If you're looking to get better at photography in 2016, one great option is to do a 52-week photography challenge that forces you to complete regular assignments throughout the whole year. And we've found a great one you can take on as your new year's resolution.
Street photographer Willem Jonkers often hits the streets of Rotterdam in the Netherlands with an ultra-wide-angle 8mm fisheye lens. He then approaches strangers and gets not only close, but low -- really low.
His collection of ultra-low, ultra-wide street portraits show a "Gulliver" effect that makes his subjects look like enormous giants towering over each scene.
New Zealand-based photographer Chris Cameron has a nice little kit he put together to mount his off-camera flash to any tree or pole. The setup centers around a plastic "dog bone" that you can make for yourself with a 3D printer.
School portraits aren't usually the result of creative photo concepts, but photographer Krijn Westerburgen was recently able to flex his creative muscles for an elementary school class photo in the Netherlands. He photographed the students in the style of a Rembrandt painting.
Every year, millions of tourists flock to Banff National Park in Canada to see and photograph the gorgeous landscapes. Photographer Meghan Krauss was fascinated by the crowds of tourists shooting selfies and other photos in these pristine locations, so in 2013, she began to shoot panoramic photos of those spots and then composite large numbers of tourists into a single frame.
Photographer and programmer Saulius Lukse made this clever 22-second-long time-lapse video in which the windows of a large apartment building are used as a ticker to wish viewers a happy new year -- all while the time-lapse continues to run in the rest of the scene.
I recently shot a series of snowy portraits... inside my studio. This shoot was originally just intended to be for my own Christmas card, The idea was to do something fun, dreamy, and Christmas-related (with a Santa hat and fun poses) that I could send to friends, family and clients. As the year was coming to an end, a fun photo shoot was very welcomed. And, ironically, we didn't have snow at this point in Brussels, which is very unusual.
Shooting vertical video, the use of portrait orientation rather than landscape, is considered by many to be one of the scourges of the Web introduced by smartphone cameras. Google's camera app even warns you when you're in vertical orientation.
Director Jean-Charles Granjon recently decided to try his hand at turning vertical video from an annoyance into a cinematic experience. His short film above, titled Impact, embraces the orientation in order to capture the "mental journey" of a high diver jumping off a cliff.
How's this for a bizarre short film? Speed Motion Films decided to take a DJI Phantom camera drone and see how it performs as a food blender. They tossed various foods at the spinning propellers and filmed the carnage at 1,500 frames per second using a $60,000 Phantom Miro high speed camera.
As my startup gear brand Eupidere grows, we face more and more photographic challenges in shooting thrifty product photos. Recently, I had just minutes to come up with an image that is a) eye catching, and b) Christmas related. There are lots of Christmas decorations around right now and the little guy above, wearing striped pajamas, is one of them. We decided to put him into a winter scenery and wish everyone Merry Christmas.
Photographer Steve Mandel just returned from Antarctica, where he made photos of icebergs using an underwater camera, a surface camera, and a drone.
For his underwater shots, Mandel shot each photo so that it's a split view in a single frame: half of it shows the iceberg above water, and half shows what's below.
German drone manufacturer Ascending Technologies is celebrating Christmas season this year by doing some light painting photography. Each of the photos they've made was painted by an automated drone that was programmed to follow waypoints in the sky.
The company believes this is the first drone light painting project of this kind.
Ever wonder what you look like while you're taking pictures? Orlando, Florida-based photographer Rich Johnson wants to show you. For his latest project "Behind the Mask," Johnson had photographers pose for two pictures, one with their camera, and one without.
For the past 2 years, photographer Che Chorley has been working has been working on a seascape project. Each shot is captured with the surface of the sea at about eye level, and each mainly shows the ocean, horizon, and sky.
But different weather and times of day cause the photos to have drastically different appearances. Chorley has put together a set of 25 seascape photos showing 25 different "moods" the ocean showed him.
For his recent project, titled "Scenic Silhouettes," photographer Miles Holden captured mountain biker Connor Macfarlane's silhouette against epic landscapes in New Zealand.
