Inspiration

If you ever need some encouragement for sticking with photography when times get tough, you should read about the adventures of Frank Hurley. Born in Australia in 1885, he took up photography as a young man and eventually became skilled enough to be selected as the official photographer for multiple expeditions to Antarctica and for the Australian military in both world wars. Among his many photographic escapades, one stands out from among the rest: being stranded in the Antarctic for nearly two years.

We've shared examples of stereographic projection (AKA "little planet") photography here before, but none quite like these. Sydney-based visual artist Catherine Nelson creates some of the most amazing "planets" we've seen by stitching together hundreds of individual photographs. Trained as a painter and having worked on feature films like Moulin Rouge and Harry Potter, she uses her visual effects expertise to combine the images in creative and surreal ways.

Artist Federico Pietrella has a clever and impressive way of "printing" his photographs. After selecting one he wants to use, Pietrella recreates it by hand using nothing but a date stamp and ink. Pointillism is usually done with distinct dots, but each of Pietrella's dots are a short row of numbers indicating the current date.

As President Obama’s four-year term in office comes to an end, TIME magazine caught up with his official photographer …

Using expired film is pretty common among analog photographers, but have you heard of anyone using expired photo paper... from over a century ago? That's what artist Alison Rossiter does. For her project "Lost and Found", she collected hundreds of sheets of expired photo paper from decades past -- some more than 100 years older than the expiration date found on their packages -- and then developed them to uncover abstract images.

About a year ago, we shared a creative stop-motion video by Eran Amir that involved 500 different volunteers holding 1,500 individual photographs in order to create an animation. That video has amassed over 1.5 million views since then. It appears that Amir has a magical touch when it comes to viral web videos, because now he's back with another video that's going viral -- one that's also related to photography in an unusual way.

Spanish photographer Marc Vicens wanted to capture the stress and pain of the ongoing economic crisis, so he found a bunch of unemployed people and asked them to hang upside-down for right-side-up portraits. His goal of the series, titled "Hanging," was to creatively portray the feeling of anxiety that dominates the daily life of these individuals.

Here's a thought-provoking video making the rounds online -- one that you might want to watch if you love photography and have been thinking hard about your career path. It's based on a lecture given decades ago by philosopher Alan Watts, who poses the question, "What would you like to do if money were no object?"

We're getting to the point at which photographers can buy fancy aerial drones without having to sell a kidney. You've probably already seen photos and videos shot from camera-equipped radio-controlled helicopters before, but did you know that the camera's view can be beamed to a pair of goggles, allowing the photographer to be immersed in a first-person-view of what he or she is shooting?

Seattle-based photographer Bill Finger creates and photographs amazingly realistic small scale dioramas showing various imaginary locations. The things contained in each miniature model are 1/6th to 1/12th the size of their real world counterparts. Finger builds each of the dioramas while looking through his camera's viewfinder, which ensures that everything he constructs conforms nicely to the perspective limits of his lens.

Photographer Benjamin Von Wong shot the portrait above a couple of days ago using a Nikon D4, a $9,000 Nikon 400mm f/2.8G lens, and a few iPhones for lighting. The extremely shallow depth-of-field was achieved using 36 separate exposures and the Brenizer Method.

21-year-old Kylie Woon hasn't been doing photography for very long, but in the two short years since she started dabbling in the medium, her surreal images have already become widely popular online. Her project Surreal-ity features beautiful dreamlike self-portraits in which she is seen floating and flying in all kinds of beautiful locations.

Inspired by photographer Richard Silver's time-slice photos that we featured last month, European Southern Observatory Fellow Gabriel Brammer decided to do the same thing, except with photographs of the ESO's Very Large Telescope in northern Chile instead of NYC buildings.

For nearly half a decade now, filmmaker John Downer has been pioneering the use of tiny cameras to capture photographs and videos from a bird's-eye view -- literally. He attaches extremely small and light HD cameras to the backs of birds in order to capture incredible point-of-view imagery of the animals going about their day-to-day lives.

Since 2006, Brooklyn-based artist Patrick Winfield has been creating incredible photo collages by photographing and recreating scenes using a large number of individual instant photo prints. Some of his pieces are composed by more than over one hundred instant photos! Although his work mostly featured Polaroid films early on, Winfield branched out into other types as well (e.g. The Impossible Project instant films) after Polaroid bowed out of the industry.

Lincoln, UK-based photographer Adam Rhoades came up with an interesting way of printing digital photographs using analog darkroom processes. By mounting his iPhone (displaying a photo) onto a 35mm enlarger, he's able to enlarge and focus his digital photograph on photo paper as if it were a negative being projected.

Photographing a lightning strike from close-up is a difficult and dangerous task, but Toronto-based wedding photographer and weather buff Richard Gottardo managed to capture something even crazier: a double-exposure photograph caused by the bolt of lightning itself.

