Ideas

Capturing cool reflection portraits might seem like a breeze—you just put someone behind some glass and go ham, right? But as photographer Matt Granger explains in this tutorial, even a basic understanding of the "key variables" involved can open up more options for you.

If you've seen the movie Inception, you're likely very familiar with that one scene where physical space is bent on top of itself. It's one of the movie's most iconic visuals, and in this 3-minute video, COOPH shows how you can easily make your own photos with an Inception vibe with a drone.

A couple of years ago I was shooting Halloween yard scenes in a street photography kind of way when I realized that I wasn't really satisfied with what I was getting. Over the last two decades, Halloween has been transformed into a major U.S. holiday focused on lavish front yard displays that often look boringly the same down street after street.

Here's a quick tip from talented photographer, filmmaker, and YouTube star Peter McKinnon. In his latest "two-minute Tuesday" video, he showed how adding a simple overlay onto some black foam core can take a basic top-down product shot to the next level.

My name is Howard Lao, and I'm a freelance sports photographer based in Portland, Oregon. Over the past five years, I’ve covered dozens of track meets. From the 2016 Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon, and the World Track Championships in London and Portland, to meets between the University of Washington and Washington State, I’ve filed and edited photos in a media workroom, surrounded by my fellow photographers.

The temperatures have been soaring lately. Depending on where you live, you might’ve even seen record heat over the last couple of weeks. Normally, such weather makes staying indoors (so long as you have air conditioning) sound ideal. However, in this article, we’re going to share a fun, creative photography idea (inspired by Tim Tadder) that’s perfect for getting outside on hot, sunny days.

The Panasonic Lumix S5 has just been released in New Zealand, and I received mine a few days ago. Last night, with clear skies, I took it to the south coast of Wellington, New Zealand, to see what the new advances in High Resolution mode included in the S5 could bring.

I’ve been enjoying bird photography from my custom-made floating hide for 3 years now. Being in the water with a variety of birds from waterfowl to wading birds and even Black Skimmers flying by my head has been an amazing experience. It becomes a much more connecting experience both to the natural areas I am in as well as my subject.

Photographer Kyle Roper is no stranger to unique camera creations; he was the producer for the viral Skyscraper Camera Project. But his latest project is a bit smaller and more intimate. Amid the pandemic, he turned his front door into a camera to capture beautiful large-format black-and-white portraits of his neighbors.

Ever since the beginning of the pandemic (and, really, the beginning of photography), macro photography tutorials have all sort of blended together. The subject matter and techniques are often pretty similar: flowers, bugs, coins, etc. COOPH wanted to change that with their latest "ideas" video.

Photographer Dan Roberts recently collaborated on an "intercontinental light painting." Using a projector and the power of the Internet, he and Frodo Alvarez captured a light-painting portrait in real time from across the world: Frodo's light from Spain ended up on Dan's camera in Denver.

Photographer Parker Rice shared an interesting tip on Reddit earlier this week. In a short discussion post, he showed what's possible when you get creative instead of tossing your smashed lens filters in the trash.

Photographer Robert Hall recently released a simple-yet-brilliant explainer that uses water to illustrate the properties of light and explain a few concepts that frequently confuse beginners, including: what is a "stop" of light, how do you use the exposure triangle, and how do various flashes and flash modifiers affect your image.

Underwater photographer Kurt Arrigo recently set himself a new challenge: working together with a group of professional freedivers, he wanted to turn a wreck in the Mediterranean Sea into an "underwater playground."

San Francisco-based inventor Lucas Rizzotto spent all of 2019 wearing cameras on his face. He then built a virtual reality time machine that lets him relive any memory from the year by simply punching in a date and time.

The Verge Video Director Becca Farsace recently set out to build her very own custom camera by merging a point-and-shoot film camera with the new Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera module and a Raspberry Pi 4 computer. Just one problem... she has zero coding knowledge. Cue a very frustrating week.

There they were, a continuous, almost organized line of middle-aged men in various stages of unfolding tripods, mounting massive DSLRs on them, carefully aiming long lenses at indeterminate points in the darkening late evening sky. The LCDs lit their faces with a soft glow as they took test shots and talked among one another while fiddling with various items from their giant bags of equipment.

The grand landscapes are beautiful to view and probably the reason you got into landscape photography but the smaller details and intimate scenes can be just as picturesque. Capturing these scenes isn’t only a great way of creating impressive art, it’s also a creative challenge that forces you to think differently.

Creator Kasper from the YouTube channel MAKESOME recently set himself a challenge. After a request from his friend and photographer Mick Friis, he decided to try and create a cable cam on the cheap—basically turning an RC car into something like a Wiral LITE, or a smaller version of the Syrp slingshot.

Matt Huber over at YouTube channel The Garage Learning has put together a fun and creative walkthrough that takes a different approach to splash photography. Instead of manually throwing water onto his subject, he designed a simple 'DIY catapult' that does the job much better than he can.

