We've shared several articles featuring the camera obscura and the many uses it has been put through over the years. From a roaming camera obscura used for photography workshops, to the possibility that some of painting's greatest names used them as an aid, the "technology" has really gotten around.
We’ve shared a few pretty cool cross-section light painting projects before, but none of them were ever very... shall we say... cheery. Both projects -- 21:31 and Andy Leach's hologram photo -- were created using the same eerie video of human slices from the Visible Human Project. But for those who wanted to toy around with cross-section light painting and re-creating 3D light objects in their photos, that’s all they had.
Part awesome party-trick, part brilliant idea, the new Cycloramic app from Egos Ventures is about the coolest thing you can get for one dollar on the iTunes app store at the moment. The app -- which will only work with the iPhone 5 -- triggers your phone's vibration at the exact right frequency to make it spin around in a perfect circle. Just stand your phone up, hit go, and keep an eye on your friend's faces (several reviewers called the reactions "priceless").
Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium are embarking on an interesting mission, and they need the help of willing photographers. What they're attempting to do is create a database of photos based on how they make the viewer feel. The project and website, dubbed Pictures With Feelings, can then be used to further our knowledge about human emotion and how specific moods come about. Where you folks come is in providing the most emotionally stimulating images buried in your archives.
We're not sure how many punk rock fans moonlight as photographers (or the other way around), but those who do may find the new CamCuff a tempting camera accessory. It's a fashion accessory wrist cuff that doubles as a camera strap for those of you who aren't big on the neck variety.
With Christmas just around the corner, here's a clever DIY craft idea for adding some photographic cheer to your gift giving this year: adorn your presents with gift bows made out of 35mm film strips.
Wet plate photographer Ian Ruhter has received a good deal of attention over the past year for using a custom camera van to create giant collodion process metal photos. When he's not turning large sheets of metal into photographs, he's sometimes working on the opposite side of the spectrum.
For their project 24x360, Patrick Rochon, Timecode Lab, and Eric Paré combined a 360-degree "bullet time" rig with light painting and produced some pretty sweet results. The short teaser above shows some of the pieces they created.
We've shared some interesting digital to analog conversions here in the past (e.g. printing iPhone photos using an enlarger), and here's another one: create a digital wet plate by shooting a photo displayed on your computer monitor.
Here's a slightly-oldie but a very-goodie: New York University photography professor Fred Ritchin gave this keynote address last year at the "What's Next?" event put on by Foam. He shares his thoughts on the past, present, and future of digital photography and how it impacts the world around us.
For their project "Museum Anatomy," Chiang Mai, Thailand-based artists Chadwick Gray and Laura Spector recreated and photographed old paintings from around the world on a human body instead of a canvas.
If the book Frankenstein were written about the subject of photography, then French photographer Grégoire Cheneau would be Victor Frankenstein and his Altered States portraits would be Frankenstein's monster(s). Upon first glance, many of the portraits seem to be harshly-lit shots of ordinary -- albeit strange looking -- people. Upon closer inspection, however, you start noticing that there's something off about them.
Check out this unique necklace created by artist Ashley Gilreath last year. Called "I Am Who They Were," the piece is designed to represent Gilreath's memories of climbing up the stairway in her grandparents' house -- a stairway lined with family photographs.
Canadian photographer François Brunelle is fascinated with the human face and the question of whether everyone has a doppelganger somewhere on Earth that looks exactly like them. For years now, he has been working on a project called I'm Not a Look-Alike!, which features portraits of people who look like identical twins but aren't actually related at all. Brunelle looks for subjects whose faces are so similar that their close friends might have trouble telling them apart.
When Quebec-based photographer Patrice Laroche and Sandra Denis found out they were to become parents, Larouche came up with a funny and clever way of documenting the 9-month journey of pregnancy. The photo project involved paying a visit to a local gas station at various points throughout the process, snapping photos to show exactly how their daughter Justine came into the world.
New York City gallery W/------ (pronounced "with") seems to think that art buying has gotten a bit snobby, and that photographers have gotten a bit used to having unlimited chances to capture the perfect shot. Enter their new Disposable Cameras project, currently on display at the NADA art fair in Miami through this weekend. If you visit W/------'s booth at the fair, you'll find a wall of 24 hanging disposable cameras, each with a very hefty price tag.
Bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin published an interesting thought to his blog yesterday that is very relevant to aspiring photographers. He writes, …
Custom photo frame maker Alphabet Photography has scored one of the first big viral marketing wins of this holiday season by releasing the creative video above a couple of weeks ago. In it, they play the popular Christmas tune Carol of the Bells using various objects inside the warehouse in which the company's photo frames are made.
