Dutch photographer Robin de Puy recently shot a series of beautiful portraits with unusual camera "equipment." Instead of using a typical lens made of metal (or plastic) and glass, she shot the photos using a single drop of water as her lens.
Japanese artist Nobuhiro Nakanishi has a project titled Layer Drawings that creatively uses photography to explore time, space, and 3D art installations. Each piece is a series of photos on a series of transparent acrylic sheets.
Louisiana-based photographer Savannah Kate Bridges shoots custom portraiture for clients in a variety of genres, but in her free time she has been working on a series that faithfully recreates beloved fairy tale scenes from Disney movies as photos.
If you point your camera at the sky and film, the stars will arc overhead. That’s because your camera is attached to a giant spinning orb called Earth. This interesting 24 hour time-lapse from YouTuber AlphaPhoenix stabilises the stars by spinning the footage in the opposite direction to Earth’s rotation.
This innovative new music video, directed by Jonah Haber, shows a glow in the dark background used to great effect. By firing strobes throughout the music video, her silhouette is recorded on the backdrop, eerily following her path throughout the video.
How sweet is this? Photographer Kevin Pickell wanted a solution for keeping his DSLR camera kit safe while driving around with it while still having it accessible, so his wife created a miniature sleeping bag for it.
It's difficult to stand out from the crowd in still life photography. When someone picks up a camera for the first time, still life is probably the initial thing they try. Therefore the internet is packed full of still life images, but these tips will help to give your photos an edge.
Have you ever found yourself sitting and watching someone browsing through their travel snaps, flitting between endless folders on their computer? No one likes looking at someone else's holiday snaps, but Caroline Buttet wants to change that with her interactive globe project.
Want to place an off-camera flash where stands and assistants can't go? Try mounting it to a drone. That's what Chinese photographer Fuyan Liu does to light difficult portraits in extreme situations.
I've been shooting tintypes for almost six years now and love to push the boundaries of what is possible with this slow and difficult photographic process. Taking a tintype from the air was an idea that, years ago, I had shelved as the technology wasn't there yet. Drones were pretty scarce and the ones I had seen were extremely limited in payload and stability. But this spring I decided to revisit the idea.
When Kevin Scruggs's daughter Mackenzie started first grade 12 years ago, he decided to pull out his camera and shoot a short interview with the 6-year-old. He then did the same thing on her first day of school for the next 12 years, and this year he turned all the clips into this touching 3-minute video wishing Mackenzie a happy graduation from high school.
Photographer Karen Jerzyk turned abandoned spaces into dark fairy tales after the death of her father. After getting into trouble with that series, she created Colors, a series of fantasy scenes photographed in rooms dominated by a single color.
This incredibly creative ad from Gatorade uses a "liquid printer" and precision-timed strobe photography to create a stop-motion athlete from drops of water. What’s more, it was created entirely in-camera, according to the company.
Submerging your film in liquid might not seem like a good idea, but when done properly it’s a photography technique that can garnish unexpectedly beautiful results. Without any post-processing work, you can get a distorted effect with vivid streaks of color and interesting textures.
We’ve covered the dolly zoom (or “Vertigo effect”) in detail recently here on PetaPixel, but did you know that you can achieve this effect using a drone, without zooming?
Digital instant cameras are an emerging trend in the world of photography: Polaroid launched the Pop in January, and Fujifilm followed suit with the SQ10 a few short months later. But industrial designer and photographer Jordan Steranka thinks he can do better: his Print is a concept instant camera designed with an ultra-modern aesthetic.
If you have been following anything drone-related lately, chances are you have seen one of the mind-bending images like the one above that are very reminiscent of the scene from Inception when the ground is bent up at 90-degree angles.
"The Forgotten Dream" is a new project by Hungarian photographer and Photoshop artist Flora Borsi. She found black-and-white photos of immigrants arriving in the United States in the early 1900s, colorized them, and Photoshopped the people into modern-day photos of New York City.
For the past few years, Chicago-based photographer Angie McMonigal has been working on a project titled Urban Quilt. Her goal is to capture her city's buildings as a patchwork of colors, textures, and materials.
Here's an interesting effect you can capture in-camera without any digital trickery: place a waterproof camera directly under a running faucet. The camera can look up through the stream of water at the aerator, and the resulting footage looks like you're traveling through a tunnel of water.
What do you do when you find a roll of film that expired 34 years ago? Shoot with it, of course! Colin Wirth of This Does Not Compute shares the results of a recent experiment in this 8-minute video in which he shoots with some ancient Kodak Plus-X black and white film.
Video effects specialist Robert McIntosh wanted a tiny but powerful camera drone, so he built himself the world's smallest high-definition drone. It's a drone that can squeeze through the smallest of spaces, as you can see in the unusual 2-minute video above.
Photographer Jennifer McMahon has created a viral maternity photo that's tugging at heartstrings around the world: it shows expecting mother Veronica Phillips next to her husband Brandon, a member of the U.S. Air Force who has been deployed overseas for nearly all of Veronica's pregnancy.
Until the release of the 500-yen coin in 1982, its corresponding paper equivalent reigned for more than 40 years in Japan. In fact, it wasn’t until 1994 that the 500-yen banknote was finally withdrawn from circulation.
This brilliantly lit commercial for Canon introduces a new campaign that urges the viewer to “Live for the Story”, and rather curiously does not prominently feature a camera at all.
