Ideas

On July 19th, the Cassini spacecraft that has been hovering around Saturn -- and sending back some stunning images we might add -- turned around to take a picture of its home planet as part of a larger mosaic of the Saturn system.

Taiwanese company Ystudio is in the business of keeping the craftsmanship behind old, often discarded products alive. And in the case of the lamps and light fixtures you see here, that meant breathing new life into old film cameras and strobes.

I’ve seen lots of used film canisters repurposed as dangling bag accessories for sale in trendy parts of Hong Kong. The idea is to drill or burn a small hole in the top of the plastic spool and fit a keychain to that. I figured it would be a lot more useful to use the can to give a return contact address in case the bag is lost and found. What better way could there be than to use film?

It's Sunday, which might mean doing your best to keep your mind off of the workweek to come, or already setting about planning next weekend. If you happen to be doing the latter, and there's room in your schedule for an interesting photography DIY project, we've got something for you: a do-it-yourself concrete pinhole camera.

Photography can be a wonderful source of growth, healing and hope. Programs like this one at the VA in Palo Alto have helped PTSD-afflicted veterans cope with their condition, while the EYE AM program was trying to have children tell their stories on an international level.

While working on a feature film called The Grind, filmmaker Vashi Nedomansky had to come up with a way to shoot a flashback scene, complete with Humvee, in the desert of Iraq. The only problem? He had neither Iraq, nor a Humvee to work with.

Here's a photo series whose subject we hope nobody ever runs across in real life. Called Point Blank, photographers Peter Andrew, Simon Duffy and Derek Blais have put together a set of photographs that give you a down-the-barrel view of several well-known guns.

While living in their studio -- which also happened to be located in an old bank with joint bathrooms at the time -- photographers Gerban Grotenhuis and Marc Marselje had an interesting idea. Just how many creative and funny scenes could they create using those joint toilets? …

Here's a video that should help you transition out of work mode and into TGIF mode with more than a few chuckles along the way. It was put together by Minnesota-based photojournalist Ben Garvin using a stop-motion iPhone app, and has been making the rounds on the Internet as beard and stop-motion lovers unite to praise his efforts.

Earlier this year, Swiss photographer Philipp Schmidli attracted a good deal of attention for a series of photos showing the silhouette of a biker in front of a gigantic moonrise.

If you're going to do self-portraits, it might not be a bad idea to take a leaf out of photographer Alex Wein's book and get creative. Started during a cross-country roadtrip back in 2011, Wein's series Headstands puts a quirky twist on your standard "here's me at the *insert famous landmark here*" photo by quite literally turning it on its head.

There's an awesome little subreddit that has been getting a lot of press coverage as of late. It's called ColorizedHistory, and is a 20,000+ person strong community of "Amateur Historians" who are interested in the idea of creating high quality colorized versions of historical black-and-white photographs.

There's nothing like a friendly competition among peers to make a road trip that much more enjoyable, and when you can get a few thousand people to join in and judge the outcome, that's even better. That's what photojournalists and friends Eric Thayer and Joshua Lott did recently when they found themselves in a midst of an impromptu Instagram battle.

If you have any photo books with glued bindings lying around the house, you'll probably understand how annoying the crease in the middle can be. If a photo is printed across both pages, you inevitably lose part of the image as it curves down in the middle, taking some of your sanity with it.

Companies and researchers are always coming up with interesting new camera concepts and prototypes that approach snapping photos in some unique way. The most recent creation to make its way across our desks is the FlexCam, a panoramic camera array that does away with sweeping or stitching to create panoramas. Instead, you simply bend the camera itself.

The crowd surfing blow up ball at a concert isn't a new idea, but late last year HP and Almap BBDO took it in a new direction. As part of HPs "Making Memories Last" campaign, the company fit one of the massive concert beach balls with a high-definition camera and WiFi antenna.

One of our popular posts back in 2011 was a quick video tutorial on how you can use Mod Podge to transfer photographs onto blocks of wood (we also shared a text-based tutorial earlier this year).

"Fast Food" is a series of food photos by photographer Jon Feinstein. The images have a rather unusual look to them -- each food item is captured in front of a purely black backdrop, and is squashed on the surface as though it's being pressed against a pane of glass.

The idea of fitting electronics into a film SLR in order to capture digital photos with it is not new. The thing is, most of the ideas we've shared ranged from April Fools jokes to promising concepts that never seem to advance beyond that.

One day, while looking at a glass of water, photographer, artist and architect Moses Hacmon realized that he could really see it. He wondered what water really looked like, and in particular what it looked like when it moved.

Most of us can agree that having a toddler is a lot less fun than being one, but photographing one... well that can fall closer to the latter given the right circumstances. For photographers April Maciborka and David Wile, the right circumstances were just a lemon slice and a cute reaction away.

When the term model is thrown around, there's a fairly typical image that probably comes to mind for most people. In the male department, six-pack abs or a clean-cut look might fit the bill. And the female department more often than not involves the descriptors tall and slender.

Earlier this month, we showed you how some astrophotographers were turning their standard DSLRs monochrome by physically scratching the color filter array off of their sensor in order to get sharper black-and-white photos.

Heather Champ is a well-known personality in the online photo community. For almost 5 years she served as Director of Community at Flickr, after which she co-founded JPG Magazine with her husband Derek Powazek. Now she's embarked on her next adventure: a weekly email newsletter dubbed "Favorites."

At the beginning of the year, the Fraenkel Gallery debuted an exhibition and book that approached photography from an interesting angle: the exhibit focused exclusively on "that which cannot be photographed." …

Getting quality astrophotography shots comes with several challenges, and one of the main ones is that the starts don't stand still -- or, more accurately, we don't. Since the Earth enjoys spinning on its axis once every 24-hours or so, exposures in excess of about 1 second begin producing star trails unless you have the camera or telescope on some sort of tracking mount.

