Inspiration

New York-based photographer Alex John Beck began his series Both Sides Of in order to explore two beliefs. First, that perfectly symmetrical faces are the most beautiful. And second, that one face is representative of one character.

The final photographs, displayed as pairs of symmetrical portraits that show what the subject would look like if you simply mirrored their left or right sides, seem to indicate that neither of these beliefs holds true.

We first introduced you to scientist and photographer Zachary Copfer's 'bacteriographs' back in 2012. A technique that he invented and, as far as we know, only he uses, Bacteriography uses the subject's own bacteria to 'grow' a portrait of them on a petri dish.

Earlier this month, Copfer brought his signature technique to the UK for the first time ever in order to photograph several British celebrities at the UK's Big Bang Fair.

World Press Photo 2014 jury chair Gary Knight has said that many of this year's entries into the contest were "missing something" -- and there's quite a bit of controversy surrounding the contest -- but he doesn't want that to take away from your opinion of the winning photographs.

To that end, World Press Photo has released the video above in which Knight talks about several of the winning entries and why the jury picked them to take home first (and in one case second) prize.

Michael Shainblum captured this perfectly timed (call it luck if you want, but luck favors the prepared, so we're going with perfectly timed) shot of lightning striking the Burj Khalifa during a storm on Wednesday of last week.

We realize it's February 16th, but it's hard for us to pass up an opportunity to watch Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York at work. And so, two days removed from Valentine's Day, we give you the love stories of HONY as told by ABC News this last Friday when they featured Stanton as their person of the week.

It's a good day to share a nerdy photographer love story, and Greg Wlosinski and Lindsay King's story certainly fits the mold. And what's more, Greg was able to document the couple's recent proposal in a creative stop motion video inspired by a few posts he read right here on PetaPixel.

If you type Wedding Photography into Google's Image Search, you'll be greeted by a flood of Pin-able fairytale wedding photographs for the traditional bride who wants the traditional white wedding where everything is perfect and there are no sitcom clap tracks.

But what if you're not the typical couple who wants the typical wedding? What if the best term to describe you is "badass" or simply "different"? Well, that's when you call Allebach Photography, a studio specializing in wedding photography the likes of which you won't see in ye olde bridal magazine... although you will see it in many a tattoo publication.

Last year's World Press Photo of the Year award went to a controversial image of a funeral procession in Gaza, City. This year's winning photo doesn't strike the same tragic nerve as last year's, and yet it makes such a powerful statement about technology and our global community that we immediately understood why it took home the top prize.

There's no use ignoring it, it's Valentine's day, and that means some cool photography related Valentine's stuff will invariably make it onto PetaPixel. No worries though, it's not all going to be sappy and romantic. Some of what we'll share, like this awesome 15-second stop-motion video, is downright hardcore.

Lets set aside all the controversy surrounding the 2014 Olympic Games for a moment and just take in the view, because NASA has -- in the way only NASA can -- put the games in perspective for us with this beautiful photo taken while passing over Sochi at night in the International Space Station (ISS).

Gilles Roudiere was born 1976 in France and lives and works in Berlin. He is a self-taught photographer, and in 2005 he decided to give up his job as an executive to concentrate on photography. His work mainly focuses on Central and Eastern European countries.

"Enough pressure to conform will send anyone packing." That's how photographer and art director Suzanne Heintz begins the description of her viral, satirical and funny photo series Life Once Removed. Too many suggestions that she was getting a bit too old to still be single -- that she needed to "just PICK somebody" and "settle down" -- pushed her to the point where she did pick somebody.

That someone, however, was a mannequin family, which she promptly packed up in her station wagon and took on a road trip.

Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner's portfolio is made up almost entirely of places. His work revolves around capturing cities or, in this case, entire countries in such a way as to bring out some unspoken quality of the place that makes it unique.

In his series on India, a place teeming with that mystical spiritual power often associated with the East, he uses black and white photography to portray tourist landmarks and natural oases alike as haunting, mysterious and solitary places of peace.

PetaPixel readers should already be familiar with Eric Paré's work. Often a combination of multiple photographic disciplines, his videos offer, if not something unique, then something at the very least different from the multitude of time-lapse, stop-motion and light painting work out there.

His newest project, called WindScale, is a combination of time-lapse and stop-motion that he and a friend created on their way from Montréal to Burning Man in Nevada last year.

This TV Spot is the height of creativity, and we absolutely love it. In 50 seconds and one uninterrupted flowing video shot, UK directing duo US and advertising agency Grey (the guys behind the amazing exploding spices commercial) pay tribute to six completely unique, culturally iconic images by expertly recreating one after the other.

In the picture above, taken on January 30th 2014, you see more than 315,000 Euro worth of Canon camera …

Artist Emma Howell's landscape images are unlike any we've ever run across. Not because she's capturing something unique, or using a process we've not seen before. They are unique because her images, captured using the wet plate collodion method, are exposed directly onto handblown glass vessels she creates herself.

