Often, getting the perfect shot requires months of planning, the right gear, and the know-how to properly capture that perfect moment when it comes along. But just as often, there's an element of luck involved. When Florian Schulz took the incredible picture that wound up on the cover of One World One Ocean's To The Arctic 3D companion book, it initially seemed like nothing had turned out.
About a month ago we featured a teaser for Departure Date, a Virgin Produced romantic comedy that holds the title of first ever film to be shot at 35,000 feet. And now, Virgin have released a full trailer, plus a great behind the scenes look at this ground-breaking (or maybe air-breaking?) film.
Made by directing duo The Theory as a personal project, this video is …
In this short video, courtesy of Red Bull, Swiss photographer …
This time-lapse video by Benjamin Ducroz, titled Points in Space and shot in …
Want to shoot photographs of rainbow-colored smoke? Just strap some color gels to your flash(es). Photographer Sean Wyatt used three snooted flashes with two colored gels on each flash to create a rainbow blend of color. He then used the setup to photograph smoke from burning incense sticks.
Last month a series of humorous photographs by Tadao Cern showing …
What would various indoor spaces look like if you were a fly on a ceiling? Photographer Menno Aden answers that question with his photo series titled "Room Portraits". He shoots from an interesting overhead perspective, capturing everything from bedrooms to dentist offices.
Inspired by Cesar Kuriyama’s monthly video summaries created with one second clips, …
Blind Spot is a new photo project by photographer John Clang in which he had people pose for portraits with their eyes closed while a previously captured portrait was projected onto their faces. The resulting images fall somewhere in the uncanny valley.
Screamotron3000 is a creative photo booth hacked together by photographer Billy Hunt, who writes,
The Screamotron3000 is an converted boom box that takes a photo when you scream. Think Rube Goldberg meets the Wizard of Oz. By using a machine, I hope to offer a window through the inherently artificial process of portraiture into real human emotion.
It's a brilliant way to cause inner turmoil for his subjects. On one hand, a scream is needed to activate the camera, but on the other hand, subjects have a natural desire to look presentable in photos.
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde creates indoor clouds using a smoke machine and uses dramatic lighting to make them look realistic. He calls the project Nimbus.
Chemin Vert is a project created by Italian artist …
For his project titled All Look Same, San Francisco-based photographer Howard Cao photographed celebrity impersonators in Las Vegas and then had Sugar Digital do some post-processing magic to transform their race. The result is a series of images that is meant to ask the question, "Would celebrities be as interesting to American culture if they were Asian?".
Artist Chris Fraser creates beautiful light displays by turning rooms into giant camera obscuras. Rather than use a single pinhole as the lens, he bores numerous holes into the walls to create layered patterns of light. He writes,
My light installations use the ‘camera obscura’ as a point of departure. They are immersive optical environments, idealized spaces with discreet openings. In translating the outside world into moving fields of light and color, the projections make an argument for unfixed notion of sight.
Super slow motion footage captured by high speed cameras usually shows slow movements (if any), but German studio The Marmalade came up with a brilliant way of speeding up the movements: a high-speed robot camera operator.
Our groundbreaking High Speed Motion Control System 'Spike' brings the creative freedom of a moving camera to the world of high speed filming and so enables us to create shots that would be impossible to achieve otherwise. 'Spike' can freely move the camera with unparalleled speed and precision, thereby removing the previously existing creative limitation of having to shoot high speed sequences with a locked camera.
By marrying the hardware of a sturdy and reliable industrial robot to software that was built from the ground up for the demands of motion controlled high speed imaging, we developed a unique system for creating real life camera moves with the ease of use normally associated with 3D Animation.
The system does camera moves that are exactly repeatable, allowing them to be slightly tweaked until the shot is just right.
Being Brave is a series of portraits by photographer Andy Brown showing children before and after tooth extraction surgery. Brown first photographed each child bright-eyed and smiling in the waiting room, and then captured their faces again as they were waking up from general anesthesia.
