Ideas

Andy Prokh of Saint Petersburg, Russia spends his days working as an economist, but its his passion for photography that has garnered him international attention on the Internet as of late. Prokh has been shooting photographs of his four year old daughter Catherine spending time with his six-year-old British shorthaired tomcat Lilu. The photographs capture the friendship the two family members have after having spent most of their lives together under one roof.

In an article on TechHive about the new HTC One, HTC's director of special projects Symon Whitehorn uses an analogy that we've never heard before. In a bid to explain why the 4 million ultrapixels on the HTC One's sensor are better than 8 million regular pixels on the HTC One X's, he likened pixels to buckets, and photons to rain.

Recently published patent applications filed by Nikon offer a glimpse into what the company may be working on for future DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. The three technologies spotted are: illuminated lens mounts, dual lens contacts, and a hybrid viewfinder.

For recent Whiskas advertising campaign based around the slogan "Feeding your cat's instincts," photographer George Logan and retoucher Tony Swinney teamed up to create a series of clever photographs showing tiny, domestic house cats engaging in "big cat" activities out in the wild. "Big Cat, Small Cat" is the name of the series.

The Mask Series is a collaboration between wet plate photographers around the world who are trying to raise public awareness of the historical photographic process that they're so passionate about. The whole thing is centered around a specific prop: a vintage Czech M10 gas mask. Basically, every photograph contributed to the project must somehow incorporate one of these gas masks in one way or another.

Check out this quirky photo project by photographer Fabien Nissels titled Blocks. Nissels first photographed his friend Johan in a studio from four different directions for each part of his body (i.e. head, arms, torso, waist, legs). They then printed out the photographs and fixed them onto styrofoam blocks, placed the blocks in various locations and in different arrangements, and re-photographed Johan as a block dude.

The 2013 Major League Baseball season kicked off this past weekend to the delight of fans of the sport across the US and across the world. Photographer Don Hamerman hasn't attended a ball game in over a decade, but he has a photo project that baseball enthusiasts may find quite interesting. It's a series titled Baseballs that shows off the beauty and diversity of found baseballs that were discarded after their usefulness was gone.

Photographer Paul Octavious has collected a number of vintage cameras over the years, with some of them handed down to him by his grandfather. One day a house in his neighborhood had an estate sale for an old man that had recently passed away. When Octavious paid the big house a visit, he found that the man was a taxidermist with a large collection of stuffed birds and bird wings.

Back in April of last year, we featured an interesting project by photographer Tanja Hollander. Dubbed The Facebook Portrait Project, Hollander has spent the last year travelling around the world and taking portraits of all her Facebook friends. The project's motivation was half photographical and half philosophical, an exploration of the definition of "true" friendship that Hollander is still in the midst of today.

In 2010, photographer Seth Taras created a series of photographs for a worldwide marketing campaign for the History Channel with the message "Know Where You Stand." The photographer shot photos at locations around the world where major historical events happened, and then blended old photos showing those events from the same perspective. It's the same "then and now" concept that has become quite popular over the past few years.

Directors Ian & Cooper created this clever music video for the song "Back to Me" by Joel Compass using cinemagraph-style shots. Each scene is a strange fusion of motion picture and still photography, as some areas look like a photograph, while other portions look like video footage. If you're not familiar with the term "cinemagraph," check out other examples of the technique we've featured in the past.

Norwegian artist and photographer Ida Skivenes has made a name for herself on Instagram for her playful photographs of food. While most people may attempt to make their food look photogenic and/or appetizing in photographs, Skivenes chooses to go a different route: she views her plate as a canvas and her food as her medium. Skivenes regularly creates artworks on her plates using her foods.

Social photo sharing, especially where location services are involved, is tricky. As we saw with the Color app debacle, privacy concerns rule all and no amount of pre-release hype and funding can overcome those. Still, as TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler said on his blog, "a killer social photo album service" should exist, and Albumatic is making a bid for that designation.

Photographer Alexandra Sandu is on a mission with her photos: she wants to put a smile on people's faces and make people who see her images feel good about their lives. Since September 2009, Sandu has been working on a portrait series titled Daydreamers.

Photographer Benjamin Von Wong likes to push the boundaries of what he does, and lately that pushing has involved playing with fire ... literally. It seems he's taken a liking to working with pyrotechnicians and creating out of this world long exposures doing it, so after a speaking engagement in November of last year, Von Wong put together an open photo shoot with pyrotechnician Andrey DAS and fashion designer Virginie Marcerou.

