Inspiration

Double Identity is a neat project by photographer Caroline Briggs in which she photographs portraits of identical twins wearing the same clothing and striking the same poses, and then overlays one on top of the other to show their similarities and differences. She writes:

My series aims to avoid direct physical comparisons between twins while allowing the viewer to acknowledge and accept the twins’ similarities and differences. For the twin, it gives them a different perspective on their double identities and poses questions about their relationship and their desire - or lack of desire - to live completely separate lives.

Briggs has the credentials to do this project -- she's a twin herself!

Vaults is a photo project by photographer David Stephenson that documents the beautiful kaleidoscopic patterns found on the ceilings of ancient houses of worship.

Washington Times video producer Drew Geraci created this amazing time-lapse video of an asylum that was abandoned decades ago.

Brian McCarty is a photographer who specializes in photographs of toys. He integrates concept and character and is a prominent photographer in the "Art-Toy" movement.

Alex MacLean is a Massachusetts-based photographer and pilot who uses his dual interests to create epic aerial photographs.

Alex MacLean has flown his plane over much of the United States documenting the landscape. Trained as an architect, he has portrayed the history and evolution of the land from vast agricultural patterns to city grids, recording changes brought about by human intervention and natural processes. His powerful and descriptive images provide clues to understanding the relationship between the natural and constructed environments.

Filmmaker Casey Neistat (whose peanut butter jar lens fix we featured recently) was recently commissioned by Nike to create an advertisement for its new FuelBand.

Skycatcher Wallpaper is a monumental display created by artists Jonathan Puckey and Luna Maurer. It's composed of a whopping 88,000 individual photographs of the sky above Amsterdam captured over two years with the camera snapping a photo every five minutes. Each vertical strip contains 144 photographs and shows exactly one day. The gradual change in the number of daylight hours results in fluctuations in the shape of the blue daylight sections of the wallpaper.

Street photographer Markus Hartel recently did some shooting on the sidewalks of New York City on a rainy day with a Kodak Playtouch rigged to his Leica M9 and 28mm Elmarit. The above video shows a point-of-view documentation of his walk along with the "keeper" shots that resulted.

Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style is a spontaneous portrait project that photographer Nina Katchadourian started while traveling by plane in 2010.

Photographer Clemens Wirth wanted to dive into microscopy, so he attached his Canon …

"The Collective Snapshot" is a series by Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa (previously featured here) that consists of abstract images of famous landmarks created by blending together dozens of ordinary snapshots. His goal is to "create an abstraction of the places we've been an the things we've seen", and to create images that are both familiar and foreign at the same time.

Here’s a short sizzle reel created by Vashi Nedomansky that shows various shots …

Japanese photographer kiyoshimachine has a quirky set of photographs titled Monster67 that features people wearing the "67 Head", a giant Pentax SLR.

"The People I've Met" is a project by photographer Krista Langley that involves one Polaroid camera and one question. Langley shoots portraits of her friends and family and asks them to write down the answer to the question "what would you do if you knew you could not fail?".

After being introduced to long, pointy Mexican boots through a Facebook video, Brookyln-based photographers Alex Troesch and Aline Paley decided to travel to the northern city of Matehuala, Mexico to see and document the shoes themselves. TIME writes,

In northern Mexico, the pointy boots trend is more about flash than fashion. “They’re worn by people who want to impress other people,” Troesch says. In fact, one boot maker they met had transformed a regular pair of shoes into pointy boots for a client who wanted to impress the jury of a dance contest. That’s how the fervor started—but not everyone is a fan. “Sometimes you’d hear people teasing others about wearing the boots,” Troesch says. “Still, it was very interesting for us to witness how such a common object—cowboy boots—worn by so many people in northern Mexico could be reinvented and reappropriated by young teenagers whose eyes and ears are so many times directed towards the other side of the border.”

Luminaris is an amazing stop-motion short film by Argentinean director Juan Pablo Zaramella.

Italian photographer Alberto Seveso has a wonderful series of surfing photographs titled "Ink Riders" shot using blue ink, water, and a LEGO figurine. It's an incredibly creative twist on the popular "ink in water" project.

JR (the TED-winning photographer who uses giant photos as street art) and Liu Bolin (the Chinese artist who photographs himself blending into scenes) recently got together to collaborate on a photograph taken by Liu Bolin in which JR blends into one of his large scale installations. The giant photograph that Liu Bolin helped blend JR into is a photo of Liu Bolin's eye, created by JR. Can you say "photo inception"?

New York-based photography student Vicki Thai has a project titled Family Photographs that consists of images created by splicing (by tearing and reassembling) family photographs shot during two different times.

UK-based photographer Sharon Johnstone has a stunning collection of macro photographs showing tiny drops of dew on dandelions.

Filmmaker Jeff Desom took Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1954 film “ …

How would you go about photographing a $380,000 Lamborghini Aventador? Here's an interesting behind the scenes video in which photographer Blair Bunting presents a step-by-step walkthrough of how went about doing it.

Japan-based art collective NAM shot this series of advertisements showing gravity-defying chocolate confections. What's interesting about the concept is that they decided to do everything without digital trickery, opting instead to hang the various foods from thin strings.

Los Angeles-based photographer Ian Ruhter creates amazing photographs using a van that he turned into a gigantic camera. He uses the collodion process (AKA wet plate photography) to turn large sheets of metal into photographs, and spends upwards of $500 making each giant one-of-a-kind print.

Dinner Etiquette is a project by Melbourne-based art director Sonia Rentsch and photographer Scott Newett that consists of clever still life photos of tableware that's arranged to look like fine dining attire.