Here's the amazing official trailer for the upcoming documentary film Chasing Ice, which follows one man as he embarks on an epic photo project around the world:

Starting in 2004, British photographer Julian Germain began a photo project shooting portraits of classrooms in North East England. The next year, he began doing the same thing for schools across the UK. It soon turned into an international project, as he began traveling to schools across the globe to document the environments young people are learning in. He calls the series Classroom Portraits. The photograph above shows a 4th grade math class in Cusco, Peru.

The short 4-minute-long video above is probably the most inspiring thing you'll see today. It's the story of Jaleel King, a man who became wheelchair-bound at the age of 8 after being shot in the back by an angry neighbor. The blast from the sawed-off shotgun almost killed him, but he fought through that challenge -- and every other challenge that has presented itself since.

Here's a fun weekend photo project for you to try: turn solid glass objects into liquid by splashing water onto them. That's what Mexico City-based photographer Jean Bérard did for his series titled Liquid Glass. He set various glass vessels onto a table, and photographed them multiple times while splashing the water contained within and tossing water on from the outside.

The photographs were then merged into single composite photos that make the objects look like they're created entirely out of water.

Tom Lacoste is a 23-year-old self-taught photographer based out of Bordeaux in Southern France. While most people do light painting using flashlights, sparklers, and perhaps flaming steel wool if they're adventurous enough, Lacoste chooses to photograph flames. Large flames.

What would you capture if you had a day off on a hot summer day with $300,000 worth of camera gear lying around the house? That was the happy situation filmmaker Brad Kremer found himself in recently. The gear he found himself with at the time included an uber-expensive Phantom Flex high-speed camera, Zeiss super speed glass, a Canon 5D Mark III DSLR, and Canon L glass. He decided to put the gear to use (and flex his creative muscles) by inviting the neighborhood children over for a water balloon party -- the perfect recipe for epic slow-motion footage.

Gigapixel photographs are generally created by snapping a large number of photos of a scene using a special robotic camera rig, and then stitching those images together afterward using special software. Jean-François Rauzier creates similarly massive images, except his "hyperphotos" are all stitched together by hand.

Screen Series is a project by New York City-based photographer Matthew Tischler, featuring portraits of people shot through window screens, netting, and scrims, with the window screens being in sharp focus rather than the subjects.

3D light painting can be done by using a 2D image rather than a single point of light. In the past, we've shared creative examples of iPads being used in this way to light paint everything from ghostly figures to creative animations.

Back in the summer of 1942, the US Army called upon a young man named Glenn W. Eve (above left) for World War II. After finding him to be 5'9" and just 125 pounds, the military deemed him unfit for combat. Unlike Steve Rogers, there was no experimental serum available to Eve, but luckily he had a desired skill: photography. In 1944, Eve was promoted to private first class and placed in the Signal Photo Corps in order to document the happenings in the Pacific.

Yep, you read that title correctly. Vegetable Weapons is a photo project by Japanese photographer Tsuyoshi Ozawa. Since 2001, Ozawa has been traveling to various countries around the world, photographing young women holding make-believe firearms constructed using vegetables and other foods.

People sometimes use the expression "slow as a glacier" to describe something so stagnant that even the speeds of snails and molasses would feel inadequately fast in comparison. The fastest glaciers ever measured move at tens of meters per day, while the slowest ones may budge only have a meter over the course of a year. Most of the time, the movement is too slow for the human eye to see.

Photographers and best friends CJ Kale and Nick Selway tell us they make a living by creating and selling photographs of Hawaiian volcanoes. "Making a living" is an interesting choice of words, because both photographers risk their lives in capturing their incredible images of violent explosions and glowing lava flows.

Symmetrical Portraits is a well-known and oft-imitated series of photos by photographer Julian Wolkenstein, shot back in 2010. After picking a number of subjects based on their facial features, he photographed them staring blankly straight-on into the camera. He then split the faces down the middle in order to obtain two separate "portraits" showing what the subject would look like if they had a perfectly symmetrical face.

Last week we shared a project by photographer Daniel Kukla, who photographed mirrors on easels in the desert in a way that makes them look like landscape paintings. Photographer Brendan Wixted did a similar project earlier this year for a photography class at his university, except he used off-camera lighting to illuminate the reflected landscapes.

Sonia Soberats' journey in photography didn't start until she couldn't see the photographs she was producing. Around two decades ago, she lost her eyesight to glaucoma between losing her son to Hodgkin's disease and her daughter to ovarian cancer. At the turn of the century, Soberats began taking photography lessons in New York City as a form of therapy and self-expression. Her technique of choice? Light painting.

Die-hard Dodgers fan Bobby Crosby is the only person to ever film himself catching a home run at a Major League Baseball game. That's not all though: over the past few years, he has also filmed himself catching tens of home runs during the batting practice prior to games, holding his baseball glove in one hand and his camera in the other. The video above, which is currently going viral online, shows Crosby's amazing first person view of all but a few of those catches.

