Ideas

German photographer Marion Luttenberger was asked by Moodley Brand Identity to shoot a series of infographics for Caritas Kontakladen, an Austrian organization that assists drug addicts. The resulting images convey facts and figure in clever ways through carefully arranged physical objects in the frame.

Here's a strange (and time-consuming) way you can test your Photoshop prowess if you ever have some time to kill: turn a dimpled golf ball into a smooth ping pong ball using only the dodge and burn tools.

Photographer Tom Johnson recently partnered up with stylist Phoebe Haines for a project titled The Thirty Three. The team roamed the streets of London for five days, asking thirty three random strangers to put on haute couture (i.e. "high fashion") clothing and pose for portraits.

Here's a nice idea for an annual family tradition (especially if you're a parent with young kids): take your family photos from the past year, create a year-in-review photo book, and then record some video of your family looking at the book and talking about it.

Sustainability is a big and important idea these days, and it's the one behind this new concept box design for DSLR cameras. It's clever packaging that has two uses: once the camera is safely transported to the owner, the box is taken apart and used as the owner's manual for the camera.

Here's a neat video that shows what you get in a star trails time-lapse if you slowly move your lens' zoom ring over the course of the long exposures. Long exposures naturally create star trails around Earth's axis of rotation, but throw in some motorized zooms and you can turn those ordinary trails into some pretty trippy effects.

The digital camera industry is dominated by eye-level viewfinders, but waist-level finders have their advantages. One main one is that it makes photographing strangers less threatening since the photographer is looking down instead of directly at the subjects.

Here's a creative (and super meta) idea for a photo project: photographer Sean Hawkey traveled to a silver mine in Peru and shot tintype portraits of the miners there using the silver they mined as his emulsion.

German photographer Jan von Holleben is known for creating imaginative scenes by having kids lie on the ground and carefully arranging everyday objects around them. One of his first viral projects that featured this style was "Dreams of Flying".

For her project "Crazy Cat Lovers," photographer Andréanne Lupien used clone photography to turn ordinary cat owners with one cat (or sometimes two or three) into crazy cat people with an army of cats swarming their homes.

"Barbie Blad" by photographer Hamid Blad is a series of portraits that mixes the old and the new. The oldness is contributed by the fact that they are created using the 19th-century collodion process, while the newness is due to the fact that each portrait is of a Barbie doll.

Spinning some burning steel wool around on the end of a rope is popular as a way to create dazzling long exposure photographs. It can also be used for dazzling video as well.

Photographer and film director Naren Wilks created this mind-bending music video by arranging DSLRs around a circular green screen room. When the perspectives of the cameras are combined and synchronized, a "rotationally symmetric, kaleidoscopic world" is created. The song is "Fear & Delight" from the album Puppet Loosely Strung by The Correspondents.

I visit San Francisco often to walk the streets with camera in hand, hoping to capture life as it happens. Invariably I am asked for change and/or a cigarette. For the most part I try to be generous, but as a non-smoker I’m not able to oblige. I then wondered what would happen if the situation was reversed: instead of being asked for a cigarette I would offer them to random people from all walks of life.

The short film above, titled "Che - A Moment in Time," was created entirely out of still photographs. Animator Bennie Melwin created the experimental short film by taking historical photographs -- including the iconic "Guerrillero Heroico" photo of Che Guevara -- and bringing the scenes to life through clever digital trickery.

Remember when I wrote "Dear New Photographer..." a few months ago? One of the big points I emphasized was valuing your photography and business skills.

3D projections are often used nowadays to create eye-popping visuals on flat surfaces such as the sides of buildings or on basketball courts, but could the same concept be done out in the wild where things aren't flat and orderly? Photographer Tarek Mawad and animator Friedrich van Schoor recently decided to try it out.

One second per day videos have gotten quite popular in recent years, and now there are even apps that can help you do the project. Ben Schmidt of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada decided to take the concept to the next level by delivering a speech over the course of a year by saying one word to his camera per day.

"Seven Generations of American Women" is a project by Los Angeles-based photographer Christine McConnell in which she recreated her family portraits going back 200 years. The series starts with her great-great-great-grandmother and ends in the present day.

One of photographer Jeff Paradiso's big projects this past year was to create a sideways room for "anti-gravity" photos. These are images in which the viewer is disoriented in regards to which way is up.

Brazilian sports photographer Marcelo Maragni likes to do experimental photography in addition to his "ordinary" sports photography. Earlier this year, he decided that he wanted to try to capture action shots at night with ultraviolet flashes and colorful paint.

Family portraits are usually meant to be idealized representation of families, with nice clothes, pleasant smiles, and beautiful backdrops. The portraits in "Best Case Scenario" are different. In each of the images in the project, lifestyle photographer Danielle Guenther attempts to capture the reality of being a parent of young children. Things aren't perfect and peaceful -- life is often chaos.

Fashion street photographers usually look for styles that are one of a kind. Hans Eijkelboom doesn't. For over twenty years, the Dutch 'anti-sartorial' photographer has roamed the streets of major cities around the world in search for the common -- people showing similar tastes in clothing, accessories, or behavior.

Tired of strangers giving you wary glances when you photograph them? A Santa suit can change that suspicion into smiles.

Bristol, England-based photographer Peter Thorpe has a special treat for his clients every holiday season. For the past 20 years, he has sent hilarious promo Christmas cards featuring his dogs as different animals in elaborate handmade scenes.