Zoe Spawton earns a living working as a waitress in Berlin. While setting up the restaurant's sidewalk furniture at 9am, the 29-year-old Australian photographer regularly encounters Ali, an 83-year-old man who always seems to dress fashionably and obviously takes great pride in his appearance.

There's a humorous new photography meme emerging from Japan. Students in the country are shooting photos that look like they're 'Kamehameha' scenes from the popular manga and anime franchise Dragon Ball.

Check out this one-of-a-kind music video for the song "Could Be Me" by the band Gunnar and The Grizzly Boys. The video is titled "Redneck Country Band Ambushes Google Street View Car!," and appears to be a music video shot entirely through the cameras of Google's Street View cars.

South African photographer Anthea Pokroy is a self-proclaimed "ginger," and has been on a mission to photograph other redheaded people in order to create a series of images about identity, prejudice, racial classification, segregation, and elitism.

Photographer David Orias of Santa Barbara, California photographs waves with a slow shutter speed, capturing their movement, color, and power as they roll in from the Pacific Ocean.

A neat way to capture the passage of time is to photograph one scene multiple times throughout a day, slice up the resulting photos, and then combine them into a single composite image showing all the different hours as slices. In the past we've shown examples of this technique done in cities and with sunsets.

Photographer Ernie Button has a unique project called Vanishing Spirits in which he photographs the bottom of Scotch glasses once the whisky has evaporated way. The residue creates textures and colors that make the photographs look as though they're images of otherworldly planets.

Did you know Instagram's mobile app can be used to view movies? Okay, okay, you won't be able to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster on it, but it's possible to enjoy glimpses of old school silent films.

Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!

By all accounts, a job at one of the major tech or social giants is to be envied. With atmospheres focused on camaraderie and innovation, you would expect that working for Google or Twitter would be pretty fun -- and now Twitter has the office cam to prove it.

I'm Google is an interesting Tumblr blog started in 2011 by Baltimore-based artist Dina Kelberman. It's a running blog collage comprising Google Image Search photographs and YouTube videos. Kelberman writes that the content is compiled into a "long stream-of-consciousness": as you scroll down through the seemingly-never-ending flow of imagery, you'll notice that the sections of similar images flow seamlessly from one to another based on form, composition, color, and theme.

French photographer Julien Mauve has always been fascinated by light, and his project "After Lights Out" is an interesting study of the subject. The series is based on a simple idea: what would it look like if darkness overtook our world, and only a single source of light were present to pierce the darkness? …

Hunger Pains is a very... different series of portraits by NYC-based photographer Ted Sabarese. For each of the photographs, Sabarese asked his model one simple question: "What are you craving at the moment?" He then took the food described, had them turned into clothing items, and photographed the models wearing the things they'd like to eat.

For his most recent project, French photography collector and editor Thomas Sauvin has been spending his time digging though illegal silver recycling centers in Beijing. He's doing this because buried within piles of X-Rays and CD-ROMs are hidden millions of discarded film negatives that Sauvin is intent on preserving.

Faced with another birthday party at Chuck E Cheese, a place my daughter loves but low ISOs do not, I decided to get creative. I shot a collection of photos with a set of three Yongnuo YN-560 and YN-560 II flashes with a diffuser cap/"omni bounce" inside of small lampshades placed along the table.

For its H5D ad campaign, Hasselblad approached underwater photographer Henrik Sorensen, knowing that he would put together something worthwhile. What he came up with is a "twisted take" on Denmark as a fairytale country that he's calling "Not Just a Fairytale," and the above video takes us behind the scenes at the underwater shoot.

One of the interesting ideas involving slow motion cameras (i.e. high speed cameras) is to move the camera very quickly during shots, resulting in footage that looks like the camera is moving in real time while everything in the shot moves in slow motion. Last year we shared an incredible demo reel by German studio The Marmalade, which uses this technique.

Jeffrey Milstein has two huge passions: photography and aviation. For his project Aircraft: The Jet as Art, Milstein visited airport runways between 2005 and 2009 and created large-scale photos of various aircraft at the precise moment they passed directly overhead.

If you enjoyed that backwards stroll through Jerusalem we shared a few days ago, you've got to check out this backwards video created by high school students in Taiwan. It's a four minute stroll through the school grounds at the National Miaoli Senior High School, with students doing all kinds of things that look awesome when reversed.

