Ideas

"The Irrational Fear of Nothing" is a new short film by director Paul Trillo. It follows a paranoid, neurotic man named Terry as he wanders about on the streets of Manhattan. "Past memories and his irrational inner thoughts soon plague his every move," the synopsis says. "By channeling a form of mental time travel, he attempts to overcome these past anxieties." …

Want to teach your dog a new trick? Try training it to do studio photography. That's what a few dogs over in Japan were taught to do recently. You can see the results in the 3.5-minute video above, titled "PhoDOGrapher."

Swedish photographer Mattias Burling recently decided to experiment with shooting 4K video with his Microsoft Lumia 950 smartphone... through his collection of Nikon SLR lenses. Using an old 35mm adapter, Burling put together a rig that lets him shoot with a Nikkor 25mm f/1.4, 50mm f/1.4, and 17-35mm f/2.8.

As with many major cities around the world, the bustling streets of Tokyo, Japan, are filled with advertisements that vie for your attention as you pass through. French graphic designer Nicolas Damiens wanted to see what the city would look like if every single advertisement were removed, so he shot some photos of ad-filled locations and then digitally removed the ads. The resulting series is titled "Tokyo No Ads."

Want a crazy photography challenge? Try photographing a snowflake. Want to make it even more challenging? Try doing it with the wet plate collodion process.

My name is Cooper Neill, and I'm a freelance photographer based in Dallas, Texas. I've found that sports photography can be an extremely challenging creative endeavor. At every game, there are several photographers, all with the same equipment, sitting in the same spots along the sidelines. When you're sitting in those same seats in the same arenas several times a week for a few years, it can make work very repetitive.

With a new exhibition on the work of French artist Edgar Degas opening soon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Harper's Bazaar commissioned photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory of the NYC Dance Project to recreate famous Degas ballet artworks as portraits of dancer Misty Copeland.

The Rodenstock XR-Heligon 50mm 0.75 lens is an old lens that was made for medical X-ray imaging by the German optics company Rodenstock. You can find them for sale on eBay these days for $50 and up.

Rob Cantor is a talented musician and songwriter who's a mastermind at creating viral and creative content. His video titled “Perfect” features him doing 29 celebrity impressions in 1 original song, and has over 14 million views.

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"Run Baby Run" is a new video by artist Eran Amir that shows a baby running through all kinds of locations. It was entirely captured in camera with no green screen or digital manipulations.

UK-based photographer Marco Marques owns an impressive collection of around 50 vintage cameras. After his collection outgrew two glass display cabinets, Marques decided to have a custom shelving unit made to display his cameras on his office wall.

Washington DC is one of the most photographed places in the United States, with over 20 million tourists passing through in 2014.

What if a spell turned some of the world's most famous car models into real women? What would they look like? That's what photographer Viktorija Pashuta decided to explore with her latest portrait project, titled "What if Cars Were SUPERMODELS?" …

Melbourne, Australia-based photographer Alexander Chin recently completed an impressive project that deals with the passage of time. Over the course of 3 years between March 2013 and February 2016, he repeatedly visited iconic locations in Melbourne and captured a timelapse in each season of the year.

Matrix-style "bullet time" is usually created using an array of cameras placed all around a subject. Swiss professional skier Nicolas Vuignier has been testing a new technique that only uses a single camera: he swings his iPhone 6 camera around using a long rope.

Photographer AnaHell has a curious and creative photo project titled Secret Friends. Each photo shows a strange creature with an egg-shaped head and torso. What you're actually seeing is a person bent over, face to their knees, with a face drawn onto their exposed back.

During a family game of hide-and-seek last year, Dan Iverson and his wife strapped a GoPro camera to their tiny toddler. They then hid themselves and watched the live stream on their phone while the toddler ran around looking for them. What resulted is the adorable 1-minute video above in which you see the world from the toddler's point of view, and in which you can see the gears turning in the kid's head as he thinks about where his parents could be hiding.

If you have a mirrorless camera that lacks a viewfinder but has a tilting LCD screen, here's a neat "hack": you can give your camera a pseudo-viewfinder by mounting an old waist-level viewfinder to the screen.

Daniel and Gina of Sunrise Odyssey recently completed a 1 year journey across Asia that spanned 12 different countries. Throughout the trip, the couple documented major locations with a series of photos of them jumping in front of the camera.

Here's a music video that took quite a bit of planning and endurance for a photographer to shoot. Created for the song "A Carta" by the rapper V1RUZ, it's one continuous hyperlapse through the city of Lisbon, Portugal, that comprises 5210 photos shot over the course of a 25-hour marathon shoot.

For his master thesis project at Hochschule Mannheim in Germany, photographer and communication designer Andreas Neumann decided to create bullet time animations using analog photography. He ended up creating a camera ring composed of 100 individual pinhole cameras for the project, titled Orbita 13.

You know that mind-bending scene in the movie Inception in which the dream world is folding up on itself? Photographer Aydın Büyüktaş' "Flatland" project is like that. The Turkish artist creates each of the images through a meticulous planning process and aerial drone photography.

It occurred to me yesterday that the whole idea of "tips" is a bit lopsided. If someone does a great job, we give them a hefty tip; if they do a terrible job, we give them no tip. In other words, the worst thing we can do to someone who provides a bad level of service is to not give them extra money.

Watching a ceramist shape wet clay on a potter's wheel is a mesmerizing sight to see. Seeing the same process from the wheel's point of view puts an extra spin on it. Literally.