Canon's latest billboard ad campaign in New York City does more than promote the camera brand: they can actually help you shoot better photos. Each of the fixed and mobile truck billboards is updated in real time with useful photo tips you can use on the spot.
For their official Christmas card this year, the Norwegian photography store Stavanger Foto …
Photographer Jay Philbrick takes his subjects where most photographers wouldn't dare to go themselves: onto the face of a cliff, 350 feet above the ground.
For its holiday campaign this year, the Yorkdale shopping mall in Toronto, Canada, created Fashion Santa. Instead of wearing his traditional red hat, coat, trousers, and boots, Santa posed for a photo shoot wearing festive outfits representing the latest trends in male fashion.
Photographer Nick Fancher often does high-quality shoots with simple locations and do-it-yourself gear -- he published a book on the subject earlier this year that's titled Studio Anywhere. For a recent portrait shoot, Fancher visited his model's apartment and shaped light using a custom prism gobo, DIY barn doors, and the blinds on the model's door.
Want to learn newborn photography but don't have any newborns to photograph? StandInBaby is a new product designed just for you. It's the world's first fully articulated, lifelike, and camera ready dummy baby that's designed to help photographers learn how to pose newborns.
What happens if your portrait clients request golden hour lighting... outside of golden hour? That's the situation photographer Pye Jirsa of Lin & Jirsa Photography found himself in recently while shooting a wedding. As you can see in the 4.5-minute video above, Jirsa was able to deliver by using creative lighting, a powerful flash, and a couple of colored gels.
This is incredible: German photographer Lukas Fritz wanted an easier way to process his film at home, so he spent a year creating the Filmomat, a fully automatic film processor that can handle everything from B&W 35mm film to 5x7-inch color slides.
If you want to play around with shadows and add depth to your lighting, this simple technique is perfect for you. And you only need minimal gear to do it.
Photographer Mathieu Stern did this short experiment with capturing the full image circle from a 180-degree fisheye lens. You'll need a smaller image circle on a larger camera sensor. For this video, Stern used a Kenko 180° fisheye lens, screwed onto a 55mm to 52mm filter, screwed onto a Canon 50mm f/1.4 FD lens, screwed onto a NEX adapter, mounted to the Sony a7II.
Artist Shea Glover recently did a social experiment. The 18-year-old Chicago-based artist took …
"Un Petit Tour Dans Paris" is a new 1.5-minute short film by French director Maxime Baudin.
"In a splendid and romantic Paris, while everything is going too fast, a young man ride a ‘bicyle’," the synopsis reads. "But his simple ride is going to take on a whole new dimension…"
Skydivers often photograph and film their jumps with a GoPro camera, but what happens if you want to shoot higher-quality photos with a DSLR? The solution is to mount it to your helmet and find a way to trigger the shutter.
Photographer Wolfgang Lienbacher demonstrated this recently by jumping out of a plane with the Red Bull Skydive team with a DSLR on his head and a shutter release cable in his mouth.
Polish photographer Rafał Krasa recently launched Eupidere, a new brand of high-end leather camera straps. He wanted some product photos with a seamless white background but didn't have the proper studio setup, so he decided to go with what he did have: his bathtub.
For his project titled "Mirrors," Montreal, Canada-based photographer Robin Cerutti took his camera underwater and shot sideways photos of models interacting with the rippling surface.
Inspired by Tom Kucy's recent short film "Ground Control," Devon, UK-based photographer Chris Coupland took photos from the Project Apollo archive on Flickr and turned them into this beautiful 3-minute short film, titled "Apollo."
There are stormchasing photographers and there are portrait photographers. Usually people don't combine the two genres, but that's exactly what photographer Benjamin Von Wong recently did. He spent two weeks chasing storms in an ambulance to shoot a series of unique portraits that have real storms in the background.
Did you know you can shoot aerial photos and videos by putting a stabilized camera on a boomerang? Victor Poulin of Boomerangs by Vic recently attached a Mobius 1080p action camera to the top of a boomerang.