New Jersey native and fine art photographer Michael Massaia suffers from insomnia. And so, when he first heard the term "seeing the black dog" in relation to the hallucinations truckers see when they're sleep deprived, the idea for a photo series by the same name immediately took shape.

Here's an interesting idea for street photogs who want to get some candid shots of people in a public square: tape a "Stand Here and Smile" sign on the ground, set yourself up a little ways away, and capture what happens.

There seems to be a growing desire among the networks to give sports fans the absolute best angle of the action when they're watching a game on TV, but what angle is that? …

What happens when "and then they lived happily ever after" is replaced with something more akin to "and then reality reared its ugly head?" That's the question photographer Dina Goldstein asked in her award-winning photo series Fallen Princesses.

Want to see how our planet "breathes"? Data visualization guru and cartographer John Nelson recently downloaded twelve cloud-free satellite photograph mosaics of Earth showing what our planet looks like in each month of the year. He then combined them into animated GIFs that show the steady pulse of seasons.

Every architecture 101 class in college would do well to start off the semester with the above time-lapse by Luke Shepard. Over the course of three months he travelled to 36 cities in 21 countries to capture some of Europe's most beautiful architecture on camera. This time-lapse, titled Nightvision, is the result.

Visual artist Ruslan Khasanov was cooking a little while back when he noticed some interesting interactions between the oil and soy sauce he was using. The little black beads of soy sauce forming at the bottom of the container inspired him, and so he decided to perform a little visual experiment by substituting the soy sauce for ink, and adding in a little soap for good measure.

Last year we shared the time-slice photography of Richard Silver, who combined multiple photos of the same scene, taken at different times of the day, into single composite images that span many hours.

Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros has turned to Instagram to create its latest music video, encouraging fans to upload clips that can be melded into an evolving visual interpretation of the song "Stormur."

National Geographic photographer Michael "Nick" Nichols has spent the last few years in the Serengeti capturing NatGeo-worthy, one-of-a-kind photos of lions. The amazing photos that illustrate the story Serengeti Lions in this month's issue of the magazine were all taken by Nichols, and in the video above we get a tiny peek at how he managed to get such unbelievable views.

Japanese photographer Nagano Toyokazu is a dad much like all dads in that he loves his daughters, Miu and Kanna. Unlike most, however, he's managed to get his daughters a good bit of attention through his imaginative and cute photography ideas.

Earlier this summer I was asked to shoot a campaign for Airwick USA to highlight the many uses for their new color changing candles. It was going to be a summery outdoor shoot involving two distinct ‘looks’ for the images; one with the candles being used at night time, and the other where they were being used during sunset or dusk activities.

Over the past few years, University of Minnesota researcher Ali Swanson has captured millions of photos of the animals of the Serengeti thanks to hundreds of camera traps set up as part of a project called Snapshot Serengeti.

While walking through Tel Aviv's Jaffa neighborhood some years back, New York-based travel photographer Sivan Askayo was drawn to the vibrant articles of clothing hovering overhead. She photographed this laundry from below, liked what she saw, and began a photo project that has since taken her around the world.

There's nothing new about time-lapse photography, and calling the camera obscura new borders on insanity, but when you put the two together you get a pretty cool combination that might just qualify as novel, if not unique.

Back in March, we shared Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner's Black Holes series of photographs showing paint being flung outwards by a spinning drill. We told you then that Oefner's stated goal was to "harness elemental forms of natural phenomena and capture them in the most stunning way possible." …

There's nothing like a gimmicky camera to make you tilt your head to the side and raise an eyebrow out of curiosity. The most recent gimmick to cross our desks is a camera that is equal parts advertising and DIY creation: an over-branded Sprite camera with a Raspberry Pi at its core.

For a while now, researchers have been trying to remove two things from 3D photos and video: the glasses and the second lens. Some companies have made headway in the area -- think of Samsung's single-lens 3D technology and Panasonic's special single-lens 3D sensor -- but some new research out of Harvard offers a software-based alternative.

We've featured build-it-yourself cameras before, but those DIY products aren't often suitable for children. One in particular was made entirely from 3D-printed parts, a DIY SLR for crafty adults that would be both fun and educational to make.

Here's a neat photo idea: capture a city's skyline in the reflection on the front of a camera lens. Photographer Christopher Anderson recently shot this picture of the Minneapolis, Minnesota skyline -- a picture that landed on the front page of Reddit.

Architecture shots are often taken from one of three places: the ground, the roof, or inside a building looking out. That's because the only real alternative after that is to take your photos from outside the building, while being on neither the roof nor the ground.

Every age has some unique insight to offer. That's the basic idea behind the project 100 Ages, A Century of Voices by graduate students Katie Alaimo and Alyssa Goodman from the University of Missouri. The duo photographed and interviewed 100 Boone County residents from age 1 to age 100 and are now sharing those peoples' stories through the project's website.

Firework photographs are generally pretty uniform in their appearance: a dark sky, glowing sparks that are either points or lines depending on exposure time, and perhaps some views of the surrounding area. When photographing a major fireworks show last week, photographer Rob Shaw of BackFromLeave Photo wanted to do something different. He played around with various camera techniques and captured a set of firework images that is quite different than most of the images you'll see online.

What would we think the surface of Mars looks like if NASA had equipped the Curiosity rover with a smartphone loaded with Instagram or Hipstamatic instead of the advanced scientific cameras they chose? Greek photo enthusiast Nikos Kantarakias decided to find out.