Inspiration

Singapore-based photographer Aw Zinkie's photo series "Republic of Pulau Semakau" explores the idea of a trash bin being an essential part of an individual's personal space, and a way of examining their identity. Her portraits show the subjects in their personal environments with their faced replaced by held up trash bins. The series also highlights issues of waste management in Singapore, and the fact that every individual's trash causes them to become a "founder" of the offshore Semakau Landfill.

Here's a fascinating video by NASA that explains what auroras are and what they look like from space. It's filled with beautiful photographs and time-lapse sequences captured by astronauts on the International Space Station. Astronaut photographer Don Pettit, who maintains a blog about his experiences, writes that taking pictures of Earth is harder than it looks.

After his Beijing studio was destroyed in 2005, artist Liu Bolin (AKA "The Invisible Man") began a project titled "Hiding in the City" that show him blending into various locations around Beijing. The photographs aren't Photoshopped -- Bolin carefully has his body painted to blend in with each landscape.

After finding toys from his childhood in his grandparents' attic, photographer Julien Mauve decided to create a series of photographs that imagines what those toys would look like in our serious adult world. The series is titled "Back to Childhood".

Here's what Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern photojournalism, said about his concept of "The Decisive Moment" in an interview with The Washington Post in 1957.

Photographer Mario Zanaria created this contact sheet …

Photographer Andrey Pavlov's images of ants may look like they were computer-generated or created with dead insects, but they're actually real photographs of living ants. Pavlov spends hours setting up his fantasy scenes and then waits for his ant subjects to interact with his miniature props in just the right way.

If you go to Google Street View and type in “rue de londres, …

For this short titled “Full Circle”, Callum Cooper attached a camera to the …

Cesar Kuriyama spent a couple years saving enough money to take an entire …

Director Jason Bognacki had a Contessa-Nettel Piccolette German folding camera from 1919 sitting around on his shelf for ages, and decided one day to bring it back to life by attaching it to his Canon 5D Mark II.

German photographer Michael Wesely has spent decades working on techniques for extremely long camera exposures -- usually between two to three years. In the mid-1990s, he began using the technique to document urban development over time, capturing years of building projects in single frames. In 1997, he focused his cameras on the rebuilding of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and in 2001 he began photographing the Museum of Modern Art's ambitious renovation project. He uses filters and extremely small apertures to reduce the amount of light striking the film, creating unique images that capture both space and time.

Last year we shared a table listing the various hazards National Geographic photographers experience while on the …

For his project Couples, Spanish photographer Nacho Rojo made portraits of himself and his girlfriend mimicking the stereotypical looks of various social groups.

Based in New York, 46-year-old Chris Arnade is a banker by trade and …

Unless you’re constantly staring at photos of yourself, the image that comes to mind when you think of your …

Albert Kahn was a wealthy French banker who launched a project in the early 1909 that aimed to create a photographic record of the world. The first commercially successful color photography process, Autochrome Lumière, had just arrived two years earlier, and Kahn decided to use the medium to both document human life and to promote peace. He sent out an army of photographers to 50 different countries, amassing 72,000 photos and 100 hours (183,000 meters) of film that became one of the most important collections of images in human history.

The Pink & Blue Project by South Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon started seven years ago after she photographed a portrait of her 5-year-old daughter sitting next to her beloved pink possessions. She then began creating portraits of other girls who loved pink things, and then other boys who loved blue.

One of the most important things I’ve learned during my ongoing adventure as a small-town, self-employed photographer is that nothing is more important than the relationships I’m building. So when I decided sometime last year that I was going to do a 2012 promo I wanted to create something that looked elegant, something that the recipients could be a part of and most importantly, something that could start building long-lasting relationships.

Haristobald recently captured a series of Superman photographs without the use of Photoshop or body painting.

Last week we shared an interesting video that shows how Civil War-era tintype photographs were created.

Here’s a short one minute time-lapse video that took nine months to create. It creatively documents a pregnancy and …

Here’s a quote by photographer Richard Benson on …

Photographer Bjoern Ewers directed this creative advertising campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra that shows beautiful views of the insides of various instruments. Shot using a macro lens, each one looks more like a giant music hall than a musical instrument.

Rusidah Badawi lost her forearms in a tragic accident 32 years ago at the age of 12. After the amputation, the 44-year-old Indonesian woman was introduced to photography through a vocational rehabilitation centre for the handicapped. She immediately fell in love with it, and began a career working as a wedding and party photographer. Working primarily with film photography up until 2010, she switched over to digital when Canon sponsored her endeavors by gifting her with a digital Canon 550D DSLR and a Speedlite flash.

New York-based animator Adam Pesapane (who goes by the working name PES) creates some of the smoothest and most creative stop-motion videos we've seen. In the short video above, titled "Fresh Guacamole", he shows how you can create a guacamole dip out of random objects such as baseballs, golf balls, and dice.

Here’s an interesting 20-minute-long documentary film titled Chimping in which Dan Perez de la Garza speaks to various photojournalists …

This past Sunday, a group of amateur astronomers in San Antonio, Texas successfully “flashed” the International Space Station with …

On December 31st, 2011, Oaida Raul decided pay a tribute to the recently-retired …

Photographer Steven Pippin creates unique photographs that capture the precise moment in which the camera used to capture the photo is destroyed by a bullet from a handgun. The images show the final moment of the camera's existence (with the help of a mirror) and are themselves damaged by the bullet passing through the film.

