Here's my 2014 Christmas card: Santa in Carbonite! At the end of every year my studio collects all of the cool card ideas that we thought of during the season. I then create a calendar event for the next November, listing out the ideas we thought of. Last year we came up with a Star Wars Christmas card idea with the boys guarding Santa Claus, frozen in carbonite. Call them Imperial Elves.
Back in 2012, we wrote about a project called "Pixel Trade" by Australian photographer Shantanu Starick. The basic idea was simple but crazy: Starick wanted to travel through all seven continents on the globe without ever spending any currency. Instead, he would try to trade his services as a photographer to people willing to provide him with shelter, food, and transportation.
Starick recently appeared at Behance's 99U to give a 20-minute talk on spending the past two years living on photos instead of money.
The city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is known for its impressive skyline, which features the world's tallest building. Every so often, the city will become blanketed with a thick layer of fog that opens the door to beautiful photos of skyscrapers rising above clouds.
Daniel Cheong is one photographer who's always on the lookout for this particular photo opportunity. Over the years, he has built up an impressive collection of shots showing skyscrapers poking through Dubai fog.
Here’s a short, inspiring video profile of Brooklyn-based street photographer Andre D. Wagner.
Bristol, England-based photographer Peter Thorpe has a special treat for his clients every holiday season. For the past 20 years, he has sent hilarious promo Christmas cards featuring his dogs as different animals in elaborate handmade scenes.
This photograph of a woman glued to her smartphone has been selected as the Grand Prize winner of the 2014 National Geographic Photography Contest. It was captured by photographer Brian Yen of Hong Kong.
For a new marketing campaign titled "Inspired Light," Infiniti invited Canadian professional light painting photographer Patrick Rochon to Dubai to transform three of its cars into "moving light painting brushes."
Here's a short clip from the Smithsonian Channel's series "Hunt for the Super Predator." It shows an encounter a team of photographers and scientists had with killer whales at Bremer Canyon off the coast of Western Australia.
Using a special camera rig he designed, wildlife cameraman David Riggs shot some amazing underwater footage of killer whales that looks too good to be true (you can find it at 1:35 in the video).
Over the past 6 months, photographer Justin Bettman and stylist Gozde Eker have been building elaborate sets on the sidewalks of New York City using unwanted furniture and household items, most of which is found discarded on the street. The sets are made to look like the rooms of a house.
Griffin Lamb is a 19-year-old freelance photographer based out of Seattle, Washington. On weekends Lamb goes on adventures, hiking and backpacking in the great outdoors with his friends.
Over the years, he has built up quite an impressive portfolio of breathtaking landscape photographs that capture the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
Using super-telephoto lenses to frame people against the rising moon has become quite popular as of late. Just last year we shared examples featuring people at a lookout, a high-line walker, and a mountain biker.
Photographer Göran Strand recently decided to take the idea a bit further by framing his subjects against the sun.
Colorizing old black and white photographs in Photoshop has become quite a trend over the past few years, and communities of retouchers have sprung up in order to share and compare their work.
One particular colorizer named Jordan Lloyd has decided to turn his hobby into a business called Dynamichrome. It specializes "in high fidelity colour reconstruction services in culture, history and entertainment."
Check out this crazy self-portrait photo by a guy named Timothy LaBranche. It's a composite image showing LaBranche posing as all 100 passengers in the cabin of a passenger plane.
In February 2013, Hindus from around the world made a pilgrimage of faith to bathe in the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India. The event was called Maha Kumbh Mela, a particular festival held once every 144 years, and an estimated 100 million people visited the site over a period of days. It was likely the single largest peaceful gathering of people in the history of the world.
Toronto-based time-lapse photographer Ryan Emond has released an impressive new video that takes you on an tour of the Toronto skyline, hyperlapse style. The project is titled, "Toronto Skyline Porn," and features gorgeous shots captured high overhead, with many of the shots seamlessly zooming into the following ones.
Check out this comic book illustration of Marvel's Silver Surfer. What you might not be able to tell at first glance is that it's not actually an illustration at all, but rather a photograph of an actual model.
Photographer Adam Rabinowitz's Tiger Suit project is like Humans of New York crossed with Tigger from Winnie the Poo. Like HONY's Brandon Stanton, Rabinowitz photographs strangers on the street and jots down interesting blurbs from their conversation. There's one big difference in the projects, though: Rabinowitz's subjects must agree to put on his tiger suit.
