Ideas

Back in 2011, photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck helped coin and popularize the "cinemagraph," an animated GIF showing a mostly static photo with certain elements moving and looping.

Photographer Antoine Geiger has put together a strange photo series titled SUR-FAKE. Each Photoshopped image shows people in public having their faces sucked into the screens they're staring at.

Slovakian food recipe site Varme published this simple 1-minute video tutorial on how you can use $25 in IKEA products to create a DIY lightbox for improving your food and product photography.

Here's a little tip for those of you who shoot with Fuji Instax film while out and about: once you're done exposing a pack of film, you can use the empty plastic pack as a container to hold your Instax photos.

A few months ago, photographer Adam Flor and I embarked on a sweet project. The goal was to shoot items using different colored backgrounds and use focus stacking to get full sharpness while shooting with a shallow depth of field.

"Care Deeply" is a series of photos by Thai photographer Patcha Kitchaicharoen that captures the simple fact that there are 2 sides to every emotional hug.

This past May, photographer Grant Mallory and his girlfriend Maria celebrated Maria's college graduation by embarking on an epic road trip around the United States. Mallory wanted to capture each National Park's scenic locations in a unique way, so he brought along an LED hula hoop and had Maria pose for light painting portraits.

Matt and Heather Koehler got married in Michigan back on September 12th. Shortly before walking down the aisle, the couple was devastated to find that their wedding photographer was a no-show. The "professional" they had hired to document their special day was nowhere to be found, so the couple was forced to go through with the wedding without the official photos they had planned and paid for.

Over the past two years, photographer Ho Hai Tran has traveled over 14,000 km (~8700 miles) to capture old and iconic Pizza Hut restaurants that have since been turned into something new.

If you thought the idea of a smartphone selfie stick was peculiar, get this: photographer Jesse Chehak has created a gigantic selfie stick for his large format camera, and it actually works.

Photographer Shaina Fishman and stylist Ryen Blaschke recently collaborated on a project to help rescue cats get adopted. The lighthearted series "Cats in Hats" features shelter cats and kittens wearing Halloween hats and accessories fashioned by Blaschke.

16-year-old photographer Leroy Bellet recently turned an idea he had into a series of epic surf photos that landed on the covers of international magazines. He followed behind surfers in giant barrel waves and photographed them in action with a Nikon DSLR and an external flash.

For its 2015 Poppy Appeal campaign to raise support for current and former British military personnel, the The Royal British Legion commissioned a beautiful photo project that recreates studio portraits of World War I military personnel with modern day serving and ex-service men and women.

The Olympus Air camera is the commercial version of the Olympus Open Platform Camera (OPC), which people are making all kinds of hardware and software projects for.

Want to know how to capture a wacky portrait of your cat? Shoot a photo while they're shaking themselves clean (or dry). That's what photographer Carli Davidson did for her new project titled Shake Cats.

Photographer Freddy Fabris spent years wanting to pay homage to the legendary artworks of great Renaissance master painters, but figuring out how to do so with his camera was a challenge. Recently, he finally came up with an idea that blends the style of old with ideas that are new: it's a series of portraits of car mechanics in a repair shop, created with the look and feel of Renaissance paintings.

Australian photographer Richard Simpkin isn't exactly a celebrity, but you could be tricked into thinking so if you look at his personal photo album. Simpkin has spent over 25 years collecting photos of himself posing with some of the world's most famous people.

Halloween is just around the corner, and if you're looking for a photo-related costume this year, one fun idea that has appeared over the years is creating a DIY giant camera that's fully functional as a camera. Here's a look at 4 examples we've seen so far.

Photographer Rachel Hulin got quite a bit of attention a few years ago for Flying Henry, a series of Photoshopped photos showing Hulin's son flying through various scenes. Now she's back again with another creative endeavor.

Check out this photo of wispy clouds over a barren desert. It's actually a photo of a choppy waves hitting a beach... flipped upside down. New Jersey-based fine art photographer Michael Massaia's latest project is a series of these disorienting upside-down beach photos. The series is titled "The Pull: Inverted Seascapes."

Travelers often collect photographs of themselves visiting beautiful locations around the world. "Shiki: Landscape and Beyond" is a project that features photos of a 5-foot tree in scenic spots.

A spirograph is a geometric drawing toy that produces beautiful mathematical curves by rolling a smaller circle inside a bigger circle. You can create similar patterns using light painting.

My name is Edin Chavez, and I'm a photographer based in Miami, Florida. In my city, I often see giant cruise ships arriving and leaving the port. Having been on a few of them, I'm always impressed with their massive size -- I always feel so tiny.

Photographer Eric Pickersgill has a photo project that has the Web abuzz this week. Titled "Removed," it shows what smartphones and tablets have done to our daily lives and the "intimate" moments we share with friends and family. In each scene, the devices themselves have been taken out, resulting in strange photos that force us to reflect on our interactions with technology.

We've shared a number of projects over the years in which photographers create working cameras using wood, but we haven't seen a wooden lens yet... until now. That's what photographer René Smets of Lummen, Belgium, recently made, and the results are impressive.

"Sunset Selfies" is a project by photographer John Marshall of Frye Island, Maine, who photographers silhouettes of himself posing with creative cardboard cutouts.