We never get sick of going behind the scenes with Brandon Stanton and Humans of New York, probably because we never tire of hearing Stanton's story. An amateur photographer who moved to New York in 2010 with two suitcases and a goal has somehow managed to start a movement that has attracted millions of followers, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity, and spawned many a Humans of _____ copycat.

At 2.8 million followers, HONY is one of the most successful pages on Facebook's massive network, and so Facebook chose it as one of the 10 'stories' they would tell for the site's 10th Anniversary.

For going on two decades after the end of World War I, Costica Ascinte was quite possibly the only professional photographer in all of Romania. He continued to work right up until his death in 1984, by which point he had accumulated over 5,000 glass plate negatives and several hundred prints -- a visual history of the Romanian people and a culture that, we know from previous articles, may soon be gone for good.

Unfortunately, this massive, culturally-rich archive is slowly disappearing as time and improper storage take their toll. But one man, Cezar Popescu, is determined to rescue whatever is still salvageable, and is well on his way to digitizing the entire archive even as it deteriorates before his very eyes.

Arie van't Riet isn't your typical photographer. In fact, he's not a photographer at all. Riet is a Dutch physicist-artist who has a knack for creating stunning colored X-ray images of nature that he calls 'Bioramas.'

If there is only one way for me to describe Iceland, it would be “Monumental Scale Shock”. The country really borders on the extreme. The entire country’s population of 320,137 (as of 2012) is less than one half of Boston’s and two-thirds of everyone lives in the capital, Reykjavik. It's north of NYC by almost all of Canada, but it is warmer by about ten degrees in the winter. And 85% of the country is on renewable energy (Volcanic and Water) as compared to the 13.2% for the US.

We're not in the habit of reposting things we've covered before, even though at least once per week we run across some post or video from a few years ago that is going 're-viral' and is being covered by everyone who missed it the last go around (and some who didn't).

For this video, however, we're making an exception. And we beg your forgiveness for that but the truth is, our readership has more than doubled since 2012 and it would be an injustice not to share this with those new readers. Plus, those who have already seen it will definitely benefit from re-visiting this motivational message.

Macro photographs of insects are nothing new; and yet, Malaysian Jimmy Kong's photographs of spiders staring straight at the camera are immediately captivating and at least a tiny bit terrifying.

During Felix Baumgartner's record-breaking Stratos jump from 128,100 feet above the Earth, he was packing a total of seven GoPro Hero2's on his person. Red Bull has been slow to release all the footage from the jump and a couple of days ago we found out why -- it seems they were saving it for the short film "Red Bull Stratos -- The Full Story."

Chances are good you've already seen Queenie Liao's touching nap time photo series Wengenn in Wonderland. Late last year, the series went viral as parents and photographers alike marveled at the creativity of this mother that brought her child's nap time adventures to life using only her imagination and household items near at hand.

Now, thanks to the folks at Flickr, we get to go behind the scenes with Liao as she explains what the series is about and how it all comes together each day when Wengenn falls asleep.

It's a question we hope none of you ever have to answer, but one that a talented colleague and PetaPixel reader is facing with incredible optimism and strength.

Wedding photographer Anthony Carbajal was recently diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. And he's now reaching out to the photography community for support as he comes to terms with the end of a three-year professional career that was everything he could have hoped for.

Despite all of the crazy gloom and doom talk that tends to circulate in the photography industry, it seems us photographers are still an optimistic bunch.

PhotoShelter has just released their "Photographer's Outlook on 2014 Survey," and besides being chock full on interesting and useful tidbits about who to follow and what to read (we're proud to say PetaPixel made the most-read blogs list!), it also showed that photographers have a very positive perspective on the upcoming year.

Life as a race photographer can be a tough and risky one. Add in a little eastern spice and it has a whole different taste. Steve Thomas takes us on a back seat ride through the pelotons of Asia.

If the first two SmugMug Films features are any indication, we're going to be covering them all... and we doubt anybody is going to complain.

First, SmugMug took you behind the scenes with Benjamin Von Wong as he created magical worlds with the click of a shutter. Today, they visit the other side of the spectrum by featuring air-to-air photographer Jessica Ambats.

Britons are seeing a new side of the nation's World War I experience thanks to the publication of a small treasure trove of negatives that were only recently discovered tucked away in someone's attic.

LEGO and baking powder, that and some Star Wars inspiration is all Finnish photographer (and PetaPixel reader, we might add) Vesa Lehtimäki needs to blow your mind and send you into a nerd frenzy that'll have you digging up your old D&D set.

Well, at least that's how we feel about it, because we couldn't have geeked out any harder than we did when we stumbled across Lehtimäki's miniature movie scene photography.

Don McCullin is a household name in the photographic community, but as far as he is concerned, it's for all the wrong reasons. In this incredibly poignant and thought-provoking interview, he shares his thoughts about an illustrious career that was spent photographing atrocities, and left him somewhat haunted.

For some reason we're fascinated by photographs of real things made to look like drawings or paintings. Series like Alexander Khokhlov's 2D or Not 2D and pretty much Alexa Meade's entire portfolio are great examples of this.