Self-portraits snapped with an outstretched arm can be seen everywhere these days, from profile pictures on Facebook to filtered shots on Instagram. Among iconic historical photos? Not so much.
What defines a portrait? Is it still a portrait if the subject is present in the frame but hidden from the eye? If the answer is yes, then photographer Chris Buck has captured a series of unique celebrity portraits through his project titled Presence. If not, then each of the photographs simply shows a random scene.
After seeing an online tutorial on steel wool light painting, photographer Simon Berger found a friend to model for him and went out to try his hand at the technique. After some initial success, he started brainstorming creative ideas that he hadn't seen before. The result of the brainstorming was this stunning shot that makes the sparks from a burning piece of steel wool look like rain falling on an umbrella.
Check out this brilliant marketing idea: to promote its professional sling-style camera backpacks, Kata designed a carnival/arcade-style game called Shootout. It's live contest that has been held in various store locations and trade shows around the world. Basically, participants engage a virtual cowboy photographer in a duel. Once the timer starts, one must swing their camera bag around, "unholster it", and snap a photo of the screen. If the time captured in your photo is less than the time …
Check out this curious 25-second time-lapse/composite video that shows every airplane that landed at San Diego International Airport on Black Friday a week ago between 10:30am and 3pm. The giant planes whiz by overhead as if they're part of a fighter jet squadron heading off to battle -- not something you'd expect to see with commercial planes at an airport. It was created by photography and film professor Cy Kuckenbaker.
Here's a photo project so profound that it might make you weep (you might also cry for other reasons). Artist Will Vincent has a project titled "Two Thousand, One Hundred and Ninety One." His artist statement is a single sentence: "Every day for six years I took a photo of myself with the lense cap on."
Some photographers have made names for themselves by creating and photographing extremely detailed dioramas: miniature tabletop scenes that are so realistic that viewers often mistake them for the real world. Belgian photographers Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux of 354 Photographers have put an interesting spin on the diorama photo concept by Photoshopping real people into their miniature scenes. The series is titled "Box".
You know those Photoshopped optical illusions that involve combining two photos of a person's face -- one straight on and one looking to the side -- into a single bizarre shot? Quebec, Canada-based photographer Ulric Collette put a spin on that concept with his new portrait series titled "Facade." Instead of using negative space and two completely different angles, Collette had his subjects turn their heads slightly to the side for the second shot, and then merged the two photos together by …
Copenhagen, Denmark-based photographer Lukas Renlund recently came up with a neat way of drumming up some excitement over his photographs. He held a public photo exhibition called "Steal My Photograph!" that turned out to be possibly the world's shortest show. After hanging up 40 framed photographs on a wall outdoors, Renlund invited passersby to take any single photograph they desired, with one condition: they had to hang it up, photograph it, and then email the photo and description to …
During Halloween a month ago, we shared a simple portrait idea by photographer Nick Fancher that involved firing a flash through fog and a perforated hardboard for a backdrop filled with beams of light. Since that initial experiment, he has taken the concept and developed it even more.
Last week we issued a challenge asking readers to shoot a creative mirror self-portrait using an alternative style of photography. Reader Agustin Barrutia took us up on that challenge, and created a pair of wet plate photographs that take the concept of "mirror self-portrait" to a new level (they're unlike anything we've seen before). Both photographs are straight-out-of-camera wet plate photos that weren't manipulated digitally. Barrutia simply used "mirrors" (one doesn't involve a mirror, per …
After seeing the "woodenized" Canon F-1n that we featured earlier this month, Vancouver, Washington-based photographer Charlie Boucher decided that he wanted to give the mod a go. Unable to find any wood shoots locally, Boucher decided to go with a somewhat different (but slightly related) material: cork.
Tom Brinckman is a Belgian-based freelance photojournalist and wedding photographer. Since he works one deadline every week for his local newspaper, he's able to do most of his image editing work from his home office. Recently he decided to upgrade his workspace, and not just with new equipment or a new arrangement: he decided to put a good deal of effort into building a completely customized home office with an emphasis on functionality.
Stranger Tourist Self-Portraits is an experimental photo project by photographer Benoit Paillé that consists of photos of strangers encountered on a beach in Mexico. What's different about the series is that the photographs are captured by the subjects themselves, as evidenced by the remote shutter release cable seen approaching the camera from the strangers' hands.
