Inspiration

Michael Zhang

Lunar Eclipse Over the Acropolis

Photographer Elias Politis created this beautiful image showing the June 15 lunar eclipse over the Acropolis in Athens, Greece by shooting a time-lapse video and then combining the stills into a single frame.

Michael Zhang

Wave this Programmable “Light Saber” to Light Paint Words and Images

Gavin of Sydney, Australia created an awesome 2-meter long programmable staff that makes painting giant words and images as easy as waving/walking the staff around during a long-exposure photograph. The staff, which he call the LightScythe (we would have called it the "Lightsaber"), was inspired by the Wi-Fi light painting project we shared here earlier this year.

The hardware is pretty simple. There’s a 2m programmable LED strip inside an acrylic tube, which is controlled from a small receiver and battery pack. A laptop PC with a wireless Xbee link sends the image data to the scythe at a specified time. [#]

Michael Zhang

Baskets of Color at a Supermarket

A while back we suggested that for a photo project (perhaps on a rainy day) you can collect things of a certain color in your house, arrange them neatly, and then take a picture. An even easier place to do this might be your local supermarket. Designer Marco Ugolini and photographer Pedro Motta teamed up for a project titled Per Color that features baskets of color shot in a Brazilian supermarket.

Michael Zhang

The “Back to the Future” Photography of Irina Werning

Argentinian photographer Irina Werning's "Back to the Future" series of photographs features people reenacting photographs of themselves taken decades ago, and has made Werning a well-known photographer after going viral on the Internet over the past year.

Michael Zhang

Portraits of Panamanian Men and Their Souped-Up Bikes

Panamanian photographer José Castrellón's series Priti Baiks features portraits of men standing proudly next to their decorated bikes. The bikes are their owners' only form of transportation, and the owners spend a considerable amount of their time and resources personalizing their bikes into symbols of identity and individuality.

Michael Zhang

Life as a Human Guinea Pig: Inside the Weird World of Medical Studies

Medical experiments can be quite bizarre -- I once heard about one that involved injecting subjects with various kinds of animal feces. After a year of participating in various clinical trials for cash, photographer and recent art-school graduate Josh Dickinson decided to start a project called Studied to document what it's like to be a human guinea pig. His experiences range from being pricked with needles and subjected to pain to being suffocated...

Michael Zhang

Photographer Uses Mouth as a Camera

For her series titled Face to Face, photographer Ann Hamilton placed a pinhole camera in her mouth and shot photographs by simply opening her mouth at people. Upon first glance, the view almost looks like you're looking out someone's eye.

Michael Zhang

Found Photos from Cameras Purchased at Car Boot Sales

For part of his MA in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Brendan Corrigan visited car boot sales -- a kind of market where people sell things out of their trunks -- and purchased old cameras for about the price of a roll of film. He then had the used film inside each camera developed, publishing the photos online alongside the cameras they were found in (along with the price he paid for the camera). His project is called "Make me an offer".

Michael Zhang

Light Painting Poetry into Photos

Math major and photo enthusiast Kris Hollingsworth created this beautiful photograph in which he light-painted an entire poem! It took patience and perseverance: practicing the technique took 15 hours, while the actual light painting took another two hours. The image is actually 9 separate photographs in one -- eight lines of poetry and the self-portrait of Hollingsworth.

Michael Zhang

HDR Photo of Endeavour Liftoff by NASA

Here's a good example of when HDR photography is useful: NASA created this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifting off for the final time by combining six separate photographs.

Each image was taken at a different exposure setting, then composited to balance the brightness of the rocket engine output with the regular daylight levels at which the orbiter can be seen. The processing software digitally removes pure black or pure white pixels from one image and replaces them with the most detailed pixel option from the five other images. This technique can help visualize debris falling during a launch or support research involving intense light sources like rocket engines, plasma experiments and hypersonic vehicle engines. [#]

Michael Zhang

Childhood Photos Reshot in the Present

DEAR PHOTOGRAPH is a neat photo project by Taylor Jones that collects pictures of pictures from the past in the present. These are images that show old photos held up and aligned to the present day location, offering a glimpse into what once was.

