Inspiration

Just a couple months after we reported that a 45-gigapixel photo of Dubai had become the world's largest, a new panorama has arrived to steal the crown. 70 Billion Pixels Budapest is a 70-gigapixel panorama of Budapest created using a setup of two 25-megapixel Sony A900 cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters. Four days of shooting resulted in 20,000 images, and an additional two days of post-processing produced a single 200 GB file. If printed, the size of the photo would be about two apartment blocks long and ten stories tall.

Lets say you had an uber-expensive Phantom slow motion camera, a flamethrower, and a fire extinguisher at your disposal. What would you do?

Mila's Daydreams is a creative photography project by Adele Enersen that's similar to Jan von Holleben's Dreams of Flying project that we featured a while back. Every day, when her baby daughter Mila takes a nap, Enersen imagines what her daughter might be dreaming about and stages a cute scene to capture it in a photograph.

Philip Heron and James Adair filmed this super slow motion video of things smashed, shot, chopped and dropped with a Photron SA1.1 high speed camera.

Here's a really astonishing stop-motion video of a guy walking across America. Peter Cote, director Sam Griffith, and the Conscious Minds Productions crew approached Levis jeans for sponsorship and products to use during the shoot. The trip began June 17 in New York and ended July 1 in San Francisco. For the actual photography, the crew used a Canon 5D.

Photographer Cosmin Bumbut was given the opportunity lead a photo workshop in one …

This music video may not have the suave nature of the single-take Old Spice commercials, but then again, neither do the unlucky men who fall victim to their runaway love interest. Plus, musician Tim Halperin had this video made for his song, "She Runs," with a budget of a mere $500. The video was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II.

Here’s a really neat video about the making of a Speedo ad campaign that is running all across Europe …

Here's a really imaginative short film called AT-AT day afternoon, created by Canadian filmmaker Patrick Boivin. Boivin took a vintage Star Wars Walker toy and transformed it into man's best friend. The film was created using a blend of stop-motion animation, puppetry, and clever household green screens that aren't always green. Boivin, who is self-trained in filmmaking and effects, said in an interview that he shoots primarily with a Canon 5D Mark II.

Check out the behind-the-scenes video below.

Photoshelter hosted this truly inspirational talk with photographer Tim Mantoani. It runs a bit long, but it's definitely worth a watch. Mantoani shares about what truly motivates and inspires him in photography, as well as the experiences photography yields. Most importantly, Mantoani talks about envisioning your dream photo and how to go about capturing it.

Photographer Samuel Cockedey created a series of time lapse photos of Tokyo landscapes …

Using a bit of drawer liner as both padding and case, Instructables Living editor …

The Sydney Morning Herald has an amazing collection of interviews with their photojournalists, sharing how they approach photography and …

There’s no app for this: Etsy seller …

Fine art photographer Susan Burnstine came up with the idea of making her own cameras from a hodgepodge of common household and hardware store objects. She picked up an old magnifying glass, plastic, rubber, garbage bags, cinema foil, metal, vintage toy camera parts, and cardboard, among other items, to create lenses and cameras. Above is a picture of one of her cameras.

Brothers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas, the same UK-based duo who created a remote-control BeetleCam to photograph wildlife in Africa, decided to get up-close and personal with some of nature's less desirable creatures. The two originally noticed mosquito larvae in stagnant water sitting in the backyard of their home, and decided they'd found their next photo subjects. They patiently set up the photo shoot, waiting for key moment when the adult mosquitoes emerged from their larval state. It's fascinating how delicate and alien the pesky critter is up-close:

Their patience and planning went a long way, Will tells us:
We did a bit of research into their development and discovered that it takes about 1-2 weeks (depending on the temperature) for them to develop into the adult form. This gave us a good amount of time to devise a set up to photograph them as they emerged.

Over the course of about 14 days, we kept a keen eye on their development. We kept the larvae in a glass of distilled water indoors and covered it with perforated cling film - we didn't want to suffer any bites during the night! Once the larvae had turned into pupae, we knew they were close to hatching. We soon discovered that when one straightened out, we had about 5 minutes until they hatched.

Street artist BLU released a breathtaking new stop-motion graffiti video called …

A few guys in Los Angeles recently convinced their friend to let them borrow his new iPhone 4 (that he waited 4.5 in line for), and got onto a rooftop with the help of another friend. Using some large helium balloons, they attached the iPhone and started recording 720p video of downtown LA as it rose up to 1000 feet into the air on the end of a kite string. They also made a fun behind-the-scenes video of their project.

Here's a photograph titled, "The Inexplicable Occurrence" by Toronto-based photographer Scott McClellan.

"Apple of My Eye" is a short film by Michael Koerbel that was created using only an iPhone 4 over the course of 48 hours. Editing was done entirely using the new iMovie app that's bundled with the iPhone 4. It's an extremely short film, running at about 1 minute without any real plot, but it's an interesting glimpse at what the new phone is capable of. The video above also includes a behind-the-scenes look at how it was created.

Li Wei is a Beijing-based artist that creates jaw-dropping scenes using mirrors, metal wires, scaffolding, and acrobatics. Check out his website here.

Lori Nix is a photographer that works with miniatures and models for surreal scenes and landscapes. Her work reminds us of the photographs by Matthew Albanese that we featured a while back. Her project "The City" depicts eerie abandoned buildings in an apocalyptic world:

A nasty storm rolled through Chicago recently, and Craig Shimala was ready to …

Roberts Birze, known as thescatteredimage on Flickr, has a neat set called "scattered images" in which he creates surreal panoramas by combining a large number of digital photographs taken of a particular scene:

OK Go, an LA-based rock band, makes some of the most creative music videos you'll ever see, from the treadmill video that amassed over 50 million views on YouTube to their gigantic Rube Goldberg machine one that dropped jaws around the world. Their latest video for the song "End Love" is yet another display of pure creativity, as they blend stop motion and slow motion techniques in strange and awesome new ways.

Pacific Star is a photography project by Colin Rich in which he sends programmed cameras up to epic heights using homemade weather balloons. This is an interesting step-by-step look into what went into the second launch. After purchasing two Canon compact cameras on eBay, Rich programmed them to take 3 photos every 3 minutes, and shoot a minute of video every fourth minute. The cameras were then insulated in styrofoam, and sent up to 125,000 feet before the balloon burst. With the help of a parachute, the cameras descended for 35 minutes and landed about 15-20 miles away.

This beautiful video shows world champion freediver Guillaume Néry plunging into Dean's Blue Hole, the world's second deepest underwater sinkhole. It was filmed by Julie Gautier, a French freediving champion, using a Canon 5D Mark II. Gautier filmed the video while freediving herself, and the stunts were filmed over four afternoons.

Classics in Lego is a super creative project by Mike Stimpson in which he recreates famous photographs using Legos.

Dalí Atomicus

This stop-motion video will blow you away. Students in Japan created this video of Super Mario for a school …

I came across an interesting post over at The Guardian a while back that discussed whether Google's ranking algorithms are good at gauging art, and whether the top result for an artist accurately reflects the artist's "best work".

I decided to do the same experiment with famous historical photographers. The following images are the top results when typing the photographers' names into Google's image search:

Berenice Abbott