Peer into the Gowanus Canal in New York City, and you'll see what is widely recognized as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. The contamination is so bad that the canal has been designated a Superfund site.
When photographer Steven Hirsch looks, he sees something more: fine art. His project “Gowanus: Off The Water’s Surface" is a series of photographs that explore the abstract explosions of patterns and colors seen on the surface of the water -- sights reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painting.
Here’s a short and inspiring video in which renowned photojournalist Steve McCurry talks …
Creating a stop motion music video by photographing a boatload of physical prints is nothing new, but what happens if you add gasoline and fire to the mix?
That's what visual artist Christophe Thockler decided to do in creating the music video above for the song "Why Won't You" by Victoria+Jean. Each of the prints seen in the video is on fire.
Adventure photographer Cory Richards gave this inspiring talk earlier this year at National …
Here's a stunt you probably shouldn't try at home -- unless you've been featured in a GoPro commercial or something. Photographer Matthew Jones recently attempted what he calls a "Human Rig shot." The goal was to shoot a motorcycle zipping down a road, but instead of using a fancy rig or a car, Jones decided to step into a pair of rollerblades.
Well known Instagram user, street photographer, and Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Richard Koci Hernandez has announced he will be deleting all of his photographs from the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service.
If Patrick and Lee from Fstoppers and landscape/travel photographer Elia Locardi's goal was to get our hearts racing, they've succeeded in spades with the drone footage they just released from their time in Iceland.
Adventure photographer Andy Mann’s journey into the world of photography has been unconventional in almost every regard. Without any formal training or education in the field, it was a pure love for adventure and photographs that inspired him to pick up a camera.
This moment, this light, in Cape Churchill last week: it didn’t last long. You can photograph it, or let it pass you by. But you may never see it again.
Last week I was sitting in a tundra buggy not photographing polar bears. The bears, driven by a months-long hunger were out on the sea ice, hunting seals. If we’d been there a couple days earlier we’d have had more time with them. But you can’t do anything about the weather, and you never know these things in advance. What you do know, is what’s in front of your face, and that -- at least for one day on this trip -- was polar bears.
Simeon Quarrie is a talented, well-respected wedding photographer based out of the UK. But despite his impressive portfolio, humble attitude, and dedication to his work, when he shares it online, people inevitably come out of the woodwork to tear into the most minute details, oftentimes without even bothering to put his work in proper context.
It’s these individuals that inspired Quarrie to sit down with a camera before a recent shoot and spill his thoughts on trolls: the overly and unnecessarily critical individuals who slam and bring down the work we all share online.
In 2011, when the end of NASA's shuttle program was announced, photographer Dan Winters decided that he would photograph the final three launches and compile those images into a book.
That book, Last Launch, was released in 2012, and is well worth the $33 if would cost you to pick it up for yourself on Amazon. But, of course, sometimes the story behind the images is just as powerful than the images themselves, and Winters recently opened up about the entire experience on stage at WIRED by Design.
Amidst the many photos of hate, anger, sadness and sometimes outright destruction that have flooded the media since a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, sparking riots and protests across the US, there are glimmers of hope and humanity.
One such glimmer was captured by Oregon-based freelance photographer Jonny Nguyen at a Ferguson demonstration in Portland earlier this week.
22-year-old Alexis Taylor recently shared an email she received from her 96-year-old photographer grandfather, and it's just too wonderful not to share.
Astrophotographer extraordinaire Göran Strand created this neat composite image to explore an interesting 'what if?' scenario: What if your eyes could see the sun the way a Hydrogen Alpha Telescope does? What would a sunset look like then?
Despite the video's title, the short, encouraging snippet above from photographer Joel Grimes isn't about finding a specific set of characteristics that define "a great photograph." Instead, it's about finding out what a great photograph is to you.
It's a matter of taste, discovering your personal vision, and then coming to terms with the fact that not everybody is going to love what you do.
Photographer Zeb Andrews prefers to slow the world down when he captures a photograph. The Portland-based photographer first began shooting with a pinhole camera purely for fun, but little did he know that, within a matter of a few years his work would take him to Turkey where he would share his love of pinhole photography with Syrian child refugees.
Inspired by Alex Koloskov's popular iPhone vs. Hasselblad whisky glass video, photographer Tilo Gockel decided to give cheap gear professional product photography a try of his own -- and he knocked it out of the park.
Using just an old iPhone 4s, an IKEA lamp, two LED flashlights, and a few Translumfoil cards (you can use parchment), he captured the photograph you see above.