After months of development, artist Kelli Anderson has created a new pop-up book titled "This Book is a Camera." As you can probably guess from the title, the book contains a pop-up camera that can actually be used as a real camera.
Here's an unusual wedding photography slideshow by Peter Adams-Shawn of Memories of Tomorrow Photography. Titled "Eyescapes," each photo shows a scene at the wedding that was captured as a reflection in a guest's eyeball.
Photographer Dave Cross has been a well-known Photoshop educator since 1990. Today, he just launched a new stock photo service called CompositingStock, which uses a collapsible safety cone in order to help photographers figure out how big subjects should be on backgrounds.
A couple of weeks ago, we shared an endearing video by a rural Irishman who accidentally spent …
If you've always wanted to go crazy and creative with lens flares in your photos or videos, then Technical Farm's new Flare Adapter is for you. It's a see-through lens adapter that lets light leak into your shots from between your lens and your camera.
Need a light to illuminate clouds or a mountainside? Check out the world's most powerful flashlight, created by Daniel Riley of Stratus Productions. By stringing together a series of powerful 100W LEDs, Riley created an ultra-powerful 1000W light that puts out a whopping 90000 lumens.
Riley introduces his crazy light in the 5.5-minute video above.
New York-based photographer Alexi Lubomirski was recently commissioned by Allure Magazine to shoot a series of fashion photos titled "Mood Elevators." The images show a man floating around as he walks next to a woman.
When Marshall and Addie got married in 2 feet of snow in Roan Mountain, Tennessee, they invited a very …
Photographer Paweł Kadysz of Bialystok, Poland, recently started a new 365-day photo project: a daily photo blog showing scenes from Darth Vader's life. The clever and humorous photos portray the Sith Lord "as just a normal guy with everyday life problems."
Hyperlapse videos generally show dazzling urban cityscapes filled with bright lights and tall skyscrapers. The video above is a …
Seok Li and Danbi Shin are an couple who create art together as Shinliart. A while back, their relationship turned into a long-distance one: Shin is currently living in New York City and Li lives in Seoul, South Korea.
They may be on opposite sides of the world, but they haven't let distance get in the way of their creativity. The couple's collaborative Instagram account features half-and-half split-screen photos that blend their two worlds in beautiful ways.
What do the things we touch over the course of a day say about us? That's the question artist Paula Zuccotti asks through her project Every Thing We Touch. Traveling the world, she asks people to document every single small object they come in contact with over the course of 24 hours -- excluding large and/or fixed things.
Zuccotti then organizes everything neatly on a flat surface and captures a still life photo -- a snapshot that can reveal quite a bit about the person.
With 2016 just around the corner, many photographers will be dusting off the cameras they've been neglecting and making New Year's resolutions in an attempt to rekindle their creativity. If you're looking for ideas and inspiration, here's a good one: do a OCOLOY project. It requires using just One Camera and One Lens for One Year.
After using a vintage 1910 lens on a modern Sony a7II, Paris-based photographer Mathieu Stern is back again with another interesting lens experiment.
This time he created "bokeh madness" by attaching a Russian Jupiter 9 85mm f/2 lens onto his Sony a7II using a M42-to-E tilt adapter.
After publishing a viral series of cinematic portraits of first responders in 2013, photographer Brandon Cawood is back again with another creative portrait project for a good cause.
For "When I Grow Up," Cawood created cinematic portraits of 5th grade students acting out their future careers.
Photographer Geoff Tompkinson has been working on a new time-lapse technique that he calls the "HyperZoom." By matching up shots from camera zooms and pans, Tompkinson takes us on seamless journeys through locations that look like one long continuous shot.
His new video above is a HyperZoom video that explores Hallstatt, Upper Austria, a beautiful historic town that's listed as a Unesco World Heritage site.
How small can you go when it comes to wet plate collodion photography? Photographer Anton Orlov of The Photo Palace recently experimented with this question by shooting thumbnail-sized 8x11mm tintypes using an old Minox subminiature camera -- a model A III from the 1950s.