Ideas

Combining light painting with sports that involve long fluid motion is a match made in photography heaven that companies like Red Bull have already taken advantage of to create some pretty spectacular shots.

Photographers Joanna Jaskólska and Zach Ancell both had similar ideas, and their resulting photo series -- Breakdance Baby! and Trajectory -- are both unique examples of the awesome photography you can create when you mix dance, athletics and light painting.

Public Lab, also known as the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, is all about creating affordable, DIY versions of expensive scientific equipment. In the past, we covered Public Lab's work creating a balloon mapping toolkit that allowed anyone and everyone to take and add user-created weather balloon imagery to Google Earth's repertoire.

For their most recent project, they're bringing things a little closer to the ground. This time, the folks at Public Lab are photographing the secret internal life of plants using an extremely affordable near-infrared camera they've designed.

Photographer Glyn Dewis shared this cool little technique that lets you work with a black background even if you don't have an actual backdrop with you. It's a fairly common trick that he refers to as "the invisible black background," and it's a nifty little tip that many photographers may want to keep up their sleeve.

When Wellington, New Zealand-based photographer Brady Dyer proposed to his then-girlfriend Emma in …

When New York City-based photographer Jerrit Pruyn recently asked his girlfriend of 2 years to marry him, he did so in quite a photo-tastic way. Pruyn popped the question through the viewfinder of his old vintage SLR!

Here's a fun wedding photo idea we've never seen before: dinosaur photobombing. Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based wedding photographer Quinn Miller created the photograph above this past weekend showing a hungry (and massive) T-Rex chasing after a bridal party that's running for its life.

Perhaps best described as mesmerizing, Turkish photographer and artist Erdal Inci has created an interesting set of animated loops in GIF form that has the web abuzz.

The effects, which are done by cloning sections of footage of a moving subject within a static setting, provide for hypnotic never-ending animations in rather banal locations.

We've featured the work of Eric Paré, Patrick Rochon and Timecode Lab before. Using a 24 DSLR fully circular bullet time rig developed by Rochon, Paré and Timecode put together some really cool light-painting projects. One of these was LightSpin: an art project that captured dancers using an awe-inspiring combination of light painting, bullet time and stop motion.

In the past we had only a few behind the scenes details to share with you. Fortunately, Paré recently decided to release the 8 minute "documentary" above in order to explain exactly what all goes into shooting his creations.

When Toronto-based photo enthusiast Alexander Kolomietz had a birthday party recently, he asked …

Photographer David Emitt Adams experiments with unique metal bases in his experiments with tintype photography. Last week we shared a project in which he used abandoned tin cans found in a desert to create tintype photographs.

36 Exposures is another project of his that uses unconventional materials for creating old school photos. It's a series of tintype photographs that were created using 35mm film canisters.

Australian engineer turned photographer Steve Back has been working for several years to put together the completely un-edited images you see here. Although they may seem like abstract art you might find on a museum wall, they're actually aerial photos of Kalbarri, Western Australia's Hutt Lagoon, the world's largest Beta Carotene farm.

What you see above is a "map" of Paris created by collaging thousands of photographs shot in the city. It's just one of the amazing pieces in Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino's Diorama Map project. The series contains maps of many of the world's most famous cities, and all of them are photographed and collaged by hand.

Want to have some fun as you're learning how to use Photoshop for image editing? Try creating a "Photoshop Chimera." In Greek mythology, the Chimera was a monstrous creature composed of three different animals: the lion, snake, and goat. The term "chimera" has since come to describe any imaginary creature that's the mashup of two or more real animals.

Reddit user Arne Olav has attracted some attention as of late for his humorous chimeras created by compositing two different photographs of animals.

We've featured quite a few "bullet time" projects in the past that involve freezing time using rigs of tens or hundreds of cameras, but have you ever seen the technique done with pinhole cameras? That's what you'll see in the music video shown above. It's for the song "Wasting My Young Years" by London Grammar.

Claudia Nallely Agres works as a bridal model for a living, but she hasn't yet had the joy of being a bride in a wedding of her own. Wedding photographer Ryan Brenizer wanted to change that, so he recently held a special photo shoot for Agres that resulted in some beautiful and unusual bridal portraits.

There's no shortage of interesting work coming from Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun of Seoul, South Korea. Yesterday we posted an interesting body of work that employed the use of computer algorithms to detect facial structures in the clouds above. The duo has another project that caught our eye: one that shares a representation of the four seasons -- with a twist.

