Ever since light painting exploded onto the scene some years ago, writing your signature by waving a light source in a long exposure has become a very common photo idea. But have you ever tried writing your signature by waving your camera at the moon?
That's what photographer John Kraus attempted recently, and the photo above shows the results of his effort.
In 2013, photographer Brad Goldpaint and his wife Marci quit their day jobs, sold all of their possessions, and began living out of a motorhome while traveling through the Western United States. Their new career was teaching photography workshops while educating the public about the damaging effects of light pollution.
As the duo moved from place to place through some of the nation's most pristine wilderness areas, Goldpaint spent countless nights out in the dark, capturing long exposure photos over many hours with his camera gear. The images have since been put together into an independent stop-motion film titled “Illusion of Lights: A Journey into the Unseen.” Above is the film's trailer.
Nikon and The Telegraph recently partnered up for a campaign titled "I Am Different." It's a series of short videos showing how 5 different photographers are using their Nikon DSLR in various niches of photography.
American photojournalist W. Eugene Smith was widely praised for his devotion to photography and for pioneering the use of the photo essay to tell stories. He is said to have "created at least fifty images so powerful that they have changed the perception of our history."
There's one little fact about how Smith worked that may be of great interest to photographers these days, especially as debates rage on regarding the merits of "straight out of camera" (SOOC. i.e. non-Photoshopped) photography: Smith believed that most of what makes a photo is done in the darkroom rather than in the camera.
Here’s something else to file under “Strange things people are doing with camera drones”: …
Zak Noyle is a surf photographer based out of Oahu, Hawaii who's considered to be one of the best in the business. He became the senior staff photographer of Surfer Magazine when he was just 25 years old, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines (e.g. ESPN, SI, Nat Geo) and advertisements (e.g. Billabong, Chanel).
Light painting photographer Darren Pearson spent the past year working on the stop motion animation above, titled "Lightspeed." Each of the 1,000 frames in it is a separate light-painted photograph that was captured in various locations across California.
For the past 10 years, 27-year-old Xyza Cruz Bacani has been working as a domestic worker for a wealthy Chinese family in Hong Kong. On her days off, she brings her camera onto her city's sidewalks and captures impressive street photos.
Yesterday, Bacani's life took a dramatic turn: she was announced as a recipient of the 2015 Human Rights Fellowship by the Magnum Foundation, a prestigious scholarship that will give her the opportunity to study in an intensive, six-week-long program at New York University in NYC.
Richard Roberts is a freelance creative retoucher and digital artist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Over the past decade, he has worked on advertisements and promotional materials for clients that include Fox, HBO, Mountain Dew, Under Armor, Kelloggs, and Gillette.
For most of his projects, Roberts will capture snapshots of the image at various stages of compositing -- glimpses are later combined into animated GIFs that show how the various images were made.
Artist INSA is known for creating mesmerizing animated GIFs using street art and photos. He was recently recruited by the scotch whisky brand Ballantines to create "the world's largest animated GIF," one that was created with gigantic paintings on the ground and photos from a satellite camera.
For his project "Comfort Zone," Lithuanian photographer Tadao Cern visited a public beach and shot photographs of the people sleeping comfortably on the sandy beach. The images were not staged, and none of the subjects were aware that a photograph was being made.
This isn't related to still photography, but we occasionally share some creative ideas from the world of video. The short film above by Eran Amir is titled "This Video is in Reverse." It may look relatively straightforward at first glance, but get this: everything you see was captured in a single take and then played backwards.
Kevin McGloughlin of Sligo, Ireland created this captivating music video for the song "Never Knew" by Sunken Foal. He tells us his use of "lights and bokeh in an unconventional way" recently got his project selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick.
Japanese photographer Daisuke Takakura takes clone photography pretty seriously. His project "Monodramatic" features some models tens of times, with some of the clones so far away from the camera that they can barely be seen in the distance.
Here's a nice dose of inspiration: above is a beautiful 16-minute mini-documentary that looks at the work of Sydney-based street photographer Markus Andersen. Titled "Belly of the Beast," the profile features Andersen talking about his thought process and love for film photography.
Photographer Jeffrey Vanhoutte of Brussels, Belgium was recently tasked with shooting a series of photos for a coffee creamer company. They ended up doing a mixed photo/video shoot with a professional acrobatic dancer flinging puffs of white powder into the air while doing dance moves.