Here's a simple, maybe even obvious, run-and-gun lighting tip for beginners from the YouTube Channel Run N Gun. If you find yourself using your smartphone for portrait lighting in a pinch, don't turn it around and use the flashlight—download an app or solid color image instead, and use your phone's display as a small LED panel.

Photographer and YouTuber Mathieu Stern has been getting into at-home photo printing lately. But after experimenting with cyanotypes, he decided to simplify even further by trying to print photos using beetroot juice, and nothing else. Dwight Schrute would be proud.

A couple of weeks into the coronavirus lockdown of 2020 and I’d noticed, among the many mentions on social media timelines of toilet paper shortages, sourdough fanaticism, and the essential viewing experience that is Tiger King, was a computer game called Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

So you have spent years packing up your camera and jumping on a plane. Then a pandemic shut down borders killing travel plans overnight and you are not sure where your next story is going to come from. Where do you go for those sweet photos or that glorious content you had been able to churn out as fast as you could make it?

These days we’re all trying to come up with new photo ideas to do around home, but how many of you have thought, ”Hey, I’ll freeze some flowers in water?” That’s a new one for me, but fortunately I know someone here who does that, and she’s happy to share her secrets.

Italian photographer Ursula Ferrara's Lomography Lomo'Instant Wide camera is a bit different than others you'll find. Instead of shooting Instax Wide instant photos, it's used for capturing tiny wet plate collodion photos.

Creative Director Yousuke Ozawa—whose 'Satellite Fonts' project went viral back in 2014—is at it again. In order to keep his sanity during lockdown, he started taking "digital vacations" through Google Maps, and capturing Street View travel photography.

Here's a beautiful new short film titled "Night Light" by UK-based photographer and filmmaker Arthur Cauty. While it may look like timelapse photography, it's actually comprised entirely of still photos with motion and lighting added in.

Solargraphies (pinhole images on photographic paper that capture months of the sun arching across the horizon) were a thing starting sometime in the 2000s. When this caught on broadly in the early 2010s, it got a lot of people excited for film again.

This period isn’t easy for anyone. Professional photographers are struggling with the implications of being on lockdown and suddenly having to stop all work from one day to the next. Hobbyist photographers may be in a similar situation with jobs, children and household duties all being juggled in an unprecedented dance that is completely new and unknown.

Weird lens enthusiast and YouTuber Mathieu Stern has created another fun stay-at-home DIY lens while stuck in quarantine. This time it's a functional camera lens, complete with focusing mechanism, made almost entirely out of LEGO bricks.

COVID-19 isolation is a tricky time for wedding photographers. Upskilling might already be on your radar as you think about putting time into your wedding photography business over this time where weddings have been banned pretty much across the globe. But I’d like to suggest some out-of-the-box ways that we can upskill as wedding photographers in this time that you might not have thought of yet.

We've seen a lot of creative self-portrait ideas come across our inbox over the past several weeks, but none are quite as fun as this "punch portrait" tutorial by photographer and YouTuber Mike Smith.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been asked to stay home and shelter in place. This restriction has only increased my desire to explore and road trip. I still need to create and think critically throughout this time, but if I can’t go to new places, how can I make new work?

With many of us stuck in lockdown, quarantine, and self-isolation, I thought I’d share 10 ideas for astrophotography that you can do from home, even if you live in a light-polluted town or city. If there’s one thing that this pandemic has taught us, it’s that we’re all in this together and astrophotography and astronomy only help to solidify that sense of unification.

Weird lens aficionado Mathieu Stern has created the rarest of camera lenses with the most precious of materials (in the ongoing pandemic): a roll of toilet paper.

Because of the quarantines currently sweeping the country and world, creatives have had to get especially creative to make collaborative art in spite of distance. I’ve seen photographers shooting portraits of people from the sidewalk and through windows. I’ve also seen photographers shooting via conferencing apps. I, too, recently conducted my own remote portrait sessions, which I’ve decided to call Remotraits.

The Bismarck, North Dakota-based video production company Threefold shared this short and sweet 2-minute video showing how they took an old ambulance and turned it into an awesome way to haul a huge amount of equipment from place to place.

You don’t have to be out and about to capture beautiful photographs of your children. The homes we live in may not strike you as being particularly photogenic, but think about how many of your childhood memories revolve around the house you grew up in. It's the ideal backdrop.

When everything went into lockdown a few weeks ago, I think my brain went into lockdown as well. It just zapped my motivation, my creativity, my income -- everything. Suddenly 3 months of income were just gone.

If anything good has come out of the current lockdown, it’s the many wonderful ways people have been finding to stay creative. When the coronavirus began to take hold and necessary government instructions rendered my wedding and portrait photography business inoperable, I had to deal with the shock and financial implications of it like any other photographer. It also threw up another challenge: how do we as creatives stay creative?