If you're looking for a bizarre photo concept to try out, and live in a cold snowy environment, look no further than Yorkshire, UK-based photographer Oliver Turpin's Snow Portraits project. Turpin shot a series of self-portraits, but instead of photographing his real face, he captured photos of imprints of his face in snow.
You might remember PermaGrin Films' Marc Donahue from his amazing "Dream Music: Part 2" lyric-lapse video that took 6 hours of work for every 3 seconds of footage. We even shared a behind the scenes look at how that time-lapse was put together, complete with deleted scenes and director commentary.
In December 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City featured an interactive art installation by Philip Worthington called "Shadow Monsters". The exhibit was created using a computer, a camera, two projectors, a light box, and some clever software. When visitors stepped in front of the light box, their shadows were magically transformed into creatures that were brought to life through sound and animation.
For her projects titled Égarements and Quotidien, French photographer Cerise Doucède creates elaborate scenes by hanging objects from the ceiling, creating swarms that look computer generated but aren't.
The Brazilian advertising agency Y&R recently came up with an extremely clever series of photographs for Colgate to promote the company's line of Total dental floss. Check out the three couple portraits in the post and see how quickly your eye is drawn to the weirdness.
This is probably the most beautiful video you'll see today, this week, and perhaps even this year. Titled "Full Moon Silhouettes," it's a real-time video captured by photographer Mark Gee at Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, New Zealand. Gee writes,
Mother + Daughter is an ongoing series of portraits by North Carolina-based photographer Carra Sykes. Each diptych features one portrait of Sykes and one portrait of her mother, with both women wearing the same clothes and holding the same pose.
Professor Isao Echizen from Tokyo's National Institute of Informatics seems to think that photography and facial tagging are infringing a bit too eagerly on your privacy. So, in a bid to avoid being surveyed (perhaps by the all-seeing eye of the ARGUS-IS) he's designed a pair of anti-photography glasses.
Here's an interesting photo project idea by Matthew, who tells us that the top photo shows him being held by his father when he was 7 months old, and the bottom photo shows him holding his own 7-month-old son.
Photographer Caleb Charland is an artist who perpetually thinks outside the box for his photo concepts. In the past we've featured experiments that include a 14-hour exposure of a lightbulb powered by an orange and using scientific principles for creative images.
Photographer and photography professor Kerry Skarbakka photographs himself falling. The concept sounds simple and straightforward enough, but when you lay eyes on the photographs themselves, you find yourself worrying about Skarbakka health... and sanity.
Strange Fruits is a series of clever conceptual photographs by German photographer Sarah Illenberger. Each photo shows a common fruit or vegetable that has been arranged to look like some other object or material.
After taking a pinhole workshop taught by renowned pinhole photographer Justin Quinnell, UK photog Matt Bigwood was inspired to start an interesting pinhole project of his own. Thus was born the six-month long exposure you see above, taken using a pinhole camera made from a beer can, some gaffer tape, and a sheet of 5”x7” black and white photographic paper.
For his project Presidial.org, Chicago-based artist Jeremy Tubbs collected random news photographs of Barack Obama captured between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2012, aligned them, and then turned them into the above time-lapse video. The 2,500+ photographs were scraped from various online sources and are arranged in chronological order.
We've seen a lot of gimmicks when it comes to selling cameras. Especially where point-and-shoots are concerned, gimmicky features have become standard over the past few years as part of the war on smartphones. But this has to be one of most interesting: a special edition camera with the sole purpose of inserting Japanese anime characters into your pictures.
It's been a while since we've shared some DigitalRev tomfoolery, but the most recent question posed by Kai and his buddies is an interesting one: given how expensive "entry-level" full-frame DSLRs are, would a dirt cheap 35mm SLR be a realistic alternative?
We don't feature a lot of tripods on PetaPixel because, frankly, once you've seen one you've just about seen them all. That's not to say that tripods don't vary hugely in both build quality and functionality, just that it doesn't really make headlines when Manfrotto comes out with their newest model.