It's easy to assume the successful photographers in the industry have always had it figured out. Commercial shoots fell in their laps and they took to the experience like they were born with a Hasselblad in their hands. But that, of course, is not always the case.
In the episode of Behind the Glass above, Nikon Ambassador Dixie Dixon tells the tale of one of her first major campaign shoots... and how it almost went terribly wrong.
Editor's note: Some of the imagery in the video might be considered NSFW, proceed with caution.
Here's an oldie but really goodie from Pix Channel, who put together a set of short clips of some of photography's greatest names talking about their craft and what makes them ‘click’.
Photographer Stefan Litster created this “photo adventure” video showing how he shoots portraits …
Need a bit more awe and wonder in your life? Look no further than the newest image released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A high-res reprocessed color view of Jupiter's moon Europa as captured by the spacecraft Galileo in the late 1990s, the photo "shows the largest portion of the moon's surface at the highest resolution."
With the exception of the opening shot, Joe Capra of Scientifantastic's beautiful time-lapse Two Lands stays pretty far away from the humanity. A trip into the snowy wilderness of Iceland and Greenland, the time-lapse treats you to some spectacular landscapes complete with enough Aurora to make your head explode with wanderlust.
Two years ago we dubbed photographer Thomas Shahan ‘the Bob Ross of bug photography.’ Today, we’re back with a video from the macro master in which he dives into his workflow in the field, dropping bits and pieces of useful knowledge as he goes through a daily shoot.
In a decade's time, the Sandy Glacier Caves -- thought to be the largest glacier cave system in the continental United States -- might disappear entirely. It was this startling discovery that led filmmaker Ben Canales and his team at Uncage the Soul onto the steep slopes of Mount Hood to film a visually breathtaking short film called Requiem of Ice.
How do you capture 'routine' on camera? That was the question that talented cinemagraph creator Julien Douvier (featured before here and here) was asking himself late last year. The answer, when it struck him, was simple: nothing is perhaps more routine than our early morning walk to work.
So he set about capturing that in the only way he knew how: photography with a touch of motion -- or videography with a touch of stillness -- in order words, cinemagraphs.
From images of graphene flowers and foam to a portrait of a self-taught engineer fixing one of his elephant pumps that is providing clean water for a village in Malawi, the winning images and other impressive entrants in the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering's photography competition beautifully illustrate how art, science, and humanity mesh.
Star trail time-lapses can be absolutely beautiful, even mesmerizing. But as incredible as the stars themselves are, the foreground subject matter can really help to set the stage and take your images of the night sky to a whole new level.
WAVELIGHT by Gavin Heffernan and Harun Mehmedinovic is a perfect example of this. The duo used beautiful, eroded stone in Arizona as leading lines and contours that move your eye to the star trails, even as they add their own captivating tone to the entire creation.
Stop-motion is a painstaking and labor and time-intensive process when you do it with photographs, so imagine creating an entire stop-motion video using only oil paintings. That's exactly what ambient folk band The Sea The Sea decided to do for their most recent music video, enlisting the help of artist Zachary Johnson to do the heavy lifting... or painting.
In all, the final music video is made up of 3,454 oil paintings that take you on a nighttime cab ride home through New York City.
Lisa Holloway might be a super-human. Until we get her near some kryptonite, we can't be sure, but the self-taught photographer somehow manages to take care of 10 children while simultaneously running a successful photography business.
All the while, she's stacking her portfolio full of gorgeous natural light portraits of newborns, babies, children, seniors and families.
Photographer Mike Hollingshead has gained quite a bit of exposure online for his jaw-dropping photos of storms across the United States. We featured his work here in January of 2014.
Recently, Hollingshead has begun to branch out his work into a new direction: cinemagraphs.
Photographer Dan Vojtěch teamed up with Red Bull wakeskater Zuzana Vráblová for a unique and technologically challenging photo shoot. Vojtěch and his team utilized 3D scanning technology, 3D printing, and studio photography to create some eye-catching images.
Los Angeles-based photographer Zachary Scott of Sharpe & Associates was recently commissioned by New York Times Magazine to shoot a quirky series of portraits for a feature titled, "What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set?" The piece was about the area of reverse aging research, so Scott's task was to make a group of kids look like they had instantly aged 70 years or so.
We’ve shared an interview with him and even featured a short behind-the-scenes video of him explaining his process a bit. But Nikon recently released a comprehensive collection of videos that will tell you just about everything you might want to know about Clark Little and his beautiful big wave photography.