Inspiration

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".

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.

"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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

Ryan Freeman has been creating a short film series called The Guild, which features interviews with some of the "creative minds of our time." The video above features photographer Jakob de Boer -- a guy who also tests prototypes for Leica and Adobe -- talking about his creative process and relationship to photography. "My advice to people is to walk softly but speak loudly with your art," he says.

Fashion street photographers usually look for styles that are one of a kind. Hans Eijkelboom doesn't. For over twenty years, the Dutch 'anti-sartorial' photographer has roamed the streets of major cities around the world in search for the common -- people showing similar tastes in clothing, accessories, or behavior.

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.

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.

Here's a short, inspiring video profile of Brooklyn-based street photographer Andre D. Wagner. We're offered a glimpse into Wagner's mind as he talks about his process for creating images, from how he approaches photographing people on sidewalks with a Leica 35mm film rangefinder to his love of making photos with his hands in his darkroom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.