Over the last month we've featured two re-interpretations of Robert Frank's classic photo book "The Americans" -- one controversial and minimalistic, another analytical. And now we bring you a third, very different, auditory take on Frank's classic work.
Photographer Andrew Emond's Sounds of the Americans is a re-interpretation of The Americans using sound. By using a specialized software to convert all 83 images into audio, and then using a spectrograph to take that audio and re-create the original image, Emond's work sheds an entirely different light on iconic pictures we've all become very familiar with.
A great timelapse is a labor of love, and photographer Cameron Michael's Manhattan Project is a result of the love he has for the incredible city of New York, or more specifically the island/borough of Manhattan.
Having just mentioned National Geographic yesterday, it's appropriate that we're featuring a photographer whose work has been used in the magazine many times over. David Doubilet is certainly one of the greatest underwater photographers in the world, and his work in both fresh and salt water, in both black and white and color, really leaves one breathless.
Back in 2010, Lee Morris set out to prove that you don't need expensive camera gear to be a photographer by doing an entire fashion shoot using an iPhone 3G; while people were impressed, many nevertheless said that the use of professional studio lighting and post-processing negated the point he was trying to make.
A little over a month ago we featured an extended interview with long-time Newsweek Photo Editor Jamie Wellford. It was a longer video than we usually put up but very educational and well worth an hour of your time. And now Photoshelter has put together another long interview/webinar as part of their "What Photo Buyers Want" series, this one with National Geographic Senior Photo Editor Elizabeth Krist.
In his series of overhead photographs title Car Poolers, Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena takes a different kind of look at the impact cultural issues like overgrowth are having on his beloved country. The series shows more and more workers who are catching rides into town in the backs of pickup trucks, and even though for them this is simply a means to save money, Cartagena sees them as "silent contributor[s] to the preservation of our city and planet."
Last month we shared a long exposure photograph by NASA astronaut Don Pettit that showed star trails and city trails in the same frame. Turns out the photo was just one of many long exposure images shot by Pettit so far during Expedition 31. The photograph above shows star trails, an aurora, and flashes of lightning splattered all across the surface of the Earth.
For his project Flying Houses, photographer Laurent Chehere photographed various buildings and then Photoshopped them to transform them into surreal UP-style floating houses.
Here's an interesting project that photographer Gabriel Verdugo Soto put together this last weekend by slapping together an old polaroid lens/aperture mechanism and a micro four thirds camera. In order to keep the lens in focus, he measured the distance from the lens to the polaroid paper in the orignal camera and used macro tubes to ensure the same distance was maintained between the lens and the sensor. The whole thing was then attached to a 52mm ring, and held together using that white epoxy clay you see in the pictures.
In many Asian cultures it's common for families to gather together for formal portraits on special occasions, but this tradition is becoming much harder to coordinate as more and more young people are moving abroad for work. Photographer John Clang has a new series of photographs that features an interesting solution to this problem: Skype webcam projections. Clang visited various individuals around the world and had them video chat with family members in Singapore. By projecting the feed onto a wall and having the entire family pose, Clang shot traditional-style family portraits with the subjects separated by thousands of miles.
There was a much-hyped transit of Venus yesterday in which Venus appeared as a small black circle moving across the face of the sun. This rare phenomenon occurs in pairs of eight years separated by more than a century: the previous transit was in 2004, but the next one won't occur until 2117. If you missed out, don't worry -- there's a boatload of beautiful photos and videos out there that can give you an even better view than what your eyes would have seen. The amazing high-definition video above was created using images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Photographer Joseph O. Holmes spent four years between 2007 and 2011 documenting the place where a person's personal and professional lives meet: their desk. He traveled around to various companies and businesses making photographs of workspaces exactly as he found them.
If you didn’t quite get your Disney fix with the creative splash mountain video we featured earlier, …
You Are Not Banksy is a project by Los Angeles-based photographer Nick Stern in which he recreates popular Banksy graffiti artworks through photography.