42 years ago, photographer Frank Gross said "I do" to his wife Helene. Since that day, through the ups and downs of his photographic career, Gross consistently pointed his camera at his wife and family, creating beautiful portraits that span over 4 decades of his family's life together.

Here's something you don't see very often at weddings: a choreographed dance involving the photographers. At a recent wedding in Albania, the bride and groom came up with the idea of doing an organized dance with their sharply-dressed photographers and videographers to open up the dance floor. You can watch the 3-minute routine in the video above.

I've been doing increasingly more portraiture outdoors over the years and most often have been relying on speedlights for their small size and portability. One problem I always faced was choosing a stand to use for supporting the speedlight.

People are having fun remixing those 8,400 Apollo moon mission photos that were uploaded to Flickr last week. A couple of days ago, we shared a video that brought the photos to life with faux slow-motion that was added with Photoshop and After Effects.

Back in May, Washington D.C.-based fashion photographer Ben Scott did an outdoor shoot featuring two models and a 1966 Corvette convertible. LEVR Studios was on hand with a 360-degree camera rig, resulting in the interactive behind-the-scenes video seen above. There are clips from different moments in the shoot, and you can move around in the scene to look in any direction you wish while the shoot unfolds.

Last week, a treasure trove of 8,400 photos by Apollo astronauts was uploaded to Flickr, making the archive easily accessible to the public. Director of photography Tom Kucy decided to put a unique spin on the images: he added 3D motion to stills to make them look at like out-of-this-world slow-motion clips. The 2-minute 4K short film above is titled "Ground Control." …

Since 1987, the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has done an annual nighttime community photo project called RIT Big Shot. For the the 31st event held this past weekend on October 3rd, the school set out to create a photo of the Churchhill Downs that shows the iconic Kentucky Derby track at night.

Did you know that you can easily see geostationary satellites by shooting time-lapse photos of the night sky? Reddit user jannne took his camera outside this week and managed to capture a number of satellites in their photos.

"The Prophesy" is a striking series of photographs by photographer Fabrice Monteiro that shines light on the problem of pollution in Africa, yet offers a message of hope. Each image is a "high fashion photo" in which the garment is crafted from things found at locations that have been altered by trash.

There's a new fad on the Web. It involves creating trippy Inception-esque scenes by Photoshopping landscape photos into strange worlds with right angles in the horizon line.

It’s been a busy past couple of months for me, full of photo experiments and metadata blunders. But even when I’m busy with assignments, I’m still looking for a project.

Check out the rugged Panasonic lenses in the photo above. No, Panasonic didn't quietly release ruggedized versions of the 100-300mm and 42.5mm that you didn't hear about. The lenses were upgraded do-it-yourself-style by photographer Nate Cowlishaw at home using rubberized undercoating designed for the undercarriages of cars.

Here's a 5-minute short film titled "O" that was shot entirely using a lens made with a drop of water and an iPhone. The lens gives the film a dream-like quality, which is perfect, given that the project is intended to give viewers the feeling of nostalgia.

This past weekend, the day before the supermoon lunar eclipse, photographer Mark Gee decided to take advantage of the extra large moon his own way. Gee recruited a bunch of local photographers from Wellington, New Zealand, and had them photograph the moon from a hill while Gee filmed the moonrise in the background.

"Impermanent Sculptures" is a series of light-painting photos by Brazilian photographer Vitor Schietti. One of the interesting ideas found in the series is using fireworks to illuminate trees, resulting in photos that look like the leaves and branches are showering drops of light onto the ground.

Wouldn't it be interesting if we had snapshots through the eyes of famous artists throughout history? The images could reveal things they saw, worked on, and were inspired by.

The Jefferson Grid is a new Instagram account that's attracting quite a bit of attention. Each photo posted is a satellite photo of some place in the United States that was discovered using Google Earth. Each photo also shows the area of exactly one square mile.

PermaGrin Films just released this new short film titled "Imagination." It's a mind-bending stop-motion journey that follows a child through his imagination over 4 minutes.

Photographer Kotama Bouabane of Toronto, Canada, has a camera that attracts strange stares when he uses it in public. He shoots with a coconut.

Back in May, we featured a clever hack by photographer Paul Adshead that involved using an IKEA storage box as a $6 laptop sun shade for outdoor shoots. Now he's back again with another nifty photo trick: using a smartphone and a car phone mount for photographic lighting.

Photographer Tyson Haslam has an interesting hobby: he takes vintage cameras and gives them a new look by replacing the rubber grips and various other panels with wooden veneers.

I’ve often looked at engagement shoots, and there are generally two types. One is when a couple are already engaged so is more of a pre-wedding shoot, and one is where someone is brave enough to invite a photographer along while he or she actually pops the question. The latter is rarer, and it made me wonder if I could get a friend to be there when I did it. The more I thought about it the more it didn’t fit in with what I had originally planned.

Renowned French astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured one of the most remarkable images of the supermoon lunar eclipse yesterday. He managed to shoot the world's first photo of the International Space Station passing in front of the moon during the eclipse.

Sometimes I make brief escapes from the humdrum of city life and venture into the woods to capture the majesty of nature. I ride around on my bicycle like a madman looking for interesting subjects to capture. The last time I did this, my beloved camera bounced out of my pocket somewhere along the bumpy road; I’d gotten some good shots that day, quite a few actually, and keeping a stoic attitude while backtracking in search of my lost camera became increasingly difficult. Not only was the …