Inspiration

Here’s a humorous short film titled “Smile” by director …

David Shankbone (real name David Miller) has been called "arguably the most influential new media photojournalist in the world." And if you've never heard of him you may wonder: How did he achieve such a status? How did he get his work published by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Forbest all while his actual day job isn't even as a photographer? He did it all by giving away his photography for free.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster are a London-based artist duo that creates amazing shadow art installations using carefully arranged objects. They use everything from trash to metal cans shot with BB pellets, arranged to cast shadows of people and skylines on the wall when a light is shined from a certain direction.

A team led by photographer Michael Forsberg and NET Television project manager Michael Farrell recently embarked on a large-scale time lapse project the likes of which you don't usually see. The project, which you can follow on their website, constitutes an attempt to visually document the Platte River -- a long-standing source of water and power to a large part of the United States.

In this first episode of LitUp — a series by [F]Network that is …

This video is actually part of a project called To Catch a Bike …

Photographer Jon Meyers has shot many different subjects at his studio in Eugene, …

You can light up particles in the air for a snazzy effect. The photos in this post were done by shining a powerful focused light into the air in various weather conditions during a long exposure. You need a light source that outputs some major power to pull off the effect. I used a Coast HP21 and a 3000 lumen Stanley spotlight for these shots. The photo above was shot while it was snowing.

1 to 100 Years Project is an awesome portrait project by Belgian photographer Edouard Janssens in which he photographed 100 women and 100 men at each age between 1 and 100. His goal was to show the aging process in a positive manner and to provide an interesting visualization of the link between generations. He didn't handpick the subjects either -- all the participants volunteered through the project's website (excluding the kids, of course).

Wonderful idea alert: to document the growth of her son, Reddit user …

Destin of Smarter Every Day recently shot some light-painting photographs using an RC helicopter loaded with colored lights. The maneuverability of the helicopter turns the great outdoors into a giant canvas on which you can light paint giant 3D shapes.

Ara Solis is a creative series of photographs by Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma showing model ships sailing across seas of crumpled bed sheets.

If you've ever watched a Japanese anime, or even American cartoons for that matter, you probably know that most of the characters have highly unrealistic body proportions -- giant eyes and tiny noses are the norm. Ideal Species is a creepy set of images by photographer Chris Scarborough that imagines what these proportions would look like in the real world. Yup, it's creepy.

Photographer Nicholas Hendrickx has a quirky photo series titled "The Adventures Of Mr. Fly" in that features macro photographs of a (presumably dead) fly engaging in various human activities.

If you like PES’ stop-motion videos in which random objects are prepared as food, you’ll love this …

Photographer Stefan Koppelkamm first photographed East Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification. He revisited the same locations a decade later, and rephotographed them from exactly the same viewpoints to document the drastic social and economic transformations that came about during the time between the photos.

Just like in real estate, for which good photos of homes can make a huge difference in attracting potential buyers, animal shelters often see spikes in adoptions when the animals are advertised with attractive photographs. For this reason, Arizona-based photographer Michael Kloth visits shelters on a weekly basis to offer his services to local adoption agencies.

One of the notable features of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film “Children of Men” …

You may remember photographer Benjamin Von Wong from last week’s behind-the-scenes video of …

Behind the scenes videos, like the one earlier about Dave Hill's Ford Fusion shoot, typically show off a photographer's technique, or the challenges he or she faces when trying to get a certain shot. But Aspen-based photographer Tyler Stableford's Buckley AirForce Base shoot posed some unique challenges.

Offering a very cinematic, editorial-style look at tradesmen doing their work, Japan-based photographer Yohei Shimada’s Workman series is an impressive display of photographic talent. The series was born out of necessity and a lack of subject matter in Shimada's small hometown of Nara. Having moved back there after completing an internship in Tokyo and coming into his own as a photographer, Shimada had to turn to the people he knew -- including his parents and friends -- to capture the series you see here.

This behind the scenes video shows photographer Dave Hill shooting a very complicated …

There's been a lot of controversy around magazines using Photoshop to make real people look unrealistically pretty or fit, but what if you could actively Photoshop what you saw and experienced? That's the question the people over at Cracked decided to ask, and the answers are pretty hilarious:

High-end DSLRs have already made inroads into the world of professional cinematography, but the new animated movie "The Pirates" was actually shot using only Canon 1D Mark III's -- 50 of them to be exact. The movie, made by Oscar-winning British animation house Aardman (the same people that brought us Wallace and Gromit), is the first full-length feature film the studio has ever shot using only DSLRs.

Scottish photographer Iain Blake's fun and, let's face it, cute Stone Footprints series caught our attention earlier this week. Like many of the series we feature, it wasn't necessarily innovative photography technique, but rather the creative execution of a unique idea that drew us in.

This incredible London flyover footage, taken by aerial photographer Jason Hawkes, shows the …

Legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz was one of photography's pioneers. In a time when the arts, photography included, were stuck in the past and unwilling to change, he drove the art of photography into a new erra of expression. Because of this he is known by many as "the father of modern photography."

Quite a bit longer than most of the videos we put up, nevertheless, this insightful interview with Newsweek’s long-time Senior …

Upon first glance, Open Horizon by photographer and filmmaker Russell Houghten might look …

This amazing commercial for the Canadian Paralympic Committee was shot in one continuous …

Denmark-based photographer Nikolaj Lund specializes in shooting the world of classical music, and captures some pretty unique portraits of musicians with their instruments. He takes the subjects out of their natural environment -- the orchestra pit -- and has them do epic poses in random places (e.g. streets, oceans, deserts).

