Inspiration

Chris Burkard is a California-based surf photographer who has shot for some of the biggest companies and publications in the world. After years of shooting on popular, sun-soaked beaches and making a living through his "dream job," Burkard began to yearn for beaches that weren't dominated by tourists and the comforts of civilization. So, he began traveling to remote -- and often frigid -- shores around the world for surf photos that are off the beaten path.

Freelance photographer Max Ellis of Teddington, UK, has received quite a bit of attention as of late for his ongoing Squirrelismo project, which features portraits of squirrels posing with various props. We caught up with Ellis to find out the secrets behind his viral pictures.

Mossless photo magazine founder and freelance photo editor Romke Hoogwaerts has launched a new video series titled in situ, which offers a casual, behind-the-scenes look at how photographers work and interact.

Warning: This post contains photos of injured veterans that are difficult to view.

Finnish photographer Tiina Törmänen wanted to capture how small and fragile humans are in the unfathomable expanse of space, so she shot a series of stunning self-portraits showing her silhouette dwarfed by a backdrop of stars and the Northern Lights. The series is titled "Wanderer."

Want an incredible dose of photographic inspiration? Check out this newly-released 2-minute trailer for the new TV series Tales by Light, a new TV series that follows 5 top photographers as they take their cameras to the ends of the Earth -- photographers who have an unquenchable desire to capture and share the wonders of this world with the rest of us.

Say hello to the new largest photo in the world. An international team led by photographer Filippo Blengini has published a gigantic panoramic photograph of Mont Blanc, Europe's highest mountain. This new record-holding image weighs in at a staggering 365 gigapixels.

Back in 2010, San Francisco-based photographer Christopher Michel received a once-in-a-lifetime photo assignment from the US Navel Institute: to ride in the back seat of a U-2 spy plane at the "edge of space." At the plane's cruising and intelligence-gathering altitude of 70,000 feet above the ground, temperatures outside the plane fall to 70 degrees below zero.

Robert De Niro was recently invited to give the graduation speech to the 2015 class at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts -- a large audience that included photography students. What he had to say has caused quite a stir.

The 2014 wedding season was very unique for me. It wasn't just that I participated on it from “the other side” -- I myself became a happy husband -- I was also a part of one particularly unconventional wedding photo shoot.

Here's a photo shoot idea that you probably shouldn't try yourself. Photographer Jake Harsh recently did a wild photo shoot with the electro-pop band Hand of Hearts that involved 18 pounds of fireworks exploding around the three band members. The short behind-the-scenes video above shows what the intense shoot was like.

Ever since I photographed basketball in Rwanda, I have been fascinated and almost obsessed with ways sport and fitness can improve culture and society. In particular, my fascination has revolved around impoverished regions. Last June, in Rwanda, where genocide, poverty, and disease devastated the small country and, a few months ago, in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.

After photographing a number of US cities at night through the open door of a helicopter, photographer Vincent Laforet has taken his Air project across the pond to shoot aerial shots of European cities. His first stop: London.

Carter Warden is a photographer very similar to the rest of us; he captures the world with a lens to his eye because it is a hobby that brings him joy. However, Warden had a bit of a surprise recently when he discovered that National Geographic was interested in paying for and publishing two of his underwater photographs.

As me and my team left for Vietnam this January, we had a goal: to make an interactive reportage about the world’s largest cave for National Geographic. This included several things no one had ever attempted before: lighting up and capturing the largest caverns that exist on this Earth. In 360 degrees.

I think, as an industry, photographers talk about inspiration a lot. We are either trying to find it, discover it or attempting to evoke it. I’ve recently found inspiration in the last place I would expect it: in my own work. More than the work, actually, the inspiration is from the subjects. And the inspiration that affected me has nothing to do with photography. Over the last two years, I’ve stumbled into photographing more athletes and fitness enthusiasts, and it has, in great part, …

"Fortuitous Layers" is a project by photographer Adam Allegro, who used an old Kodak Reflex II from 1948 to shoot random double exposures of San Francisco.

I'm photographer Joe Hendricks, and in this post I'll share some things I learned from trying to get into landscape photography.

Photographer Keow Wee Loong of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, just got his hands on the new Huawei P8 smartphone, which has an innovative "Light Painting" feature that stacks multiple images to create single long-exposure photos.

Vintage Trouble recently played their biggest gig in front of 115,000 people as the support act of AC/DCs “Rock or Bust” Tour 2015 at the Red Bull Ring in Zeltweg, Austria.

In this article, New York-based photographer Todd Vorenkamp shares 44 helpful tips you can use to improve the quality of your photography.

We first featured the Cardboard Box Office project back in 2013 as parents Lilly and Leon Mackie were attracting quite a bit of attention for their creative recreations of Hollywood films with their baby boy, Orson. In the year-and-a-half since, the family has continued shooting low-budget photos, branched out into TV shows, begun doing commercial shoots with their concept, and been nominated for a Webby award.

Photographer Eric Paré has built much of his career around the concept of light painting, but a recent photo shoot he did involved a very different source of lighting: the bioluminescence of glowing plankton.

This starry double exposure-style photograph was made using a single long exposure. Photographer Ted Schiele was 190 seconds into a long exposure photo of the night sky when he heard a car coming down the road. He then pointed his camera down towards the car and exposed the camera for another 13 seconds as it approached.