Cincinnati native Amy Hildebrand was born completely blind due to albinism, a disorder in which the body is unable to produce melanin (the pigment that gives color to hair, skin, and eyes).

Choices is a Warhol-esque (or Gursky-esque) project by photographer Richard Stultz, who visited various stores to document the mind-numbingly large number of choices consumers are faced while shopping.

Maho Beach outside of Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten is famous for the fact that landing airplanes fly overhead at minimal altitude. It's one of the only places in the world where airplanes can be viewed in their flightpath just outside the end of the runway, and therefore is very popular with tourists and plane spotters. Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner has a project titled "Jet Airliner" that consists of photos of massive jet airliners hovering over the heads of sunbathers on the beach.

After reading about the Wakhan Corridor in the New York Times, French photographers …

This past Sunday, Jupiter and Venus put on a show by lining up with our moon (a …

Architectural photographer Brett Beyer was recently commissioned by Cornell University to make a photograph of the interior of its recently completed Milstein Hall. The request wasn't for a standard interior photo, but for an aerial shot of the 25,000-square-foot studio space that looked as if you were looking down at it with the roof removed (think Google Earth but for the interior of a building). Beyer accomplished this by pointing his Canon 5D Mark II and 17-40mm lens down from the ceiling on a 12-foot boom and then capturing 250 separate photographs of every square inch of the space over three days. He then spent 10 days stitching the images together by hand in Photoshop to create the amazing photo seen above.

Silent World is a project by Paris-based artists Lucie & Simon that shows post-apocalyptic views of famous locations around the world. All but one or two of the people in each location are removed from the scene. Rather than use multiple exposures and compositing the images to remove moving objects (e.g. people and cars), they chose to use a neutral density filter -- one that's normally used by NASA for analyzing stars -- in order to achieve extremely long exposure times during the day.

Here's an oldie but goodie: back in September 2009, photographer Chris Weeks released this documentary about street photography titled Documenting the Human Condition. It's occasionally preachy and at times feels like a stealthy Leica advertisement, but should be interesting to you if you're at all interested in the practice of street photography.

What would you do if you were given the task of creating a self-portrait within 20 minutes in front …

According to the UN, one third of the world's food goes to waste -- mostly in industrialized nations -- while 925 million people around the world are threatened by starvation. To draw attention to this startling fact, Vienna-based photographer Klaus Pichler has been working for the past nine months on a project titled One Third, which consists of photos of rotting food. The food ranges from simple vegetables to cultural dishes from around the world, and everything is allowed to rot naturally by being stored in large plastic containers in Pichler's bathroom.

Photographer Tim Chao created this beautiful photo of a dark figure standing over …

For her project titled Mirrors, Swedish photographer Ilar Gunilla Persson photographed various landscapes with giant mirrors placed in them. The mirrors give the scenes an surreal and artificial look, but all the shots were captured on film.

Brand Spirit is a new photo project by NYC-based branding strategist Andrew Miller, who writes,

Every day for 100 days, I will paint one branded object white, removing all visual branding, reducing the object to its purest form. Each object may be purchased for less than $10, something I own, something another person gives me, or something I find.

See if you can identify each of the objects despite their lack of branding.

Here’s a stunning super slow motion video that shows Marina Kanno and Giacomo Bevilaqua of Staatsballett Berlin performing several …

"Mimicry" is a photo project by Dutch photographers Ilse Leenders and Maurits Gisen that's based around the idea of uniformity. They write,

The inspiration of the series Mimicry came from the uniformity of the human beings. People from whom the identity is missing and those who are inconspicuous in our society. Just like animals they adapt to their environment. Visually in this series it is shown by the use of similar costumes, position and sex.

Hamilton College assistant art professor Robert Knight has a project titled "Sleepless" that consists of ghostly long exposure photographs of people tossing and turning throughout the night.

Framed is a beautiful and creative short film about a photographer taking pictures in the woods when he encounters …

Raleigh, North Carolina-based artist Scott Hazard creates abstract images by tearing shapes into multiple prints of the same photograph, and then stacking the images on top of each other. He uses the technique to create things such as smoke, clouds, and portals in walls. He calls the project "Photo Constructs".

For his project titled "Horror Vacui" (latin for "fear of empty space"), photographer Federico Chiesa imagines what the villains and creepy characters of '80s films would be like if they were "still alive" today.

London-based photographer David Wilman recently did some experiments in which he used a Canon 5D Mark II as a digital back for his MPP 4x5 large format camera. He placed his lens-less 5D at the back of the camera at the film plane and then placed a black cloth over the two cameras to prevent any light from spilling onto the sensor. Light from the Schneider Kreuznach Xenar 4.5/150mm lens entered straight into the open mirror box of the DSLR without any physical link between the two cameras. Wilman was surprised to discovered that this pairing produced quite a respectable macro setup.

YouTube member Syejukoon mounted a GoPro camera to the back of his …

Photographer Ilona Szwarc's project "http://www.ilonaszwarc.com/american-girls" is a series of portraits of girls in the United States posing with their avatars -- American Girl dolls that are customized to look exactly like their owners.

After photographer Bob Carey moved with his wife to the East Coast in 2003, he found that life suddenly flipped 180-degrees from what he was used to. He then did what every sane, middle-aged, male photographer would do: he began photographing himself in a pink tutu to express himself. However, the project wouldn't stay random for long.

Steven Alan and Ben Boutwell made this …

German ad agency Jung von Matt created this brilliant series of photographs for a LEGO advertising campaign titled "Imagine". The images show famous characters from children's television shows in simplified LEGO form. Can you figure out each of the shows?