A time-lapse of the aurora borealis captured from several different locations throughout Iceland would be a good enough way to start off your Saturday, but MIT neuroscientist Alex Rivest's time-lapse from a few months ago takes it one step further.
Since June 19th of last year, political activist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Although Ecuador has granted him political asylum, if he steps foot outside the embassy, he could be arrested, extradited to the United States, and tried for his role in leaking sensitive US diplomatic cables.
What are the most popular photo subjects in each location of your city? Is there any easy way of finding out? Those are questions UC Berkeley researcher Alexander Dunkel is trying to answer, and he has his sights set on Flickr as a possible solution. By combining the location geotags and context tags attached to many (or most) of the service's photos, Dunkel is able to create tag cloud-style maps of any location that reveals the tags that dominate each location.
Have you ever considered adding a prism to your camera bag? Washington DC-based wedding photographer Sam Hurd has done quite a bit of experimentation using an equilateral prism -- the kind used in schools to teach properties of light -- to add special effects to his photographs. The results are pretty interesting.
The short 1-minute video above is a beautiful time-lapse showing a train ride in Norway that spans not just distance, but seasons. It was created by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, which recorded the exact same scenic 453-mile journey from Trondheim to Bodø in each of the seasons. The footage was then synchronized to show the same location at each time, and then made to transition from one to another in a seamless fashion.
Lomography (the movement) has been called many things, including "analog Instagram;" but regardless of how you feel about the movement or the company that bears its name, it seems that Lomography (the company) has been one of the driving forces keeping film photography alive and interesting for the masses.
Businesses aimed at dealing with an increasingly digital photography world are popping up all the time. Beyond just retro photography apps and lo-fi attachments that make it seem like you're shooting with an old camera, the problem now becomes how to prevent those photos from disappearing into binary oblivion.
Leading up to the 2004 Olympics, before Michael Phelps was quite as big a deal as he turned out to be, photographer Greg Heisler had the opportunity to shoot him for the cover of Time magazine. He initially planned to photograph Phelps at the Stanford pool where he was training, only to find out that it was too close to the Olympics and that wasn't an option.
Here's an interesting idea/experiment put together by Adrià Navarro and DI Shin that takes photographing your daily life to a whole new level. Fair warning, if you think that taking pictures of your breakfast or your night out bowling is overkill, you should probably stop reading now...
Google has been working some time now on a camera-equipped device that's worn over (or above) the eye. Olympus has something similar going on, but instead of a full-fledged camera, their device only serves as an external viewfinder for a separate digital camera.
New York Philharmonic trombonist David Finlayson scored an viral Internet hit earlier this month after attaching a GoPro camera to his instrument's slide and then capturing quirky footage with the setup.
For the past five years, photographer Amy Stein has been driving across America and capturing portraits random strangers who are stranded on the side of the road after having their cars break down. She often drives on freeways hours upon hours before coming upon a new subject for the series.
Lifehacker featured a great tip today courtesy of Redditor lifedeathandtech that'll help you avoid scams when you take your chances buying camera equipment from sites like Craigslist. When you see a listing that seems suspicious, or you get an e-mail reply that seems a bit automated, plug the post's photos into Google Images and see if they're being used elsewhere.
To make the point that Garnier Fructis' hair products are great for both women and men, advertising agency Publicis teamed up with photographers Billy & Hells for a series of creative advertising photographs.
Here's a creative project by visual artist Andrew Knapp and his puppy (all dogs are puppies... no matter how old) Momo. Remember those 'Where's Waldo' books that used to keep you unendingly entertained and frustrated in the waiting room of your local doctors office as a kid?
Getting noticed for quality landscape and wildlife photography is difficult enough, but try doing it on an iPhone. That's what photographer Kevin Russ has been doing, traveling the great American West and capturing stunning photos using nothing more than an iPhone 4S and 5.
For a fleeting, wonderful moment, it seemed that all of our Instagram popularity dreams were coming true. Released two days ago, the app Firegram used some automatic magic to get your photos way more attention than they would ever have gotten on their own. When Roi Carthy of TechCrunch tried it out on one of his photos he got a whopping 56 likes (%1500 increase) in no time.