As humans, it's only natural to take a look at the sky and perceive to see an object, a face, an animal. Computers, too, are capable of this perception. However, they may be capable of finding things that the human eye can't, or just might not notice.

In a project called "Cloud Face", Seoul, South Korea-based Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun of aptly-named 'Shinseungback Kimyonghun' have pointed cameras up at the sky and let complex algorithms detect faces in the passing clouds.

Need a chuckle? Look no further than the latest bizarre photo fad to sweep across the Internet. Called "Cat Beard," the meme involves shooting a self-portrait with your face above a cat's head. If you can nail the right perspective, you get a humorous photograph that looks like you have a strange beard covering your face (and a frown as well).

Using discarded tin cans found on the hot Arizona desert ground, David Emitt Adams has created timeless pieces he calls Conversations with History. The cans are branded with tintype pictures, reflecting ties to the very locations the cans -- some of which have been sitting out in the sun for over forty years -- were found.

In the words of Adams, "The deserts of the West also have special significance in the history of photography. I have explored this landscape with an awareness of the photographers who have come before me, and this awareness has led me to pay close attention to the traces left behind by others."

Here's an interesting concept! Jiho Jang, a student, has come up with Polaroid-like instant camera, dubbed GIFTY, that captures short clips and prints them out. According to Jang, it was put together as part of his college thesis.

Wait -- printing out a video? What's next? A GIF with sound? The concept involves first capturing a small clip (the camera prototype includes a timer). Thereafter, the camera will print each frame, at which point in time you can tear each frame apart to create the flip-book. By the looks of it, the concept includes a page holder of some sort, so you don't easily lose frames. So there you have it, a GIF on-the-go. Sound not included.

A bit of clever thinking from San Francisco Instructables member Amanda Ghassei has produced some really creative 3D-printed images from nothing but old photographs.

Printed using an Objet Connex 500, Ghassei's creations are still meant to be viewed in 2D, but are textured to create an interesting silhouette effect.

In order to properly view them, they must be backlit with a diffuse light. Images used for printing were first converted to black and white, and according to Ghassei, "each individual greyscale pixel value of an image to thickness," which effectively allows for the printing of any greyscale image.

Sometimes it's the simplest ideas that end up leaving an impression on people and inspiring them. Case in point: Astana, Kazakhstan-based photographer Timur Zhansultanov has created a project he's called "In My Own Eyes", which features pictures of himself from — well — his own eyes in the past two-or-so years.

Colorful and unusual patterns pictures are what photographer Erno-Erik Raitanen calls self-portraits. The pictures, which Raitanen says are more like photograms, involve no camera, some photographic film, and bacteria.

The series, called Bacteriograms, is a display of Raitanen's own body bacteria cultivated on the gelatin surface of film negatives, much like bacteria is grown in Petri dishes in a laboratory setting.

Check out the picture above. Pretty cool, huh? Well, to make photos like this you can use a special technique. It wasn’t invented by me, but by a Bay Area photographer named Scott Jarvie. It's a pretty eye catching way to take portrait photos, and here's an introduction to how it's done.

For her series of Photoshopped images titled "The Real Life Models," 19-year-old Hungarian photographer Flora Borsi created a set of heavily post-processed self-portraits that imagine what real life models of strange abstract paintings would have looked like.

Photographer Nolan Conway's project Happy Meals is all about finding unique people in one of the world's most commonplace locations on earth: McDonald's restaurants. With his camera in tow, he has visited 150 McDonald's in 22 states, photographing some 180 patrons in the process.

Portugal’s Krypton Films, in collaboration with production company Moonlighting and marine support company Frog Squad, recently succeeded in filming what they claim to be South Africa's first ever underwater time slice for an Aqua Das Pedras mineral water commercial.

With the help of food stylist Charlotte Omnes, New York still life and food photographer Beth Galton put together an interesting series of photos that shows what prepared and packaged foods look like in cross section.

AlmapBBDO, the ad agency behind the touching Getty ad "From Love to Bingo," are at it again. Last time they spent six months picking 873 stock photos out of 5,000+ options to create an award-winning one minute video.

This time Getty asked them to do the same thing, only using the agency's massive video archive instead. The resulting video is, dare we say, even better than the "Love to Bingo" ad.

Late last year, we introduced you to NYC-based photographer Jordan Matter's viral photo series Dancers Among Us, a set of photos that depicted professional dancers performing difficult dance moves in everyday life situations.

Many people fell in love with that photo series, and two of those people are college sweethearts Betsy and Peter, the latter of which recently put together an awesome Dancers Among Us proposal with some help from Matter himself.