German photographer Marion Luttenberger was asked by Moodley Brand Identity to shoot a series of infographics for Caritas Kontakladen, an Austrian organization that assists drug addicts. The resulting images convey facts and figure in clever ways through carefully arranged physical objects in the frame.
Photographer Tom Johnson recently partnered up with stylist Phoebe Haines for a project titled The Thirty Three. The team roamed the streets of London for five days, asking thirty three random strangers to put on haute couture (i.e. "high fashion") clothing and pose for portraits.
Photographer Vincent Laforet captured some stunning nighttime photographs of New York City while leaning out of an open helicopter door 7,500 feet in the air. At that altitude, Laforet was able to look down at air traffic around NYC's major airports, and there was no extra pane of glass between the photographer and the city. A few thousand feet higher and oxygen masks would have been required.
In Jessica Shyba's home, nap time is a sacred ritual. At the same time every day, her son Beau, baby Evangeline, and dog Theo take a cuddly nap together in her room. And while nap time is underway, Shyba will often take the opportunity to capture a heartwarming photograph of the little trio cuddling together in bed.
Here's a neat video that shows what you get in a star trails time-lapse if you slowly move your lens' zoom ring over the course of the long exposures. Long exposures naturally create star trails around Earth's axis of rotation, but throw in some motorized zooms and you can turn those ordinary trails into some pretty trippy effects.
Want to see the photographs that made the biggest splash on Flickr over the course of 2014? Flickr's website doesn't have a leaderboard -- the best you can do is explore popular photos -- but luckily for us, the company has just announced the top 25.
Here's a creative (and super meta) idea for a photo project: photographer Sean Hawkey traveled to a silver mine in Peru and shot tintype portraits of the miners there using the silver they mined as his emulsion.
German photographer Jan von Holleben is known for creating imaginative scenes by having kids lie on the ground and carefully arranging everyday objects around them. One of his first viral projects that featured this style was "Dreams of Flying".
His latest one is the most ambitious and elaborate of them all. Titled "Konrad Wimmel is in Town," the series features gigantic scenes that took a year to create.
Nicky Bay is a Singapore-based photographer who captures the beauty and diversity of insects in Singapore's rainforests through macro photography. He made 46 trips out into the wild in 2014, capturing tens of thousands of photographs and sharing thousands of photos online.
For her project "Crazy Cat Lovers," photographer Andréanne Lupien used clone photography to turn ordinary cat owners with one cat (or sometimes two or three) into crazy cat people with an army of cats swarming their homes.
They may look like fitness models, but they aren’t.
They’re everyday people — office workers, programmers and mothers who took the chance to try something they had never done before.
"Barbie Blad" by photographer Hamid Blad is a series of portraits that mixes the old and the new. The oldness is contributed by the fact that they are created using the 19th-century collodion process, while the newness is due to the fact that each portrait is of a Barbie doll.
18-year-old Saar Oz of Creavite created this beautiful and inspirational video for people who are just starting out in a creative field such as photography. It's easy to become frustrated (and even give up) when you experience "the gap" between your skills and your tastes, but the important thing is to never give up.
Spinning some burning steel wool around on the end of a rope is popular as a way to create dazzling long exposure photographs. It can also be used for dazzling video as well.
Photographer Richie Johnston created the video above by capturing a woman spinning steel wool in a forest and then reversing the footage. It's titled "Ignition Sequences."
Photographer and film director Naren Wilks created this mind-bending music video by arranging DSLRs around a circular green screen room. When the perspectives of the cameras are combined and synchronized, a "rotationally symmetric, kaleidoscopic world" is created. The song is "Fear & Delight" from the album Puppet Loosely Strung by The Correspondents.
Israel-based astrophotographer Gadi Eidelheit recently managed to capture the International Space Station crossing the moon on camera. In the video above, we see how fast the ISS appears to travel when seen by an observer here on Earth (it spends less than 1 second in front of the moon).
I visit San Francisco often to walk the streets with camera in hand, hoping to capture life as it happens. Invariably I am asked for change and/or a cigarette. For the most part I try to be generous, but as a non-smoker I’m not able to oblige. I then wondered what would happen if the situation was reversed: instead of being asked for a cigarette I would offer them to random people from all walks of life.
Up until recently, Tao Liu was just an unknown water meter reader in China with an interest in photography. Then people started noticing his clever photos captured on sidewalks, and now Liu has become one of China's hottest street photographers.