For his project "Trace Heavens," James Nizam found an abandoned property in Delta, Canada, and, with the government's permission, sliced gaps and holes into a couple of the rooms. He then allowed sunlight to stream into the space in the middle of the day, and then used small mirrors attached to ball joints in order to direct the light beam around the room in various patterns.
Want to know how much film you and your camera are chewing through? John Sypal over at tokyo camera style does this by collecting box tabs. Regarding the photos above, he writes, …
Every so often, we come across a creative video created by someone who decided to mount his or her camera to somewhere or something strange. Examples include a wedding bouquet, inside an underwater torpedo, on the back of a corgi, on a stick, and on a sword.
There's no end to the fun and creativity you can pour into a great light painting session. And the more techniques you have in your photographer's utility belt the more interesting and professional your light painting can become.
Photographer John Deprisco of Deprisco Photo has put together two fairly unrelated things and, as a result, created something pretty cool. By combining his love of old, run-down VW buses and the tradition photo booth, he's created the Photo Bus, a rentable photo booth on wheels -- available for whatever soiree you're planning to host next.
Photographer Wendi Riggens has been receiving a good deal of attention in social media channels for her recent photo shoot of a 9-month-old girl, Miss Maddie. It was a fairy tale-themed shoot, with Maddie wearing the outfits of characters from famous Disney movies, including Cinderella, Alice, Wendy, and Snow White. The series is titled, "Once Upon a Time."
We've been seeing more and more of this concept lately, but this one is still nicely done: Springfield, Missouri-based photographer Kent Frost created this 6.5-minute recap of his life in 2012 using one second of footage recorded each day. It's titled, "Just a Second."
For his project "Un printemps à New York," photographer Fred Lebain visited and photographed various locations around New York City. He then printed the images as poster-sized prints, revisited those locations, and shot new photographs with the old prints blended into the new scenes.
Motion image photography is a new name for an old concept: pulling stills from video. In fact, famed headshot photographer Peter Hurley took a stab at it last year, pinning the 5K Red Epic against his Hasselblad to see if he could recreate his work in video. The issue there, even ignoring price, was that the sheer size of the Red Epic makes it far too bulky for anything but studio work.
If you ever have enough patience and dedication to capture one photograph of something each day for an entire year, you should think about creating a collage with the photos once the project is completed. Tiffany Yung snapped photos of breakfasts she ate during 2012 and then created this photo collage once the year was over. She writes, …
Here's a dash of creativity to get your brain juices going today: Melbourne, Australia-based aspiring filmmaker Julian Tay recorded footage of the fireworks display his city put on a couple of nights ago, and then decided to experiment with the video. He writes, …
Here's an interesting idea to try: if you ever find yourself shooting fireworks and it starts to lightly drizzle, keep on shooting instead of putting your camera away. The tiny drops of rain that fall on your lens can add some bokeh to your shot!
For a New Year's greeting ecard this year, Paris-based photographer Noël Bourcier decided to put his camera equipment to good use, but not in the way you'd expect. He gathered up some of the camera equipment at the EFET School's photography program, recruited a couple of photography students, and turned the equipment into the simple stop-motion ecard seen above.
Photographer and photography student Eric Omori has an interesting project that combines the modern with the historical. He has been capturing paintball wars using wet plate photography. The project is titled Weekend Warriors.
One method for capturing "multiple exposure" photographs is to shoot a long exposure photograph of a scene with your camera pointed in different directions while the shutter is open. Photographer Nicolas Ruel uses this concept in an ambitious project that has taken him around the world. Titled 8 Seconds, the series features famous cities around the world (e.g. New York City, Tokyo, Beijing, Barcelona) captured in surreal multi-exposure photographs.
Emio Tomeoni often plays with his toddler son Xavier while his wife Stephanie is at work, due to her often irregular hours. Recently, he decided that instead of simply telling his wife what transpired over the course of a day, he would show her through pictures -- many, many pictures.
