create a mesmerizing visual loop sampler for the live recording of the song "Bear Claws" in the 6-minute video above.

Want to spice up your photography and try some unorthodox methods for getting unusual photos? This 1-minute video may be the inspiration you need. Photographer Dan Watson runs through 5 neat accessories that will let you "hack" your way to creative photos.

The popular JOBY GorillaPod has a new challenger. Tenikle is a new three-tentacled and suction-cup-covered tripod that's jumping into the flexible, portable tripod market.

Using drones to illuminate scenes and subjects using flashes and powerful LED lights is a new trend made possible by the emergence of affordable and intelligent consumer drones. If you'd like to see what the latest experimentation is producing, check out the 2.5-minute short film above, titled "mémoires". It was lit entirely with drone lights.

Recently, I've become interested in photographing boiling water in a glass tea kettle. It may sound boring and uninteresting, but with the right lighting, you can get some truly fascinating images.

For their ongoing "Craigslist Encounters," the Los Angeles-based photography team Kremer Johnson has been shooting portraits of completely strangers who are each found using Craigslist. Each subject responded to an ad titled "Characters Wanted" and agreed to pose for $20 an hour.

Here's a new 3-minute music video by Russian/Ukrainian group 5'Nizza. In it, the band finds themselves in a variety of situations, but as the action is frozen they keep on singing while the camera pans around them. How was it done? It turns out the effect was created with a single moving camera and a green screen.

Here's a video by YouTube user oOtoke, who shot selfies for three years to create a timelapse of himself singing.

If you're into photography, chances are that you've seen the tutorials where you are supposed to cut hearts out of paper to get heart-shaped bokeh. I recently decided to try to do this myself. But I soon realized that my scissor skills aren't anywhere near good enough to make nice looking heart shapes... let alone anything more advanced.

Back in May, artist Kevin Parry released a viral illusion video of himself walking into a mirror in a forest and emerging out the other side. If you liked that one, check out Parry's new video above featuring a compilation of many similar illusions.

Back in August 2016, the Blue Cut wildfire tore through Cajon Pass in Southern California, burning 37,000 acres, dozens of cars, and over 300 homes and structures. Local photojournalist James Quigg documented the fire's damage in a creative and unusual way: he found a burned teapot and turned it into a pinhole camera.

Here's a different perspective of the Great American Eclipse by photographer Stephane Vetter. It's a "little planet" photo that beautifully combines the solar eclipse with star trails.

Los Angeles-based photographer Daniel DeArco recently shot a series of "inverted room" photos of a dancer and a mirror on a wall. To turn the idea into reality, DeArco and his team spent days building a sideways room.

Steve Irvine is a Canadian potter who has had a lifelong interest in photography. Some years ago, Irvine decided to combine his two passions by creating ceramic cameras. Each beautiful and unique creation is fully functional as a pinhole camera.

How might photography evolve in the coming years and decades? The folks over at COOPH took a look at current trends and research projects to come up with 10 productions about the future of photography. They're discussed in the 4.5-minute video above.

Photographer Murilee Martin has shot auto racing for over a decade now, but recently he decided to give himself a challenge: he covered a race using a "point-and-shoot" camera that contains 100-year-old+ camera technology.

In this tutorial, I'll break down how I create light trails from video and how you can create a video panning shot. A panning shot is where a camera pans horizontally to track a subject in a frame, keeping the subject sharp, while blurring the background.

Austrian adventure photographer Sebastian Wahlhuetter has just released an amazing new project titled "Amadé". It's a series of photos showing Mozart walking across the air on musical notation, created entirely in-camera instead of through Photoshop "faking."

If you've ever wanted to see what the world looks like as a vegetable being eaten by animals, today's your lucky day. YouTuber Agavem bought some vegetables, mounted a camera to one end, and then visited a park to feed the animals that live there. The viral 4-minute video above is what resulted.

Concert photographer Rich Gastwirt came up with this unusual "viral" business card for getting his website URL into people's hands.

Here's a beautiful then-and-now photo that shows a bride and groom on their wedding day in the exact same pose as when they received their first holy communion as children decades ago.

High-end photo backdrops can cost over $1,000 apiece. When photographer Jeremy Cowart couldn't find a backdrop he needed a few days ago, he had an idea: Cowart drew his own backdrop on an iPad Pro and printed it out at 40x80 inches on a $4,000 professional Canon printer.

Photographer Rob Snow and Red Bull have just released a new red hot series of photos that involved gasoline, baseballs, a blowtorch, and World Series hero Kris Bryant.

Publicly accessible live webcams can be found all over the world these days, especially at famous tourist locations. Photographer and artist Carlos Pacheco realized that this means anyone can find the exact moment any photo was shot there given a time stamp. That's the premise behind his new project, titled Found.

The visual record left behind by the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers has, according to New York Times critic Charles Hagen, come to “represent one of the most ambitious attempts ever made to depict a society in photographs (Hagen, 1985).”

This trippy music video for Bonobo's new track "No Reason" is full of what would appear to be clever CGI, but it's actually all shot in-camera using "a very small camera and a very big set."

In Spain, a community of light painters has come together to coordinate and create a huge giant man in the night. Light painter Frodo Álvarez DKL envisaged and directed the effort in Getafe, Madrid.

No-fly zones are increasing, regulations are tightening, and the situations where you can actually fly a drone in public spaces are dwindling. No bother -- just use your smartphone and a really, really long selfie stick instead.

After traveling through 40 countries in 2 years, Chanel Cartell and Stevo Dirnberger of How Far from Home decided to sift through their 14,000 photos and find similar shots from different parts of the world. Using these images, they created a series of beautiful "photo mashups," or side-by-side images that blend together in beautiful ways.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Barbara Davidson and Volvo recently teamed up for an unusual photo project: Davidson created the first ever photo exhibition ever shot using a car camera.

Here's a simple little life hack for photographers: wine storage can sometimes double as great camera lens storage. A shelf or rack designed for wine could be a way to keep your lenses organized and ready to go.

Photographer Burton Rast has just completed a new project titled, The Shapes of San Francisco. He spent 100 days exploring SF and shooting one photo per day of the city's most popular and photographed sights, but "in a unique way." Each photo focuses on shapes.

Some cameras are more prone to overheating than others, leading some photographers and videographers to come up with creative solutions for keeping their sensors cool. Industrial designer Eric Strebel came up with a solution that looks pretty unusual: he customized a computer heat sink so that it can be mounted to the back of a Panasonic GF7.

Here's a neat idea for light painting photos: if you build a custom light tube using a certain type of reflective metallic material, your photos will look like they're filled with rainbows.

Yesterday was a rainy, hazy day at home. I didn’t feel much like going anywhere but I needed to find something to do that didn’t involve sitting or work. I decided to break out one of my macro lenses and a flash with soft box diffuser to go macro hunting around the house.

Getting the perfect portrait of your pooch or cat looking into your camera can be challenging. Pets aren’t the most patient models, but a Los Angeles-based company called Paw Champs has found a way to make them hold a pose for a few moments longer.

Artistic filmmaker Thomas Blanchard is back with another mesmerizing experimental video, combining forces with Oilhack to create this otherworldly 2 minute film.

Stop motion film is a way to bring to life inanimate objects. It's totally fascinating, but also an incredibly painstaking process to complete. Brett Foxwell is no stranger to this, and is known for great feats in photographic animation.