The short film above, titled "Che - A Moment in Time," was created entirely out of still photographs. Animator Bennie Melwin created the experimental short film by taking historical photographs -- including the iconic "Guerrillero Heroico" photo of Che Guevara -- and bringing the scenes to life through clever digital trickery.
By day, Robert Jahns is a digital artist and art director based in Germany. By night, he's known as nois7 on Instagram and runs a popular account boasting more than 600,000 followers. His stream of images consists of dreamlike photos that are often clearly the result of compositing, but there's one hidden fact that sets Jahns apart: his editing is done strictly on his phone.
Remember when I wrote "Dear New Photographer..." a few months ago? One of the big points I emphasized was valuing your photography and business skills.
Every year, on New Year's Day, the Internet is swarming with shiny new 52 Week Projects or 365 Week Projects directed specifically to photographers. And don't get me wrong -- I love these projects! The idea behind them is to get people shooting more, and shooting more outside their own comfort zone.
3D projections are often used nowadays to create eye-popping visuals on flat surfaces such as the sides of buildings or on basketball courts, but could the same concept be done out in the wild where things aren't flat and orderly? Photographer Tarek Mawad and animator Friedrich van Schoor recently decided to try it out.
What resulted is the video above, titled "Projections in the Forest". The two artists spent six weeks illuminating various things in nature with a powerful projector and then capturing the results on camera.
One second per day videos have gotten quite popular in recent years, and now there are even apps that can help you do the project. Ben Schmidt of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada decided to take the concept to the next level by delivering a speech over the course of a year by saying one word to his camera per day.
"Seven Generations of American Women" is a project by Los Angeles-based photographer Christine McConnell in which she recreated her family portraits going back 200 years. The series starts with her great-great-great-grandmother and ends in the present day.
One of photographer Jeff Paradiso's big projects this past year was to create a sideways room for "anti-gravity" photos. These are images in which the viewer is disoriented in regards to which way is up.
The images in photographer Emma Phillips' 'Salt' series may look like they were captured in desolate polar regions of the world, but they actually show a location in Western Australia. Phillips created the project when she came across a salt refinery with mountains of salt piled up, forming strange white alien landscapes.
Brazilian sports photographer Marcelo Maragni likes to do experimental photography in addition to his "ordinary" sports photography. Earlier this year, he decided that he wanted to try to capture action shots at night with ultraviolet flashes and colorful paint.
Earlier this year, photographer Carl Pendle released a popular video showing himself doing street photography with a Hasselblad 500C/M, from the perspective of the photographer looking down into the camera's viewfinder.
That was simply "a test video" he says. Now he's back again with a more polished attempt at the same idea. The video above shows the "viewfinder view" of a recent project in which Pendle shot portraits of barbers in London barbershops.
DigitalRev TV is back with another episode of the Cheap Camera Challenge. This time, renowned fashioned photographer Lara Jade is tasked with shooting haute couture fashion photographs on the streets of Hong Kong using a 0.3-megapixel Anpanman camera packed with "awful features".
The Admont Abbey in Austria is one of the oldest monasteries in the world, and inside is the largest monastic library in the world. The grand library hall was built back in 1776 and contains roughly 70,000 books. 48 windows fill the chamber with gorgeous natural lighting.
Photographer Benjamin Von Wong was recently given access to the historic building and used the opportunity to do the first creative photo shoot ever held there.
Simon Byrnes of The Pixelist operates a time-freezing camera array consisting of 140 Canon 1100D (AKA the Rebel T3) DSLRs. One client has been the UK show Got To Dance, for which the cameras are used to capture bullet-time sequences of dancers. During a period when the TV show was off air, Byrnes decided to have some fun with the rig and captured some shots that became the video above. It's titled "The Timefreezers."
Michel Rajkovic is a fine art photographer based in Asnieres, France. He travels the world and captures photos of time passing through landscapes by shooting long exposure photographs on medium format black and white film.
23-year-old videographer Nejc Miljak created this inspiring short film about Slovenian landscape photographer Janez Tolar. It's titled, "Before You Wake Up".
In the early hours when you probably sleep and dream, he discovers the world around us. His passion is nature and it's landscapes. With his camera he capture it's magic.
"I wake up early so I can wake the sun up, not the other way around," Tolar says.
Ryan Freeman has been creating a short film series called …