If you had to quickly flee both your home and country, what one possession would you make sure you take with you? It's a question that reveals a lot about your life and values, and, unfortunately, is one that many people around the world actually have to answer.

Photographer Noah Kalina's Everyday project features one photo of his face every day, and has been running since January 11, 2000. Kalina uploaded time-lapse videos created using the photos in 2006 and 2012, and both videos quickly went viral online. Not only did they amass millions of views, but they sparked a new phenomenon as well, as people around the world started snapping daily photos of their own faces and uploading similar videos to the web.

Have a cute baby photograph from shortly after you first entered this world? New York City resident Molly Thomas wants to rephotograph it. Thomas has been running a humorous photo blog titled "My Precious Roommate." Each entry features a photo of a baby submitted by readers and a photo by Thomas that recreates the submitted image with the baby replaced by Thomas' roommate -- a fully grown man.

One of the problems photographers face today is explaining to clients why it's worth it to pay a professional to do a job the client often feels they can do themselves. And while people familiar with photography can immediately give a plethora of reasons why an entry-level DSLR in an layman's hands is NOT the same as hiring a professional, clients often don't get it.

Photographer Nick Fancher tells us that he recently came up with an interesting way of customizing the catch light in subjects' eyes. If, in your portraiture, you place white or black foam boards to control the amount and direction of bounce light, you can also use white and black gaffers tape to control what goes on in your subjects' eyeballs!

Messe Kopp sent us this awesome and mind-bending video he shot on the streets of Downtown Jerusalem. It it's a backward-is-forward video that shows a man getting up from bed and taking a stroll down a city street, interacting with various people and objects along the way. The entire 2.5-minute video was shot in a single take.

Japanese photographer Satoki Nagata moved to Chicago in 1992 to document the city and its people. His background is in neuroscience (he has a PhD in the field), but his passion is creating intimate documentary photography projects in his city.

Canon is planning to hold a product launch press conference on March 22, 2013, and it's letting various media outlets know by sending them slick black boxes with silver pens. Wait, what? Pens? Yup, and they're not just your everyday pen: Canon's invite pens contain a secret message in a manner worthy of a secret agent.

Swiss photographers Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (yes, the ones who created a large format camera out of books) have a clever series of photos that uses wooden beams to play around with a few things photographers often think about: lines, angles, and perspective.

Clothing and cute pets are two subjects that have big followings online. Combine them, and you've got yourself something viral. Dave Fung and Yena Kim of New York City have brewed up a fun photo project that's quickly gaining a lot of attention. It's called Menswear Dog, and is what you might get if you combined The Sartorialist with a dog blog.

Most high-end digital cameras (not named Ricoh) aren't designed to be modular. If you want a new sensor in your camera, you'll need to buy an entirely new camera. Want to use a different lens system? You're out of luck.

Stephanie and her husband Jonathan are huge fans of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. When the two got engaged and married in 2011 and 2012, respectively, they decided to use the comic as their theme for both their engagement photo shoot and their wedding. To capture the images, they recruited San Francisco-based photographer Junshien of Junshien International.

Photoshop wizard Cristian Girotto's photo series L'Enfant Extérieur (the outer child) takes his subjects' inner children and brings them, quite literally, to the surface. In the series, Girotto explores what adults would look like if men and women never left the cuteness of infancy -- at least in some respects. Each photo, originally captured by photographer Quentin Curtat, shows the subject 'shopped to look like a toddler.

Nancy Rose is a guidance counselor who lives on Canada's east coast. When she's not meeting up with people who need counseling, Rose enjoys spending time with a very special group of furry friends: squirrels that call Rose's backyard their home.

Dutch photographers Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren live in London and Beijing, and work together on photo projects as a duo known as WassinkLundgren. One of their collaborations is a set of street photographs shot on the sidewalks of Tokyo, Japan in 2009 and 2010. Titled Tokyo Tokyo, each of the pieces is a diptych showing the same "decisive moment" shot by both photographers at the same moment in time, and then arranged side by side.

Gigapixel photography has become all the rage as of late, as photographers around the world are using special rigs to shoot numerous photos of a scene and then stitching them together into an uber-high-res panorama. Austrian photographer Kurt Hoerbst is taking the high-res photo-stitching concept and applying it to a different subject: human subjects.