Michael Zhang

Unusual Uses for Potholes in Large Cities

Husband and wife photography duo Davide Luciano and Claudia Ficca have a project called "Potholes" in which they stage unusual scenes around giant potholes found in large cities (e.g. Montreal, NYC, LA, and Toronto). The project started after they collided with one such pothole and needed a way to channel their frustration into a positive project, transforming something useless into something humorous and creative.

Michael Zhang

15 Minutes to Shoot, 15 Years to Master

Here's a story that was shared over on the Photo.net forums recently:

Client : Nice shot. You got it in 15 minutes. But isn't 1,000 bucks for that a robbery?
Photographer : Yes, you are right, but to get it done correctly in 15 minutes it took me 15 years of hard work and dedication to master this art of "robbery".

When people see photographers at work, they often assume that the results must not be worth as much as other forms of art, since pressing the shutter to capture an image seems so much faster and easier than painting a photograph.

Michael Zhang

Hollywood Blvd Superheroes at Home

The superheroes that line Hollywood Boulevard for tourist pictures may have a tiny taste of stardom while on the job, but what are their lives like when they put down their masks and capes? For his project "Super Heroes", photographer Gregg Segal followed a number of superheroes home to document their not-so-super lives when not on the job.

Michael Zhang

Long Exposure Night Photos of Airplanes Taking Off and Landing

Sit around long enough near an airport and you can shoot photos like these -- stacked long-exposure images that make airplanes look like fireflies streaking around the night sky. Flickr user Terence Chang visits various locations around the Bay Area to capture these photographs of San Francisco International Airport.

Michael Zhang

Lens Taken From Vintage Camera Used on Canon 5D, Makes Beautiful Photos

Reddit user Bryce Hoeper recently broke an old Zeiss Ikon Contina L he purchased for $7 from Goodwill after it took a nasty tumble down some stairs. After being bummed for a while, he stumbled upon Timur Civan's experiment with sticking a 102-year old lens on a modern DSLR, and decided to attempt the same thing. He spent a few hours taking apart the camera body to extract the lens, then super glued it to a Canon body cap that he cut a hole in, allowing the lens to be mounted to his Canon 5D Mark II.

Michael Zhang

Photo Project Shows What People Would Save from a Burning House

If your house was going up in flames and you only had a few minutes to gather up a few things to save from the fire, which of your possessions would you choose? The Burning House is a neat photo project by Foster Huntington that asks this question, with photographs submitted by various people showing their most valuable possessions neatly arranged. Unsurprisingly, cameras and photographs are at the top of many peoples' lists.

Michael Zhang

Another Street Photographer Discovered, Captured Life in 1950s NYC

Frank Oscar Larson was an auditor living in Queens back in the 1950s who had a passion for street photography. Every weekend he would travel around the city armed with his Rolleiflex camera, photographing the things that caught his eye. After Larson died of a stroke at the age of 68 in 1964, his photographs quietly sat in a cardboard box for 45 years before finally being discovered by his son's widow in 2009. They offer a beautiful look into what life in NYC was like half a century ago.

Michael Zhang

Mailman Photographs the Dogs That Want to Kill Him

Everyone knows that mail carriers and dogs don't mix very well. San Diego mailman Ryan Bradford decided to document his encounters with the canine adversaries along his route using a disposable ISO 400, 35mm camera purchased from Rite Aid. The delightful photo essay that resulted, titled "All the Dogs Want to Kill Me", shows dogs glaring and barking at Bradford from the other side of fences, doors, and mail slots.

Michael Zhang

Chromogenic Prints Modified with Bleach

These bizarre looking images are what you get when you "modify" chromogenic prints with chlorine bleach. Flickr user Sarah Palmer has done a number of experiments with these technique, and the results are pretty abstract.