Photographers Chris Limbrick and Francesco Fragomeni both work for the website hosting company Squarespace. During times in which they're not hard at work, the duo has been shooting a lighthearted photo project called foolsdoart.

"What would chairs look like if they were people?" It's a strange question that forms the basis of an interesting and creative project by photographer Horia Manolache. It consists of pairs of photos showing various chairs and Manolache's ideas of what those chairs would look like in human form.

Over the past 6 months, photographer Justin Bettman and stylist Gozde Eker have been building elaborate sets on the sidewalks of New York City using unwanted furniture and household items, most of which is found discarded on the street. The sets are made to look like the rooms of a house.

Using super-telephoto lenses to frame people against the rising moon has become quite popular as of late. Just last year we shared examples featuring people at a lookout, a high-line walker, and a mountain biker.

Check out this crazy self-portrait photo by a guy named Timothy LaBranche. It's a composite image showing LaBranche posing as all 100 passengers in the cabin of a passenger plane.

Check out this comic book illustration of Marvel's Silver Surfer. What you might not be able to tell at first glance is that it's not actually an illustration at all, but rather a photograph of an actual model.

Here's a clever idea we've never seen before: a card that "loads" as you open it. Pull the card out of the sleeve and watch as the progress bar magically "works."

Photographer Adam Rabinowitz's Tiger Suit project is like Humans of New York crossed with Tigger from Winnie the Poo. Like HONY's Brandon Stanton, Rabinowitz photographs strangers on the street and jots down interesting blurbs from their conversation. There's one big difference in the projects, though: Rabinowitz's subjects must agree to put on his tiger suit.

Peer into the Gowanus Canal in New York City, and you'll see what is widely recognized as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. The contamination is so bad that the canal has been designated a Superfund site.

A friend (Eric) and I were hanging out one Sunday and we decided to do something fun with EyeEm data. We obtained and then graphed the predominant photo colours for every photo uploaded or tagged in Europe. We then generated these pretty pie graphs for each country.

Here's a new idea that's quite a bit off the beaten path: RoboStage is a new online studio that lets photographers conduct a photo shoot through their browser. We're not talking about some kind of faked virtual environment, but an actual photo shoot done in an actual location, controlled through your browser.

Creating a stop motion music video by photographing a boatload of physical prints is nothing new, but what happens if you add gasoline and fire to the mix? …

Here's a stunt you probably shouldn't try at home -- unless you've been featured in a GoPro commercial or something. Photographer Matthew Jones recently attempted what he calls a "Human Rig shot." The goal was to shoot a motorcycle zipping down a road, but instead of using a fancy rig or a car, Jones decided to step into a pair of rollerblades.

Photographer Noah Kalina is best known online for his everyday project, in which he took a selfie every day for over a decade. He's also an avid shopper with his Amazon Prime account.

Few countries celebrate Christmas as beautifully as Austria. Vienna in particular is known for its buildings adorned in decorations, streets illuminated by lights, and seasonal markets called ‘Christkindlmarkt.’

It’s these festive elements that inspired time-lapse production team FilmSpektakel to create a unique time-lapse of Vienna’s winter wonderland -- unique because the whole thing is captured refracted through a snow globe.

Christopher Mitchell recently breathed some photographic life into a pice of technology many of us probably have languishing away in some drawer. With the help of an Arduino board, he’s found a way to Frankenstein a Texas Instruments graphing calculator and Game Boy Camera into the ArTICam: a 128–128 grayscale selfie machine.

Here's a simple photo idea that photographer Nick Fancher came up with for the folks over at Digital Photography School. If you wanna add some holiday flair to your portrait sessions this Christmas season on the cheap, try shooting through a $5 set of Christmas lights.

One afternoon, while hanging out with his coworkers at Bozeman Camera, photographer Tanner Johnson and his friend Beau Larson had an idea: they decided to recreate the Game of Thrones Season 1 poster with camera gear instead of swords.

This is going to be a VERY long year, and we have J.J. Abrams to blame. Since its release on Friday, the trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens has swept across the Internet like a wildfire. But as with almost anything viral, it hasn’t completely taken its course until it’s been parodied and recreated a handful of times. This viral sensation is no exception, and we have our first viral attempt thanks to LEGO fanatic Snooperking, who recreated the entire trailer from start …

In the age of the iPad, there still is something glorious about a photo book. Here are a few of our favorites from 2014, so send Santa (or Hanukah Harry) a quick tweet, and get a big dose of inspiration this Holiday season.

Astrophotographer extraordinaire Göran Strand created this neat composite image to explore an interesting 'what if?' scenario: What if your eyes could see the sun the way a Hydrogen Alpha Telescope does? What would a sunset look like then?

Here's a cool patent that gives new purpose to a camera accessory you don't hear talked about much: the body cap. Chances are you don't give your camera's body cap much thought, but the body cap Canon just patented would serve a dual purpose by not just keeping your sensor protected, but also cleaning the contacts on your lens mount in the process.

Then & Now style photo series are anything but uncommon, but what if the "then" you want to compare to "now" happened before the invention of photography? You would think that would be a deal-breaker, but one computer graphics manager and gaming enthusiast found a way around this issue.

Red Bull is known for its clever advertising and incredible collection of sponsored adrenaline junkies. So, to make the most of both of these assets, the company recently decided to pair up with wind surfer Jason Polakow to create one of the most intense and immersive ‘tiny planet’ videos you've probably ever seen.

If you've got storage containers-worth of old family photos sitting in an attic somewhere, a clever new app wants to help you turn those old, physical photos into digital files without having to get a desktop scanner involved.