Upon first glance, the images in art director Stephen McMennamy's #combophoto project may look like surreal photo-manipulations created using Photoshop. They're actually the result of a much simpler process.
Sheep Meadow in New York City's Central Park is a popular spot for sleeping and sunbathing, sometimes drawing tens of thousands of people per day. For his project "Sheep Meadow: Vertical Abstracts," photographer Michael Massaia shot candid portraits of people who are deep in sleep, creating surreal images of intertwined human bodies suspended in darkness.
Here's a daily dose of cuteness: Chris Cardinal wanted to document the growth of his two Golden Retriever puppies, Bleu and Colby, so he set up a camera at their food bowls and captured clips of them sprinting to dinner over 9 months from 11 weeks in age to 11 months. Bleu is the one who keeps drifting into the cabinets, while Colby is more cautious by taking the inside track.
A violet ray is an antique electrotherapy medical device invented by Nikola Tesla that's essentially a portable tesla coil. Altdorf, Germany-based photographer Marc Simon Frei purchased a unit from 1920 on eBay and customized it for experiments with photographing electricity at home.
How much can you tell about an artist from the shoes they wear on stage? Florida State University student newspaper photo editor Matthew Paskert has been trying to find out. His project "A Shoe Piece" consists of close-up photos of shoes worn by famous musicians, comedians, and personalities while they're standing in front of large crowds.
Want to scan some film but don't have a scanner handy? You can actually do some high quality digitization using some LEGO blocks, a smartphone or tablet, and a camera with decent resolution. Filmmaker Zachary Antell uses a method using those components, and his results are pretty impressive.
Photographer Antti Karppinen was recently hired to do a portrait photo shoot with Cardiff-based singer and songwriter Jammy Harris. For one of the shots, Karppinen decided to create a mind-bending image of Harris sitting on a stone ledge over rough waters using a creative perspective and photo-manipulation.
"Out of the Wild: Zoo Portraits" is a project by photographer Boza Ivanovic, who created artistic low-key portraits of animals during visits to a local zoo.
New York-based photographer Chris Buck is known for his celebrity portraits and magazine cover photos (two of his TIME covers here and here), but recently he's been working on a rather unusual personal project -- one that involves his iPhone and a realistic miniature 3D-printed figurine of himself.
It's always neat when photographers and film directors opt for creative and ambitious physical sets and effects rather than relying primarily on computer generated imagery. One interesting recent example is the mind-bending tesseract scene in the hit movie Interstellar. Rather than portray time as a dimension using CGI, director Christopher Nolan and his crew built a giant and complex physical set.
This is impressive: photographer and aspiring astronaut Trevor Mahlmann was sitting in the seat of an airplane at 40,000 feet this past Tuesday when he managed to plan and shoot this stacked long-exposure photo showing the International Space Station whizzing by.
Here's a quick look at how I created some homemade "petzval swirl" bokeh that mimics photos taken with the new Petzval 58 Bokeh Control Art lens.
When Seth McMurry proposed to his girlfriend Cymber recently, he partnered up with his brother Andrew to capture the whole thing in a creative and unusual way. Instead of settling for a standard hide-in-the-bushes photo or video, Andrew convinced Cymber that he was shooting an action movie and needed her and Seth to help out as actors.
Tired of having to memorize new keyboard shortcuts for every application you use? Want to see every Photoshop tool icon right under your fingertips? Sonder is a new customizable keyboard that can help you navigate shortcuts. Each of the main keys features an E Ink display that can be customized with different icons for different programs.
One of the popular photo ideas in San Francisco is to shoot the sloped sidewalks as level for mind-bending photos that are confusing to look at. The short 1:42 video above takes the same idea but applies it to video, resulting in some clever gravity illusion shots.
A few weeks ago, Colin Devroe, a friend from Twitter, introduced me to the concept of a panoselfie when he created a Flickr group for it and tweeted at me.
Like single serving coffee pods, film canisters aren't exactly the environment's best friend. One startup over in Italy is trying to change that. Called compagnia-imago, the company is trying to create a high-quality eco-friendly film canister that's biodegradable, compostable, an reusable.
Design technologist Roo Williams was recently tasked with creating a better way to capture corporate employee headshots. What he came up with is a Raspberry Pi-powered mobile photo booth that's controlled entirely through the subject's smartphone through a special website. He calls it the "Pi-Booth."
In any given week, the average US child will watch more than a day's worth of TV. This subject is the focus of a new photo series by photographer Donna Stevens called Idiot Box. It's a set of portraits showing blank expressions on kids faces as they watch television in a dimly-lit room.
This may look like an ordinary photo of an orchestra, but there's something special about this shot: it's a clone photo in which every one of the 100 musicians in the frame is the same person.
What if a camera drone were the monster in a Hollywood horror movie? That's what filmmaker Jordan Rubin imagines for a fake film titled "The Drone." It's a story of a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter that takes on an evil and blood-thirsty mind of its own.
What do you get if you mount a giant $60,000 broadcast lens to a tiny mirrorless camera? That's what YouTube user SirJonnyCargo recently set out to find out. He used a Fotodiox lens adapter to mount his Panasonic GH4 onto a Fujinon XA55 lens. The results were actually very impressive.
"Then and now" photo projects are all the rage these days, but the video above puts a unique spin on the idea. It's titled "Yesterday's Tomorrow: A Portland Journey," and is a magical tour of Portland, Oregon, with vintage photographs weaved into modern day video of different places in the city.
How's this for an unlikely couple: what you see here is a heavily modified Fuji Instax Mini 10 instant camera that has a vintage 4x5 lens mounted to the front.
