Ideas

A black Baptist minister and a group of Ku Klux Klan white supremacists. You wouldn't expect to see them together, but that's precisely why they're found side-by-side in photographer Mark Laita's project Created Equal. Laita spent eight years shooting black-and-white portraits of Americans that are on opposite ends of various cultural spectrums. The images are then placed into diptychs that are both jarring in their juxtapositions and powerful reminders of our shared humanity.

The woman in this portrait doesn't actually exist. The face is actually the average of 57 different women -- 57 girlfriends that appeared in episodes of the popular TV sitcom Seinfeld.

Here's another example of a strange effect caused by the shutter of a DSLR. YouTube user drummaboy5189 captured the above video by playing a 61Hz sound through his speaker and then pointing his Canon 6D at it while filming at 60 frames per second and 1/4000s shutter speed. What resulted is a "rolling speaker" effect.

One Lighthouse, 365 Clicks is a fascinating photo series by Brazilian photographer Tunisio Alves Filho. Like all 365 projects, he took one photo per day over the course of a year. Unlike most 365 projects, he never changed subjects, just vantage point, composition and style -- needless to say, he had to get pretty creative.

It's always interesting when a photographer manages to show the artistic or beautiful side of something that you otherwise might pay zero attention to. Beat up baseballs, diverse seed specimens, and even the view of Hong Kong looking straight up have all made for interesting photo series we've shared in the past.

This experimental video shows what you get when you combine dancers, light-painting, stop-motion, and a 360-degree camera rig. It's like eye-popping popping that's the product of cameras rather than extremely skilled dancing.

The Color Vibe 5K is a run that takes place all over the United States between February and November, benefiting charities and non-profits in each city they stop in. During and after the event, participants get a little crazy and pelt each other with colored powder. By the end of the race, the organizers of the event are proud to call you an "exciting and vivid walking masterpiece."

Images Connect is an international photo project by photographer Henny Boogert that explores the similarities and differences between the places students call home around the world.

We've seen some pretty crazy, vertigo-inducing rooftopping and skyscraper photography in the past, but French photographer and graphic artist Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze's "Vertical Horizon" photo series takes the opposite approach to yield a similar awe-inspiring effect.

Earlier this week, photographer Philipp Schmidli of Lucerne, Switzerland captured this incredible photograph of a biker's silhouette in front of a giant moon rising in the horizon.

Samuel Burns is a photographer based in Sydney, Australia who specializes in shooting minimalist landscape photographs using a large format camera. While the scenes chosen for his photographs are already simple and bare, Burns captures them with extremely long exposure times in order to give the locations a blurry and dreamy look.

When photographer Caleb Cole sees strangers in public, he wonders about them -- the lives they lead, how they experience the world, how they make meaning of things, etc. This interest led him to start a self-portrait project titled "Other People's Clothes. It's a series of photos in which Cole steps "into the shoes of the types of people" he sees on a daily basis.

There is no shortage of landscape photographs of mountains at sunrise on the Internet, but how often do you get to see photographs captured at the same time from the mountain's perspective? Photographer Todd Caudle ('Cloudman' on 500px) was able to capture these two viewpoints simultaneously yesterday morning by shooting with both his personal camera and a live webcam located at the mountain's summit.

What will future generations think of the cameras we're using these days? What will the cameras look like to them? Japanese artist Maico Akiba has a project titled "100 Years Later" that imagines what various modern commonplace objects might look like if rediscovered by people a century later. Among the objects are a number of cameras.

'The Unseen Seen' is a project by Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler that captures the beauty of classic cinema in an unconventional way.

There's often a degree of anonymity in online classifieds, as you often don't learn what a person looks like until you respond to their ad and meet them in person. Perth, Australia-based photographer Phil Hill has been working on a portrait project featuring the people who post listings to Gumtree, a free online classifieds website that competes with Craigslist.

Marta Crass of Knoxville, Tennessee is quite handy with cardboard. She runs an Etsy shop called CisforCardboard that's dedicated to her custom cardboard art. She handcrafts signs, wall hangings, letters, and anything else you can dream up... including cameras.