Last month we wrote about how the small focusing lens inside a laser pointer can be repurposed as a cheap macro lens for your smartphone. After seeing this project online, photo enthusiast John Coleman decided to give it a shot. To keep the lens secure against your phone, you'll need something to hold it (e.g. a hair pin) and some tape to attach the holder to the phone. The photo above shows the super simple attachment Coleman created.

Photographer Noah Kalina has taken a self-portrait a day for the past 12.5 years, but his already-impressive project has now been bested by one that's nearly twice as long. When Leeds Met University student Cory McLeod was born 21 years ago, his parents began faithfully documenting his life by taking a single photograph of his face every single day. This past week, the project was published as a one-of-a-kind video titled "21 Years" that shows McLeod's entire life in roughly six minutes.

Ever wonder what it looks like when you fire a gun underwater? Firearm enthusiast Andrew Tuohy of VuurwapenBlog recently decided to find out. Taking his .40 Glock 22 into his swimming pool, he captured some high speed videos of himself firing a round using an ordinary Pentax Optio WG-2 waterproof compact camera (which has a 120fps movie recording mode). The photograph above is a still taken from one of the videos.

Daniel Kukla is a photographer who had formal training in biological and anthropological sciences. His educational background plays a major part of his artistic practice, and this can be seen in his clever project titled, The Edge Effect.

Here's an interesting way to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how a portrait shoot was done. After photographing British comedian Frank Skinner, UK-based photographer Harry Borden took all the unedited photos from the shoot and turned them into a one-minute time-lapse movie. The resulting short film is a glimpse into how a session progressed from one pose to another, and the different ideas that were tried.

People vs. Places is a creative collaborative photo project by photographers Timothy Burkhart and Stephanie Bassos.

Earlier this year, we featured a project by photographer Sannah Kvist that showed portraits of urban young people posing next to a pile of all their worldly possessions. Jiadang (Family Stuff) by Chinese photographer Huang Qingjun is similar in concept, but very different in content. He has spent nearly a decade traveling around to various rural communities in China, asking families to take everything they owned and carefully arrange them outdoors for a picture.

Bob Ross became a household name a couple of decades ago through his show The Joy of Painting on PBS. His friendly personality, soothing voice, and artistic talent got countless people hooked on oil painting, beating the devil out of paintbrushes, and creating happy little trees and clouds. He's the kind of guy who could (and did) talk about watching paint dry and make it enjoyable.

Ithaca College, a small private school in New York, recently conducted a fun photo experiment to capture a day in the life of the students on campus. Instead of sending a photographer around to various student hotspots, the student social media team left ten disposal cameras in five locations around campus with a note that read:

Hey, I just left this camera here for the day. Take some fun pictures with you and your friends! I'll be back later to pick it up

At the end of the day, all the cameras were collected, all the film was developed, revealing an "authentic view of a day at Ithaca College."

Living and working in New York City, Canadian writer and producer Christopher Moloney walks past many locations used as settings in movies. This past summer, he began documenting those spots with an awesome "photo in a photo" project. Using a simple black-and-white printer and a cheap digital camera, Moloney visits the exact locations where famous scenes were filmed at, and shoots a photograph of a printed movie still from just the right perspective so that it blends into the background. His website, titled "FILMography" (film + photography) has hundreds of these creative images so far.

We've shared some pretty intense footage captured using helmet-mounted cameras in the past, but perhaps none as crazy as the video above. Shot by a US soldier in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, the video offers a point-of-view look at what it's like to face machine gun fire from the Taliban. [Editor's note: Be warned -- there's a bit of mature language.]

North Carolina-based photographer Daniel Lowe sent us the gorgeous video above, which shows star trails forming and floating across the sky. Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show stars as points of light, rotating around Earth's pole. Lowe's video shows the long streaks of star trails doing the rotating, making the video even more surreal and magical.

Yesterday we featured an interesting example of digital photographs being reintroduced into the real world in another form (Google Street View photos as life-sized portraits), and now here's another one. For her project "Broken Houses", NYC-based photographer Ofra Lapid created realistic models of abandoned buildings using printed photos, and then photographed them on an infinite gray background.

While attending Photokina 2012 in Cologne, Germany last week to talk about the C300 for Canon, filmmaker …

Haute couture and Occupy protests are two things that are completely at odds with one another -- the perfect combination for a photo shoot dripping with satire and social commentary. Photographer Ben Ritter did an American Psycho-themed fashion shoot featuring models wearing pricey suits hanging out among semi-homeless Occupy protestors camped out in Zucotti Park in New York City.

What you're looking at is the most zoomed-in photo ever shot by mankind. Titled the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), it's a followup to the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field photo created in the mid-2000s. Scientists combined 10-years-worth of Hubble Space Telescope photos to create this resulting image that shows 5,500 individual galaxies, some of which are one ten-billionth the brightness of what our human eyes can see.