Photographer John Cyr has an ongoing project titled Developer Trays that features photographs of developer trays used by famous photographers. He writes,
I am photographing available developer trays so that the photography community will remember specific, tangible printing tools that have been a seminal part of the photographic experience for the past hundred years. By titling each tray with its owner’s name and the years in which it was used, I reference the historical significance of these objects in a minimal manner that evokes thought and introspection about what images have passed through each individual tray.
The tray above was used by Ansel Adams.
In addition to being an internationally successful musician, Moby is also an avid …
Brooklyn-based photographer Henry Hargreaves teamed up with food stylist Caitlin Levin on his project "Deep Fried Gadgets", which -- as its name indicates -- shows various electronics deep fried. The purpose of the project is to highlight the wastefulness of consumer culture and its rapid consumption of the latest gadgets.
We live in an analytical time, where most of the information we receive -- be it about the stock market or the presidency -- comes in way of charts, graphs, and other visual representations of hard (or sometimes soft) data. And it's this dependency on analysis that Sherwin Tibayan's diagnostic take on Robert Frank's "The Americans" -- the second "The Americans" spin off we've seen in two weeks -- focuses on.
French artist Pierre David has a project titled "The Human Pantone" in which he recreated Pantone's popular color guide using photographs of 40 different models. The work was commissioned for the Museum of Modern Art in Brazil, so David selected 40 people from the museum to serve as his models. The resulting work is found on paint cans in addition to swatches, and is meant to highlight the issues of beauty, diversity, acceptance, and racism.
When a group of facial hair aficionados got together late last year at the first inaugural Battle of the Beards in Atlanta, photographer Josh Meister took it as an opportunity not just to compete himself, but to take some portraits as well. The resulting photo series, simply titled "Beards," shows off some seriously impressive facial accoutrement.
Beauty may be only skin deep for us humans, but crack open a classic rangefinder and there something both …
Over the last couple of weeks we've featured two very impressive cinematography shots, one from the movie "Contact" and another from "Sucker Punch." But while both of those required planning, expertise and, for one of them, some help from the digital age, the final steadicam shot from the movie "Hugo" is impressive in an entirely different way.
We’ve mentioned Tom Lowe’s TimeScapes a few times before, but if you’ve somehow missed out on the …
School Portrait is a project by documentary filmmaker and communications student …
Kingston University photography students Luke Evans and Josh Lake wanted to do something unusual for their final major project, so they decided to turn themselves into human cameras by eating 35mm film squares and letting their bodies do the rest. After eating and pooping out the film in the dark, they used fixer on the film and then scanned the film using an electron microscope. They are currently exhibiting massive prints of the images that show every detail of what their bodies did.
Fingerprints of Drinkable Culture is a photo series by photographer William LeGoullon that explores what popular beverages look like under a microscope.
More than most government agencies, NASA is actually pretty enthusiastic about photography (by comparison, we probably won't be seeing CIA photography archives come to light any time soon). When NASA had a problem that needed solving they liked to look towards their cameras, and that's exactly what they did when they needed to test and record the abilities of their space suits.
The world is a serious place, and it seems that even comedians like Saturday Night Live's Fred Armisen think that this is a side worth seeing. So, by way of a fun video project, he's asking viewers to do one simple thing: Be Serious for 30 Seconds... and record it.
Flickr user TigTab creates beautiful scenes by light painting with hand-cut stencils. For each shot, the camera's shutter is left open while she moves about the location, firing her flash through the stencils in various locations to add the individual items to the scene. Some photographs take up to four hours to create from start to finish.
Floating is a series of manipulated photographs by Chinese photographer Zhao Huasen showing people in China riding around on invisible bicycles.
Of the photographs that emerged after the recent solar eclipse on May 20th, …
If you liked the the “impossible shot” from the film Contact that we shared earlier this week, …
Photographer Jack Long has an absolutely amazing series of photographs titled Vessels and Blooms that features liquid flowers captured by shooting high speed photographs of splashes. The images are not faked with Photoshop, but are instead single exposures that result from months of planning and testing.