When commercial sports photographer Nick Laham arrived at photo day during the New York Yankees' spring training last Monday, he had to compete with a legion of photographers for space and time. He ended up occupying one of the bathrooms in the facility, turning it into a makeshift studio.

Director Ninian Doff made this creative music video for singer …

Want to see how Las Vegas has grown from 1972 through 2010? NASA created this unique time-lapse video using …

For a recent advertising campaign to bring attention to its hydrogen-powered cars, Mercedes-Benz decided to make a car “invisible” …

UK-based wildlife photographers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas got the Internet's attention a couple years ago with the BeetleCam, a special remote controlled DSLR that allowed them to capture close-up photos of animals in the wild that photographers would have difficultly strolling up to. After the success of that experiment, they decided to return to Africa last summer with upgraded (and armored) versions of the BeetleCam in order to photograph lions in Kenya.

The last time C. Corey Fisk walked was in 1992. She has multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease that affects the central nervous system and gradually took her ability to walk and leave her bed.

But early February, she went on a photo walk with photographer John Butterill in the woods behind his house in Ontario, Canada -- all from her own home in northern California.

Here’s a documentary film about acclaimed American photographer Richard Avedon that originally aired …

"33 RPM" is a project by Stockholm-based photographer Philip Karlberg that consists of still life photographs of various desserts spinning on various vinyl records. The combo above shows "'Don’t look back into the sun' by The Libertines: Sundae surprise."

"Global Rainbow" is an outdoor art installation by Yvette Mattern that consists of seven high powered lasers projecting a bright rainbow across the night sky. The rainbow was originally displayed in New York in 2009, but has since appeared in cities across the UK. If you're lucky enough to see the project in real life, be sure to take some photographs -- it's not every day you get to enjoy rainbows at night.

Angel Falls is the world's highest waterfall as well as the inspiration for Paradise Falls in the Pixar film Up. Unless you're planning on visiting the falls in the heart of Venezuela in person, the next best thing might be this stunning series of 360° aerial panoramas recently captured by photographer Dmitry Moiseenko over two days from a helicopter. Pan around, zoom into the scene, and become immersed in the otherworldly landscapes found at Angel Falls.

Parisian photographer Malo has fun portrait series titled "Un jour, mon enfant tu seras" (One Day You Will Be My Child) that imagines what a baby's future career might be.

Just in case you’ve always been wondering what it would look like to record footage with a camera attached …

Street photographer Eric Kim and DigitalRev host …

Named after the fact that Google Street View cars shoot with 9 separate cameras, Canadian artist Jon Rafman's Nine Eyes of Google Street View website is an ongoing project that publishes strange scenes photographed by Google's automated cameras. Rafman writes,

This infinitely rich mine of material afforded my practice the extraordinary opportunity to explore, interpret, and curate a new world in a new way. To a certain extent, the aesthetic considerations that form the basis of my choices in different collections vary. For example, some selections are influenced by my knowledge of photographic history and allude to older photographic styles, whereas other selections, such as those representing Google’s depiction of modern experience, incorporate critical aesthetic theory. But throughout, I pay careful attention to the formal aspects of color and composition.

[...] I can seek out postcard-perfect shots that capture what Cartier-Bresson titled “the decisive moment,” as if I were a photojournalist responding instantaneously to an emerging event. At other times, I have been mesmerized by the sense of nostalgia, yearning, and loss in these images—qualities that evoke old family snapshots. I can also choose to be a landscape photographer and meditate on the multitude of visual possibilities.

The annual Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is considered to be the …

Photographer Benjamin Von Wong recently had the idea of doing a photo shoot that involved a model being lit on fire. He assembled a team of people -- including a person willing to be lit on fire and some fire experts -- and then set out to turn his vision into a reality. This interesting behind-the-scenes video shows how they went about capturing a burning man without using Photoshop to add in the flames.

Zurich-based designers Atelier Volvox have a project titled "Outsiders" that consists of various stuffed animals turned inside-out. The toys were purchased from second-hand shops, cut open, turned inside out, re-stuffed, and sewed back up.

Every year, graphic designer Everett Hiller and his wife throw a party during the holiday season. Afterwards, Hiller Photoshops the photographs captured at the gathering before sending them out to friends and family. He doesn't just fix white balance and removed red eye, but instead sneakily Photoshops various celebrities into the shots. Hiller finds source images of celebrities by doing a search on Google Images for the name -- ranging from presidents to movie stars -- and uses certain keywords (e.g. "dinner" or "I met") to find candid/amateur shots. Photoshopping the celebs into the photos takes about 45 minutes to do.

It might sound strange to use the verb "Love" in the title of a rant. But here goes.

I love photography.

Why am I telling you this? Isn't it self-obvious? Don't we all love photography? The answer is no. There is a percentage of photographers who hate photography. They do not appreciate photography. They do not consume photography. They don't look at photo books or photo magazines. They hate the guy with the iPhone taking Instagram shots.

For her project titled All I Own, photographer Sannah Kvist asked her friends to pile up all of their belongings into the corner of a room and then pose with the pile for a photo. The portrait subjects are all Swedish young adults that were born in the 1980s.