"Dolly zoom" is a technique that was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Vertigo, after which it was commonly referred to as "Hitchcock zoom" and the "vertigo effect". The basic idea is to photograph (or film) a subject while moving towards or away from it, and at the same time changing the focal length to keep the subject at the same size in each frame. French photographer Micaël Reynaud used this technique on a beach last year, snapping photos of a stone block at focal lengths ranging from 24mm when he was closest to it to 840mm when he was farthest away.

Cinematographer Jim Geduldick was lucky enough to be the first to test out …

At first glance, some of Simon Davidson's photographs look like Harry Potter stills showing flying cars floating in the clouds. They're actually a glimpse into the burnout subculture that's growing in Australia. These are competitions in which drivers try to create as much smoke as they can by spinning their tires in place.

We've seen many a photo collage in our day, but New York artist Michael Mapes' Specimen Boxes are an entirely different creature. To create these unique photo compartments, he dissects various photos of his subjects into many corresponding bits and then mounts those bits on or in different materials -- much like what you see in insect collection boxes. Sometimes it's vials, sometimes it's push pins, and sometimes it's gel caps, but it always turns out looking really interesting.

Photographer Lauren Marsolier’s Transition series consists of minimalist landscape photographs of desolate locations. The various places don't actually exist -- Marsolier creates them by combining photographs captured in different places at different times.

Aerial photographer Stephan Zirwes shoots amazing images of patterns and repetition seen in landscapes while looking straight down from a helicopter. From his perspective, things like cars, shipping containers, and people blend together into abstract designs.

To show off its collection of eyewear for kids, Very French Gangsters shot cute mugshot-style portraits of gangster children who were obviously booked for being too hip for their own good.

Last October, Portland-based 17-year-old photographer Brendon Burton began an ambitious project in which he committed to creating one self-portrait every day for a year. Now, half a year later, Burton is still going strong and his Flickr photostream is full of beautiful and creative images that document his development as a photographer.

German photographer Christian Stoll's "Epic" series features epic wide angle photographs of futuristic locations. The spaces are immense and the scale dizzying.

Yesterday One World Trade Center officially became the tallest building in New York …

Words certainly won't do Kevin Michael Connolly justice. Born without legs, this part-photographer, part-professional skier, part-writer is, ironically enough, an inspiration to us all (we say ironically because in the Today Show interview above they talk about how much he hates to be called an inspiration).

Ever since she entered the world 30 some-odd years ago, Alison has had her father Jack Radcliffe's camera pointed at her. Radcliffe, a Baltimore, MD-based photographer, started out by documenting her life casually as new parents commonly do, but slowly became more interested in the relationships involved in growing up.

The United States is a diverse country, but there are few places in the US as diverse as New York City: "the greatest city on earth." In many ways The City's diversity makes it a street photographer's gold-mine, and it's this mine that photographer Brandon Stanton has been meticulously digging through over the last couple of years.

Korean photographer Lee Eunyeol creates beautiful nighttime scenes by installing lights in various landscapes. His artist statement reads,

Starry night expresses private spaces given by night and various emotions that are not able to be defined and described in the space. I’ve chosen analogue type for the expression which attempts to install electric bulbs in an objet to be expressed using back space of night by taking advantage of huge studio. There are two spaces in photographs. One is a space before electric bulbs of familiar landscape are installed and the other is a space after electric bulbs expressed by dispersing personal emotion are installed. Unified light from these two spaces generates a mysterious landscape.

In each of his photos, it almost looks as if the stars have fallen from the sky onto the ground.

"Dancing with Invisible Light" is a project by San Francisco-based photographer Audrey Penven, who used an infrared camera to capture portraits illuminated by the invisible structured light emitted by a Microsoft Kinect.

Last November Google launched a Photography Prize for finding the "photography stars of the future". After receiving entries from 20,000 students in 146 countries, Google announced the winners last week. The grand prize winner was Viktor Johansson, a 24-year-old photography student from Sweden who photographed the loneliness of competitive diving:

The judges were impressed and captivated with his series that focused on Christoffer Eskilsson, Sweden’s best male diver from 10 metres. Viktor has chosen to show us an alternative view, one that we are not used to seeing from sport photography in the media. Instead of glamorous action shots of an athlete in competition, he has produced arresting and unexpected photographs that focus on the long, lonely hours of repetitive training and practice that it takes to excel in your field.

Every photo has a story, and this particular photo has one of the most interesting stories of them all -- a story of anonymous fame, and famous anonymity. To this day the above photo, titled "Firing Squad in Iran," is the only anonymous photo to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. And although the photo was taken in 1979, the photographer behind the lens didn't receive credit until 2006.

Artist Maarten Baas has a project called "Real Time" in which he creates one-of-a-kind clocks using a video camera and boatloads of patience and dedication. He creates 12-hour-long loops of people manually setting the time on various clocks... in real time. The video above shows his grandfather clock exhibit in which the hour and minute hands of the clock are painstakingly drawn in every minute of every hour for twelve hours.

"All the Wild Horses" is a photo series by South African photographer Andrew McGibbon that consists of beautiful studio portraits of horses. McGibbon writes,

For thousands of years the horse has been mankind's closest ally. The horse made travel and development possible. We tethered, weighted and reigned them. We captured, stabled and trained them.

Ever willing, the horse was the magnificent tool of man’s ingenuity. The Horse is a beast of legend, taking on its own character, personality, emotion and mythology. However, with the advent of the steam engine the horse was made obsolete, and now they are resigned to the realm of shows and races, a world of equestrian sport, a mere shadow of the beast’s former glory.

McGibbon says painstakingly lit each shot in a manner reminiscent of the portraiture of the rich and famous.