Here's a neat example of an ultra-telephoto lens being used to add a dramatic effect to a scene. For this scene from the 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema used a 2000mm lens to compress the foreground and background so that they look much closer than they really are.

Photographer Craig Mann is passionate about both photography and Star Wars, but one of the things that puts a damper on his work is the fact that he spends 6 months of each year working on an offshore drilling rig in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Bubbleissimo" is a quirky new photo project by New York-based photographer Mindo Cikanavicius. It features serious portraits of men wearing serious expressions... and beards and mustaches made of soap bubbles.

We've seen a number of photographers use mirrors in creative ways in recent years. Photographer Stefan Schlumpf recently decided to go big with the idea for a series of portraits.

I recently wrote an article about 8 Reasons You Should Buy A 50mm f/1.8 Lens and one part was about using it with the "El Bokeh Wall." What's an El Bokeh Wall? It's using some aluminum foil to add beautiful bokeh to the background of your photos. Here's a full tutorial on the technique.

Our buddies over at COOPH got their hands on the new Leica X-U waterproof camera and created this video with 8 photo ideas you can do when you have a rugged camera that can take a beating and a dip.

During a wedding reception back in September 2013, photographer Tammy Bryan and the couple decided to have a little fun with the guests by organizing a flash mob. Bryan is the organizer of the Greater Cincinnati Photographers Club, and she asked 100 of the group's photographers to help brighten up the first dance... literally.

Upon first glance, photographer Benjamin Von Wong's latest work looks like a Photoshop composite that shows a model swimming with sharks below the sea. But what you see is the real deal: Von Wong did actually tie down a model underwater with sharks swimming around, all for a series of surreal (but very real) portraits.

Hungarian photographer and retoucher Flora Borsi has a knack for making creative (and viral) photomanipulations, from placing herself into historical photos to turning the world into a coffee-lover's dream.

If you're a casual photographer, you probably don't have so many tripods that you have a hard time storing and organizing them. But if that is a problem that you or your studio struggle with, here's a clever solution: you can use a snowboard rack as a tripod storage solution.

When people ask me what lens they should get after buying their first camera, I always tell them to buy a 50mm f/1.8 lens because it's one of the cheapest and one of the coolest lens you could buy. I have an old 50mm which is a little bit dirty and also quite old so I don't use it that often. But recently, my girlfriend bought me a brand new 50mm lens, so I fell in love with using the 50mm again.

There is an ineffable allure when it comes the human mouth. The lips and tongue (and much more) help emit wonderful language, tell stories through micro-expressions, and experience the joys of how things in the world taste along with presenting another form of touching.

Clichés are everywhere on Instagram, and trending hashtags are an easy way for users to shoot nearly identical photos on the same topics. For their latest music video for the song titled "Clichés," Hiérophante decided to create a hypnotic rapid-fire slideshow that shows how much of what you find on Instagram is completely unoriginal. From hashtags, to locations, to celebrities -- each group of photos has an eerie level of uniformity.

Sometimes, photography is about being brilliant at lighting, or capturing a decisive moment, but often it's as much about collaborating with other talented people to realize a vision as it is about your own skills.

Sony has created what it believes is the world's first 48K 360-degree video. The company created a special 3D-printed camera rig that uses 12 Xperia Z5 smartphones arranged in a circle. By shooting 4K with each phone and then stitching together the resulting footage, Sony was able to create 48K video that you can explore interactively.

"Stages" is a photo project by 65-year-old photographer Laura Hofstadter, who recreated some of history's famous portrait paintings as creative self-portraits.

French travelers and filmmakers Claire & Max have created this new experimental short film titled "Apparences." They shot 4K imagery of Paris using a Panasonic GH4 and 12-28mm lens, and then used clever editing to make the city look like a giant movie set. Real buildings are turned into facades -- fake flat fronts that are propped up with wooden beams.

Some people can't get enough of having their photos taken. Photographer Mikaël Theimer's girlfriend is the opposite. She's extremely camera shy, so it's difficult for Theimer to get any photo of her smiling and looking into his camera.

Photographer Emma Jean Nolan of Brisbane, Australia, recently captured and shared an unusual baby photo that's attracting a great deal of attention. While photographing the birth of a baby boy named Harper, Nolan decided to arrange the umbilical cord so that it spelled the word "love."

This amazing composite picture by photographer Stephen Wilkes shows the different animals that visited a watering hole in the Serengeti over the course of 26 hours. The photo transitions across time as you move across the frame starting with sunrise on the right.

Smartphone camera quality has gotten pretty darn good in recent years, but one of the limiting factors is still the tiny lens that's found in front of the (usually) tiny sensor. Accessory makers have started addressing this problem by creating add-on lenses that you can attach to your phone to improve the look of your photos -- even ZEISS jumped into the game this week.

We recently shared a 52-week photo challenge you can do to improve you skills over the course of a year. The challenge for week #1 was "self portrait," and photographer Trevor Mahlmann completed it by creating this eye-popping photo, titled "The Universe At My Feet."

Video effects specialist Robert McIntosh was recently featured by Vimeo for this 2-minute video showing an unusual continuous shot captured with a camera drone.

My name is Nick Fancher and I am a Columbus, Ohio-based commercial and portrait photographer. I specialize in lighting -- specifically with the use of small flash in unconventional locations.

I love hard light. I love the shadows it creates and the colors it brings out. I also love the convenience it affords. I work exclusively with small flash, and by using predominantly hard light in my images, I am able to travel extremely light, as I need few to zero modifiers.