There was a time in which anyone who could light a photo well was of value, but those people are of no value anymore, says artist rep Maren Levinson. In the 5-minute interview above, Levinson offers some great insights into how the photography industry has changed over the past several years and what photographers need to do to stay relevant and needed.

Here's a fantastic 6-minute TED Talk by photographer Anand Varma, who recently became involved in the preservation of bees after being asked by National Geographic to shoot a story on them.

For the past two years, photographer Jordan Liles has been researching the life and work of George Bradford Brainerd, a lesser-known 19th-century photographer who shot 2,500 photos of New York before he died in 1887 at the age of 42.

For its latest installment of the Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera Challenge, DigitalRev TV invited photojournalist Gary Tyson of F8 Photography to shoot street photos of Hong Kong... using the 0.3MP camera on a VTech "smart watch" designed for kids.

This is a real, non-manipulated photo of 98 different foods cut into perfectly little 2.5cm cubes. It was created by Netherlands-based design studio Lernert & Sander at the request of the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant for a special issue on food.

A while back, I came across an article about using a super cheap CCTV lens. The results to me looked something like a Voigtlander f/0.95 but for a tiny fraction of the cost. I picked one up off eBay for something like $20 a year or so ago.

Flickr rolled out a new search engine last week, but one thing it still lacks is a way to search by EXIF data. A new website has launched to fill that hole. Called shutterdial, it's a Flickr search engine that lets you find photos by camera settings such as focal length, aperture, and shutter speed.

This photograph of an underwater camera being held up to a great white shark has been making the rounds on the Web over the past week. It was captured by a group of filmmakers who were shooting off the coast of South Australia.

LSU photography student Katie Joy Crawford has personally struggled with general anxiety disorder for over a decade. For her senior thesis exhibition, she chose to make her inner experience the subject of a series of self-portraits. The project is titled "My Anxious Heart."

Wedding photographer James Day tells us that he recently pulled off the "craziest stunt" of his career thus far: delivering the final wedding album to the newlywed couple at the end of their wedding day.

"In Motion" is a short film by photographer Aaron Grimes showing the city of Tokyo, Japan. It features a novel, surreal effect that was created by stacking video frames inside Adobe Photoshop and then recombining those stacked frames into a video again.

For the past two years, photographer Beth Mancuso has been taking pictures of her three sons and their relationship with their two cats. Her portraits, both candid and posed, offer a glimpse into the bond that has formed as the boys and cats grow up together as a family.

Photographer Andrew Jamieson was recently asked to give a presentation at work on his medium format film photography process. Instead of sharing a slideshow, Jamieson filmed this beautiful 4-minute video that covers how he loads Tri-X film into his Hasselblad, meters and shoots his photos, develops his film, scans it into a computer, and post-processes the images in Photoshop.

This photo may look like a Photoshopped image that blends a sunrise with a nighttime shot, but it's actually a single exposure of a moonrise.

The Grocery Store Project is an unusual and ambitious effort by Danish photographer Simon Hoegsberg. After spending 159 afternoons over 20 months shooting 97,000 photos of strangers near a supermarket in Copenhagen, Hoegsberg set out to find brief and hidden connections by analyzing the images.

If you have an hour to spare, here's a fantastic interview you should listen to. It's a Talks at Google event featuring renowned photographer Rick Smolan, who has shot for TIME, LIFE, and National Geographic. He's also one of the bestselling coffee table photo book photographers of all time.

Photographer Blake Morrow shot a creative series of clone photos showing his friend Beth Beard before and after she lost 150 pounds. The portraits were taken two years apart and combined into pop-culture inspired clone photos showing old Beth interacting with new Beth. It's a series titled The Beth Project.

Photographer and filmmaker Dheerankur Upasak of Mumbai, India, recently took his Canon 5D Mark III and 24-105mm lens around and shot everything handheld using the camera's 6fps burst mode. He then combined the stills into a video, added background sounds from the different scenes, and ended up with this short film titled "Unframed." …

Here's a short video in which National Geographic documentary photographer Wayne Lawrence talks about his recent project of documenting the city of Detroit.

I recently spent a few days in Kidepo Valley National Park, a remote reserve in the North of Uganda that borders South Sudan and Kenya.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz recently visited the set of the upcoming film Star Wars: The Force Awakens to shoot a series of behind-the-scenes photos for Vanity Fair. Above is a short video showing Leibovitz shooting portraits of the different actors and actresses in character.

It's amazing the kinds of space photos that amateur photographers can create from their own backyards these days. Case in point: the high-resolution moon photo above was captured last week by Polish photographer Bartosz Wojczyński. It was stacked together using 32000 separate photos.

A couple of months ago, we shared an interview with the photographer known as Weegee that was released in the 1958 vinyl record titled "Famous Photographers Tell How." On that same record is an interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson in which the legendary photojournalist shares his thoughts on what photography is, the way he approaches it, and various opinions on theory and technique.

My friend Matthew Simmons and I did recently did a photo shoot with an amazing little girl named Desi Robinson. After sending Renee, Desi's mother, the finished images and talking to her a few days after, something really hit me.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to achieve high magnification in your photography, you need to know about the reverse lens macro photography technique. Reverse lens macro photography has allowed me to achieve the magnification I couldn’t come close to with my more expensive equipment.

Boxing superstars Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao are set to engage in a historic match tomorrow dubbed "The Fight of the Century" that's expected to be the highest grossing fight in the history of the sport. Photographer Alexis Cuarezma was recently tasked with doing a portrait shoot of the two fighters for HBO.