Stop-motion animator Kevin Parry has shared a clever little video illusion titled "Walk in the Woods" that has a lot of people scratching their heads. It's a loop that shows Parry repeatedly walking into a mirror in a forest and emerging out "the other side."
Pantone’s quest is to become the universal language of color. The Pantone Matching System allows printers everywhere in the world to ensure they’re producing colors accurately. Artist and graphic designer Andrea Antoni has found a different use for this language of color: matching it to photographs taken in his home country of Italy.
ELEMENTS is a new project by Slovakia-based photographer Maria Svarbova. Each of the portraits in the series features some physical, real-world element that has been introduced to add a layer of 3D complexity to the underlying 2D image.
Ed Greggory of Photos in Color has put together a 3 minute guide that will show you how to shoot the so-called "perfect wedding photo" in just 10 steps. We're not sure about that "perfect" bit, but it's a fun idea that's worth checking out.
We've seen a lot of creative setups for faking that 'bullet time' look—one guy strapped his GoPro to a ceiling fan—but this creation filmmaker Luca Amhofer is the most versatile and functional DIY rig of its kind we've ever seen... and it's dirt cheap to make!
Photographer Beno Saradzic recently embarked on an interesting experiment. Given the crazy resolution of cameras like the 50MP Canon 5DSR, could you create a "Motion" timelapse by simply... cropping out frames? It turns out, you can.
Over the past several years, I have watched as the prices for compact film cameras have steadily increased into the sort of price ranges usually reserved for collectible cameras.
The folks over at The Field Lab decided to put a camera at the bottom of a bucket and shoot a underwater view of what it looks like when different animals stop by for a drink. The camera caught bees, birds, a squirrel, chickens, a donkey, and a steer named Ben.
Australian photographer Murray Fredericks has spent years visiting and photographing the salt flats at Lake Eyre, the lowest point in Australia. For his latest project, titled Vanity, Fredericks brought a giant mirror and created gorgeous, abstract landscape photos at dawn, dusk, and night.
Remember Nicolas Vuignier, the skier who shot bullet time by swinging his iPhone around his head? He's back again with another brilliant idea: he shot "poor man's drone" footage by throwing his GoPro into the air.
For his latest project, titled "Stratochronokinetics," photographer and mixed media artist Alexy Joffre Frangieh created a "time slice" view of showing the town of Ehden, Lebanon, over the course of a year.
The Lighting Channel made this rapid-fire 1-minute video with examples of 10 different ways you can light a face to create different moods and themes, from "horror" to "1920s beauty."
Israeli visual effects artist Eugene Romanovsky wanted to sell his old 1996 Suzuki Vitara SUV, so he created this out-of-this-world 2-minute video to advertise its qualities. The ad shows the car zipping around in ordinary landscapes before appearing in famous movies and on the moon.
Photographer Gabor Kasza has unveiled a new photo book titled Concrete passages about closeness and coldness… and a couple of songs. It's a study of unfinished concrete buildings and surfaces, and the book comes with an unusual physical form that mirrors its content: the slipcase is made of concrete.
Here's an interesting effect you can create entirely in-camera: photograph a backlit keyboard in the dark using a long exposure while moving your camera around.
Here's a 4-minute video by the folks over at Macro Room that looks like it was made using computer imagery, but it was actually shot using a tank of water, colored ink, and various objects.
Photographing abandoned spaces has exploded in popularity in recent years. For photographer Karen Jerzyk, however, finding those spaces is only the first step. She transforms each one into what she describes as a "dark fairy tale" scene.
Here's a beautiful use of a camera drone: freelance cameraman Jack Johnston created this video showing landscapes in Japan. As the drone flies over each one, cherry blossoms suddenly fade into view.
Got a minute? That's all you'll need. Take a break from infinite scrolling through Instagram and listen up, because South African photographer Sheldon Evans can teach you 5 fun homebrew camera hacks in the same amount of time it takes you to read this post.
Here's a gorgeous nighttime timelapse shot from a different perspective: this "FlightLapse" was captured from the cockpit of a Swiss airliner during a flight from Zurich, Switzerland, to Sao Paulo, Brazil. It shows the world, glowing cities, and other airplanes passing below the Milky Way above.
Back in 2014, we shared a clever new photography accessory called the LensFlipper, which is basically back-to-back lens mounts that help you quickly and easily swap between lenses. Now a new startup is going one step further: the upcoming TriLens lets you mount three lenses on a single belt-worn accessory.
Project Grand Shadows is a new indie superhero comic that just released its first pages. What sets this series apart from most others is how the visuals are being made: what you see in each panel isn't a drawing -- it's a stylized photograph.
Here's an ambitious drone project: photographer and filmmaker Will Strathmann visited a farm in Pennsylvania over two years and created this 47-second video that beautifully transitions through seasons.
Photographer Mithun M Das captured this creative and romantic photo of a kissing couple's silhouette in a drop of water hanging off the end of a leaf. What's not obvious from the photo, however, is how it was shot: Das made it from the comfort of his own home. In fact, he didn't even leave his computer.
Photo lens experimenter and prolific YouTube filmmaker Mathieu Stern is at it again. This time, he took one of his old, cheap (do we even have to mention that?) Russian lenses and made one small modification to create what he calls a 'bokeh explosion.'