Now we have another similar series to share with you. Created by artist Cynthia Greig, Representations is a series of photographs of everyday objects that have been white washed and outlined so that they look like very simple drawings.

Sometimes, all that's required to take a standard photo and turn it into something special and unique is to flip your camera upside down. That's what artist Peter Wegner did for his Buildings Made of Sky series, which features 'skyscrapers' outlined by the New York City streets when you flip your perspective.

I don't think we've referred to a time-lapse as "dramatic" before, but when it comes to photographer Nicolaus Wegner's most recent time-lapse creation, no other word fits quite as well.

Captured over 14 months in the Wyoming wilderness, beautiful motion landscape sequences are juxtaposed masterfully with weather that he calls 'terrorific' -- terrifying, horrific and terrific all rolled into one -- in Wegner's Wyoming Wildscapes II.

Natan Dvir is an Israeli photographer who focuses on the human aspects of political, social and cultural issues. He received his MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts (NY), after which he became a faculty member at the International Center for Photography (ICP). Based in New York City he photographs around the world represented by Polaris Images photo agency and Anastasia photo gallery.

Almost 25 years later, the country of Romania is still in the midst of a difficult transformation from one of the region’s hardest dictatorships to a modern European nation. A transformation that photographer Tamas Dezso masterfully captures in his series Notes for an Epilogue.

William Albert Allard has shot over 40 stories for National Geographic, and in the short video above he shares some of what he's learned since starting his career for the magazine as an intern in 1964.

If your advertising campaign's goal is to redefine beauty and help High School girls accept and even embrace the flaws so studiously eliminated on magazine covers, you've got an uphill battle ahead of you. But Dove is fighting (and maybe even winning) that battle, and one of the ways they're doing it is by putting the selfie to more empowering use.

People familiar with the Brother's Grimm fairy tales know that the Disney versions of many of these tales were rather less dark than the original, broody, oh-my-goodness-did-that-just-happen-in-a-fiary-tale versions.

The photographs in German photographer Kilian Schoenberger's series Brothers Grimm's Homeland represent the latter universe: a foggy, dark, ominous place where the next footfall you hear might send you running.

Photojournalism jobs may be disappearing in real life, but they're thriving in at least one corner of the Interwebs. A handful of participants in the online version of "Grand Theft Auto" have decided it's more fun to document virtual felonies than commit them and have formed a team of street photographers.

Just over a year ago, photography was my most precious hobby. I really enjoyed it and took photos fairly often, but I felt that if I wanted to take this thing to the next level, I had to do something extraordinary. A couple of days before New Year's Eve I decided to start a "365 days 365 photos" project like so many other photographers before me. It felt like a great idea, and so I just went for it. What could possibly happen?

You might not come out on top if you weigh the pros and cons of storm chasing, but there are definitely pros beyond feeling like a bada** and a deep fulfillment of your twin passions for meteorology and spiking your adrenaline. If you want proof of that, just check out the awe-inspiring photography of storm chaser Mike Hollingshead.

Former ballet dancer and professional photographer Jesús Chapa-Malacara has two great passions in life: yep, you guessed right, they're dance and photography. These two passions collide in his recent Dance Prints series, a beautiful motion photography project that, with your help, he hopes to take to the next level.

When most people visit the site of the World Trade Center Memorial and the new towers, they point their cameras at the buildings or the pools where the original towers once stood. But when photographer Keith Goldstein goes there, he turns his camera on the people.

Photographer Jan Von Holleben specializes in imaginary awesomeness, creating scenes that whisk you away to a different place where random objects can be used to turn dreams into reality.

For his most recent project, however, he and his friends set about doing something even more difficult than bringing 'Dreams of Flying' to life: they're trying to save the universe... with imaginary machines, of course.

Russian photographer Elena Shumilova only got into photography in early 2012, when she acquired her first camera. But if you were to look through her Flickr and 500px profiles, you would swear she had been doing it for much, much longer.

I recently got asked to shoot photos for a show called “The Haves and HaveNots” for the Oprah Winfrey Network. I’ve shot many shows in my career and I always enjoy these shoots because there are so many challenges involved.

For those close to me, you know how much Michael Schumacher’s skiing accident and subsequent critical condition has affected me. He is one of my heroes, and my family are of the many Ferrari tifosi (fans) that have cheered him on through the years. Like so many around the world we continue pray for his recovery in dark times.

When word came that his 1998 F1 car was in Scottsdale for an auction, I quit everything I was doing and started to call every contact I had that might be able to get me near the car. It meant too much, for I saw it as a way to show my respect to a legend that I have never met.

In my last post, I said that Adventure Photography doesn't get much attention; however, based on all of your feedback and reactions it seems I may have been mistaken. Perhaps it's just quiet attention? Regardless, I wanted to go ahead and compile a second list because, as I said in the first post (and as many of you pointed out) there were clearly some people missing.

This happened for a number of reasons, the most common being limited communication due to shoot schedules. But now, with a little more time for people to respond, I've been able to rectify the problem and include a lot of the great photographers that got left out the first time. So without further ado, here are nine more adventure sports photographers you should check out.