From most angles, it looks like a bunch of lights flickering at random. But stand in just the right spot, and you’ll perceive moving bodies. Jim Campbell’s installation for Light Show – a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London – is a powerful antidote to the high-tech obsession with performance, the endless competition to pack more megapixels into a smaller screen or sensor. It also provides fresh insight into human vision.

Duesseldorf, Germany-based photographer Jakob Wagner wants to show you how diverse photographs of the Atlantic Ocean can be. The images in his series "Madeiran Weather" are all of the same patch of coastal area, yet they are drastically different from one another due to the weather.

Earlier this month, we featured a neat light painting experiment by photographer Matt Holland that involved long exposure photos of rock climbers wearing colorful lights. The climbs resulted in colorful light trails that tracked the course each climber took.

For his project "Happy End," German photographer Dietmar Eckell has travelled all over the world to find and photograph abandoned airplane wreckages with positive endings. That last part may seem like a paradox, but all of the 15 wreckages Eckell has shot actually do have happy endings: no one on board died, and they were all rescued from the remote locations where they crash landed.

Film footage from the early 1900's, when hand-cranked cameras were all the technology available, aren't exactly high-quality. Choppy, jumpy, and sped-up, the people in these films look anything but natural.

Photographer Ray Demski recently teamed up with climber Alex Luger to shoot a project he's dubbed "Ice Nights." Shot entirely at night using several powerful flash units and a medium format camera, the shoot looked to take ice climbing photography to a whole new level.

Need a pick-me-up? Check out the project "Your Pet and You" by photographer Tobias Lang of Hamburg, Germany. The series is composed of beautiful portraits of all kinds of pets and their loving owners.

About a week ago, Red Bull Illume and Snap! Orlando revealed a collaboration they were working on called "Motion to Light," in which they paired the fluid motion of certain sports with light painting. Part one used photographer Patrick Rochon and a team of wakeboarders to capture some stunning pics. Now a week later, we have part two. And the sport of choice? Paramotoring.

Hungarian photographer and retoucher Flóra Borsi created a popular series of photos last year titled "Photoshop in Real Life." The images imagined what various Photoshop Tools might be used for if they had physical powers in our world, and were quickly shared across the web.

Fine art photographer Aaron Ansarov's project Zooids contains beautiful, colorful, and abstract images that might look to you like something biological seen through a microscope. They're actually macro portraits of the Portuguese Man O' War, a jellyfish-like creature that is responsible for 10,000 documented painful stings worldwide.

When photographer Callum Cooper moved from Melbourne, Australia to London, England, one of the things that caught his eye was the uniformity (or "conformity") seen in the city's residential areas. Along a street, multiple buildings would have exactly the same architecture, and if it weren't for the minor differences in the facades, some of them can hardly be distinguished from one another.

Between 2009 and 2012, Finnish photographer Petri Artturi Asikainen roamed the streets of Tokyo in search of subjects for his project 100 Years in Tokyo. His goal was to collect portraits of people for all the ages between 0 through 100. The result of the effort is a book that contains 202 beautiful portraits -- the faces of a man and a woman for each age in that range.

PechaKucha is a presentation style that gives presenters exactly 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide to get their point across. Designed by architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham in Tokyo in 2003, what started as a weekly show-and-tell format at their firm has become a world-wide presentation phenomenon that recently broke into the world of photography.

When Israeli photographer Natan Dvir visited New York City in 2008, he was taken aback by the massive advertising billboards dominating commercial hubs and the fact that giant models on them loomed over the pedestrians walking by. Dvir began documenting these billboards and the juxtaposition of huge fake humans and tiny real humans through his project titled "Coming Soon."

Slovenia photographer Matej Peljhan has a touching series of photographs titled The Little Prince, which stars a 12-year-old boy named Luka. The images show the boy exploring an imaginary world created by laying colored sheets and household objects on the ground. Peljhan created the images to give Luka the feeling of being able to do things he can't.

When the presidential election was looming on the horizon last year, photographer Ashley Pizzuti decided to shoot a project that had been brewing in her mind for some time. Titled "Vote for Chase," the series imagines what political campaign photographs would look like if innocent young children ran for president rather than weathered adult politicians.

For a long time, photographer Travis Lawton had been toying with two ideas: shooting film for the first time since he was 6 years old, and doing a 365 project where he shot something every day for a year. Instead of choosing one, he decided to mix the two desires into a project he felt he could realistically keep up with for an entire year; that's how he came up with Project OneRollFifty2.