Belgian-based photographer Frieke Janssens received quite a bit of attention last year for her portrait series showing young children smoking (don't worry, they were faked), and now he's back with another unsettling photography project. This latest one is titled, "Your Last Shot," and consists of portraits of people that will one day be used on their tombstones. Each one is captioned with a name, a birth date, and a dash leading to an unknown date. The photo above is captioned, "Marcia …
Metaphysics of an Urban Landscape is an ongoing series of photographs by Milan-based photographer Gabriele Croppi that features high-contrast, black-and-white photographs of major cities around the world. His images often feature a single subject illuminated by a slice of sunlight in front of a background filled with shadows and negative space. His photographs of New York City are especially striking, as a normally chaotic city is turned into a silent play of light and darkness.
In election exit polls, pollsters stand outside polling places and ask voters who they voted for in order to obtain an early indication of what the election results might be. During the 2012 presidential election yesterday, Aymann Ismail and Nate Cepis over at Animal New York decided to put a photographic twist on the concept. They write, …
When San Diego-based landscape photographer Ben Horne got married recently, he and his bride came up with an interesting way to document the wedding from their point-of-view without attracting attention or weird stares: a wedding bouquet camera.
Mobile operating systems have begun making their way into digital cameras, but so far their foray has been limited to compact and mirrorless cameras. However, DSLRs are starting to have built-in Wi-Fi, but it seems to be only a matter of time before a full-fledged mobile OS appears in one.
Photographing people on park benches is nothing new in photography, but photographers usually capture different people sitting on different benches. Ukrainian photographer Eugene Kotenko did something different: he spent four years documenting the life of a single park bench outside his house.
Check out this album cover portrait photo of the Belgian indie pop band SX, shot by photographer Benjamin Von Wong. While it looks appears to show the band standing in the ocean with the sun rising (or setting) in the background, it was actually shot in a much more controlled environment: a swimming pool.
Sometimes the best thing you can do to improve your photography is leave your camera at home.
Want to see an example of what dedication to a photography project looks like? Check out The Fortieth Parallel, an ongoing series by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photographer Bruce Myren. It's a set of photographs captured across the 40th degree of latitude across the United States, at every whole degree of longitude. See those markers on the Google Map above? Those are all the photo spots that Myren aims to photograph.
Shooting portraits of strangers in cars isn't uncommon, but have you ever tried using off-camera lighting to illuminate their faces? That's what photographer Jonathan Castillo is doing for his ongoing series called Car Culture.
Looking for a photo project to play around with this weekend? Try exploring a technique known as the Harris Shutter. Invented in the days of film photography by Robert Harris of Kodak, it involves capturing three sequential exposures of a scene through red, green, and blue filters, and then stacking the images into a single frame. This causes all the static elements within the scene to appear as they ordinarily would in a color photo, while all the moving elements in the shot show up in one of …
Here's a fun photo idea you might want to try out this Halloween: shoot epic portraits showing beams of light streaming in from the background. All you need are a perforated hardboard, a couple of flashes, and a fog/smoke machine (or some method of generating smoke).
Now here's a creative idea that we've never seen before... For this short film titled New York: Night and Day, New York City-based filmmaker and animator Philip Stockton blended daytime and nighttime images of his city into single shots. He explains, …
Check out this geeky Instagram-inspired Halloween costume created by photographer Eric Micotto. What's neat is that it actually "works" as a camera: it's powered by a Nikon D800 snapping photos through the "lens", and has an iPad on the back that acts as the camera's giant LCD screen. Subjects who have their photo taken by the costume can run around to the back to take a peek at how it turned out.
Earlier this year, we shared the photos of Tim Noble and Sue Webster, London-based artists who are well known for creating amazing shadows using piles of carefully arranged objects. Perhaps inspired by their work, photographer Julian Wolkenstein shot a clever series of photographs a couple of years ago that show three people contorting their bodies in various ways to create intricate shadows on the wall behind them. The project is titled, Nova.
Dissatisfied with the way your smartphone photographs are turning out when the built-in flash is fired? When desperate times call for desperate measures, you can make your flash match the ambient light around you with the help of a colored gel. The flash is often just a tiny LED, though, so how do you comfortably "mount" the gel to your smartphone? Reader Todd Glidden has an answer: use an index card.
"BYOB" is an initialism that's readily understood by college students who party. To artist Rafaël Rozendaal, however, it means something entirely different. In 2010, Rozendaal launched Bring Your Own Beamer, a series of novel "open source" art exhibitions in which participants were asked to bring their own beamers (AKA projectors). The recipe for the concept is extremely simple: find a venue with plenty of wall space (and outlets), invite a bunch of artists and art-lovers, and have images …
There have been a number of projects in the past that asked people to capture videos and photographs all over the world during a single day. Montblanc wants to take the idea one step further: the luxury company has launched a photo project called "Worldsecond" that aims to have all its participants capture photographs across the globe at the same moment in time.