Ad agency brand strategist Derrick Lin has developed a creative way to vent about all the little annoyances of his office job. Using an iPhone, a desk lamp, and miniature figurines, he shoots miniature world photos that capture his real world frustrations.
Steel wool is often done by lighting a small ball of steel wool on fire and then swinging it around in a long exposure photo while it burns. But what happens when you take it to the extreme? The folks over at Joby recently decided to see what you get when you burn a giant 2-foot ball of burning steel wool.
If you have ever dreamed of taking photographs through a camera obscura, then we have some great news for you! Former fashion photographer and inventor Valmont Achalme has designed the Lumigraphe, “a camera obscura for your smartphone”. The project is currently on Kickstarter seeking $49,276 with the promise of helping you capture “beautiful effects” starting around $100.
Freelance photographer Max Ellis of Teddington, UK, has received quite a bit of attention as of late for his ongoing Squirrelismo project, which features portraits of squirrels posing with various props. We caught up with Ellis to find out the secrets behind his viral pictures.
Since 2012, photographer Kenneth Brandon has regularly ventured into the great outdoors at night to shoot time-lapse photos of the dark sky. He recently began to wonder what a time-lapse would look like from a point-of-view on his telescope rather than through it, so he attached a DSLR to the outside on a recent shoot in Panamint Valley, California. The video above is what resulted.
Need to do a quick tracking shot on a table but don't have any dedicated camera equipment for doing so? A book and some fine powder can be a cheap and easy way to get the shot in a pinch.
Here's a photo shoot idea that you probably shouldn't try yourself. Photographer Jake Harsh recently did a wild photo shoot with the electro-pop band Hand of Hearts that involved 18 pounds of fireworks exploding around the three band members. The short behind-the-scenes video above shows what the intense shoot was like.
"All Our Suns" is a new project by NYC telecommunications grad student Michelle Chandra that visualizes the snapping of sunset and sunrise photos around the world using Instagram data.
"Fortuitous Layers" is a project by photographer Adam Allegro, who used an old Kodak Reflex II from 1948 to shoot random double exposures of San Francisco.
We first featured the Cardboard Box Office project back in 2013 as parents Lilly and Leon Mackie were attracting quite a bit of attention for their creative recreations of Hollywood films with their baby boy, Orson. In the year-and-a-half since, the family has continued shooting low-budget photos, branched out into TV shows, begun doing commercial shoots with their concept, and been nominated for a Webby award.
Photographer Eric Paré has built much of his career around the concept of light painting, but a recent photo shoot he did involved a very different source of lighting: the bioluminescence of glowing plankton.
Time-lapses are usually created with one or more cameras by one or more photographers working together to document a particular subject, but now scientists have created a new method of time-lapse creation that uses photographs found on the Internet.
This starry double exposure-style photograph was made using a single long exposure. Photographer Ted Schiele was 190 seconds into a long exposure photo of the night sky when he heard a car coming down the road. He then pointed his camera down towards the car and exposed the camera for another 13 seconds as it approached.
"Beauty in Blood" is an ongoing project by Denver-based artist Jen Lewis that consists of abstract macro photographs of Lewis' own menstrual blood.
For the past two years, photographer Jordan Liles has been researching the life and work of George Bradford Brainerd, a lesser-known 19th-century photographer who shot 2,500 photos of New York before he died in 1887 at the age of 42.
This is a real, non-manipulated photo of 98 different foods cut into perfectly little 2.5cm cubes. It was created by Netherlands-based design studio Lernert & Sander at the request of the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant for a special issue on food.
A while back, I came across an article about using a super cheap CCTV lens. The results to me looked something like a Voigtlander f/0.95 but for a tiny fraction of the cost. I picked one up off eBay for something like $20 a year or so ago.
Photographer Saulius Lukse recently decided to try his hand at shooting video to capture photos of a lightning strike rather than using a special trigger for still photos. The technique worked well, and is rather efficient thanks to a special script Lukse wrote to quickly find frames containing lightning.
Here's a 1-minute video titled "Revolution," created by Dubai-based photographer Sherif Mokbel "to support all the free people fighting for their liberation and right to live." Mokbel also created the work as a technical exercise in how to turn still photos shot with a DSLR into pseudo super-slow-motion footage.
LSU photography student Katie Joy Crawford has personally struggled with general anxiety disorder for over a decade. For her senior thesis exhibition, she chose to make her inner experience the subject of a series of self-portraits. The project is titled "My Anxious Heart."
Wedding photographer James Day tells us that he recently pulled off the "craziest stunt" of his career thus far: delivering the final wedding album to the newlywed couple at the end of their wedding day.
"In Motion" is a short film by photographer Aaron Grimes showing the city of Tokyo, Japan. It features a novel, surreal effect that was created by stacking video frames inside Adobe Photoshop and then recombining those stacked frames into a video again.
This photo may look like a Photoshopped image that blends a sunrise with a nighttime shot, but it's actually a single exposure of a moonrise.
Some lenses have tabs on their focus rings that allow photographers to precisely control focus with a push or pull of their finger. For those that don't, TAAB is here to help. It's a universal tab that can be used on most lenses, giving photographers greater manual focus control than simple focus rings.
The Grocery Store Project is an unusual and ambitious effort by Danish photographer Simon Hoegsberg. After spending 159 afternoons over 20 months shooting 97,000 photos of strangers near a supermarket in Copenhagen, Hoegsberg set out to find brief and hidden connections by analyzing the images.
How do you go about shooting a quick photograph if you need to include both of your hands in the frame? One guy had a solution that turned into a classic sequence of photographs.