Kate Seabrook is an entirely self-taught Australian photographer who fell in love with the art of picture taking after laying her hands on her first DSLR in 2009. For the next couple of years, she made a name for herself photographing Melbourne's underground music community, but when she moved to Berlin in late 2011, something entirely different caught her eye -- the U-Bahn system.

We've seen some strange photo projects in the past, but they're typically making a statement or serving some purpose. Haley Morris-Cafiero's photos of herself getting strange looks turned the tables on judging onlookers. Theron Humphrey's photos of his dog Maddie balancing on things across America allowed him to document his trip in an interesting way.

By his own admission, photographer Andrew McGibbon doesn't like using natural light. It's not that there's anything wrong with shooting natural light -- he's done it before when the situation called for it -- it's just that he prefers the wow factor that he knows he can get by experimenting with crazy lighting setups.

If you've always wanted to feast your eyes on the aurora borealis but haven't had the time or the money to travel to areas of the world where the light display occurs, photographer Göran Strand has a treat for you. He has created an immersive 360-degree panorama using time-lapse photographs shot during a particularly active aurora. The video lets you pan around in the scene, offering a small taste of what experiencing the northern lights feels like.

What do you get when you combine rock climbers, glow sticks, and long-exposure photographs? Answer: some pretty neat light painting pictures.

When BBC Future approached design company Conran with a challenge to "redesign any object," Senior Product Designer Jared Mankelow chose the camera. He believes that the form factor of our cameras hasn't kept pace with their function, and so his square creation harkens back to the film cameras of old, while simultaneously catapulting the camera into the future.

Red Bull Illume and Snap! Orlando recently came up with an awesome way to put a twist on the concept of light painting. They recruited light-painting photographer Patrick Rochon to photograph a team of wakeboarders who rode around with colorful lights strapped to their wakeboards!

Photographer Jeff Salvage and his wife Jennifer got married back in 2008 near a volcano crater on Easter Island. While they were there, Salvage had his new wife wear her wedding dress for three photo shoots in various locations and at various times. Those shoots sparked a photo project idea that would take the two on an adventure around the world.

The New York Daily News reports that an anonymous commuter has decided to improve his boring ride to work everyday in a very unique way: newspaper photobombs. The paper won't reveal who the photographer behind the pics is, but he or she has made quite a splash using forced perspective photography to make fellow commuters look downright hilarious.

Photographer Jacob Kedzierski first came up with the idea to create a street sign collage eight years ago while riding a bike around the streets of his hometown of North Tonawanda, NY. After completing that project and moving to New York City, the idea for a Manhattan version crossed his mind several times, but he was never ready to commit to the amount of work it would take to actually get it done.

Photographers Sean Lenz and Kristoffer Abildgaard of From the Lenz have come up with a brilliant light painting concept that produces gorgeous results. For their project titled Neon Luminance, they dropped glow sticks into waterfalls and then used long exposures to capture the bright and colorful trails as the sticks were carried down stream.

Did you know that it costs the US Mint 2 cents to produce every 1 cent coin due to the cost of materials and production? Countries such as Canada have already done away with their lowest denomination coins due to their costs and lack of usefulness.

Los Angeles-based photographer Johnny Tergo project "Passenger Side Window" is all about the art of the drive by shooting. The series was captured using a complicated camera rig Tergo built into the passenger seat of his Chevy Silverado.

Refractographs are photographs of the beautiful patterns formed when light reflects and refracts through an object. Stunning as they look, you would think that there was a lot of post processing or digital manipulation involved, but there's not, and in the above video, photographer Rob Turney gives you a step-by-step guide to taking them yourself.

A little while ago, we introduced you to photographer Ed Pingol's Cullinator, a Mac app that played nice with a PC gaming controller and helped you to significantly speed up your Lightroom workflow. As many of you pointed out, however, the Cullinator could easily be turned into a DIY project, and it looks like photographer Paul Snow of Photo Thoughts was listening.

Edith Widder is one of the three scientists that managed to capture the first high-resolution video footage of an actual giant squid. And about a month ago, her TED talk describing how she and her team did it (embedded above) was finally posted online.