Forget storm chasing, that's a cinch when you compare it to what former NASA photographer Ben Cooper and some colleagues of his did last weekend: eclipse chasing. Cooper captured the shot above from a chartered jet going 500mph at 44,000ft in the air, but it was a near miss.
Filmmaker Matthew Vandeputte has spent the last year traveling the globe and shooting more photographs than ever. From Belgium to Australia, he's shot well over 100,000 photos of countless sunrises, sunsets, cityscapes and star-filled skies. And now, we get to be the beneficiaries of that work for a glorious minute and a half.
Back in July, we told you about a heartwarming Skype campaign called "Stay Together." Inspired by photographer John Clang's viral photo series Being Together, the company got in touch with Clang to see if he would help them create a campaign/contest, the winner of which would be reunited with their distant friend or relative.
Photographer Fabian Oefner's work with paint -- all part of his "Paint Action" or "Three" cycle of photo series -- never ceases to impress. His previous Black Hole and Liquid Jewels series highlighted the effects of centrifugal force and air pressure on paint, respectively.
The final series in the cycle, Orchids, explores the effects of gravity -- and, as always, it does so in the most colorful (and messy) way possible. What's more, this time we have a chance to watch him work behind the scenes!
No matter how much energy you have going into a project, it's likely that at some point you'll run out of steam. When you're hours in to editing your photos and are beginning to have an existential crisis about the real meaning of the words "tone curve," you'll suddenly stop and wonder why you're doing this in the first place.
Then the next day, when it's time to return to editing, you'll stare blankly at your computer screen or come up with any number of excuses or tasks that will prevent you from getting started.
Susan Dobson is best known for her work on suburban culture, architecture, and landscape. Her photographs have been exhibited across Canada, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom, Belgium, China, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. Her work was included in the Canadian Biennial titled Builders at the National Gallery of Canada in 2012, and she was a contributing artist to the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. Dobson is Associate Professor at the University of Guelph.
Susan Dobson's series "Sense of an Ending" gives us look at architecture, decay and a literal sense of ending -- reminding us that eventually everything around us will become rubble. Through the use of composite imagery, Dobson crafts scenes frozen in melancholy.
As the overcast skies in each piece forebode cold and rain, and as the architectural styles have begun to weather and collapse, these images, while fiction, portray the inevitable truth of not just homes and buildings, but perhaps cities and civilizations as well.
Art and photography often intersect in interesting and, at times, confusing ways. For instance: if you create a beautiful 11-acre portrait out of wood stakes, soil, sand, grass and stones that is only truly visible from the air, are you an artist, portraitist or just a landscaper with an artistic eye? What's the percentage breakdown?
Obviously there's no right answer here, but Jorge Rodrigeuz-Gerada -- a man who recently did just this -- calls himself an artist and so we'll go with that.
There's been a lot of gear talk today -- both serious and comical in nature -- so we thought we'd shift gears and share a little bit of inspiration in the form of a gorgeous time-lapse of the night sky over the Canary Islands.
For the past couple of years, photographer Klaus Pichler has been interested in the subject of costumes. The subject has traditions in many of the world's cultures, and some people spend great deals of time and money in order to obtain extremely elaborate outfits.
Between 2011 and 2013, Pichler visited many of these costume owners in their homes, asking them to pose among the spaces and objects of their life while taking on the appearance of their "alter egos." The resulting series is titled "Just the Two of Us."
For the photo above, titled "Dead Little Things," I wanted to create a scene out of strictly dollhouse supplies. Inspired by many of the weather events that have occurred in recent years: tornados in Joplin and Oklahoma City, Hurricane Sandy and even Katrina.
I was struck by the indelible photos of homes destroyed in various ways that almost make them look fake, a physical upending of one's life as defined by materialistic possessions.
If you want a daily dose of creativity and humor, start following the Instagram account (@cintascotch) of art director Javier Pérez. The Ecuador-based artist regularly posts simple and quirky photographs that consist of only a small object and a simple sketch.
This week marks the one year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, the most devastating storm of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season and the second most costly hurricane in the history of the United States. To capture how far New York City has come since being pummeled by Sandy, resident photographer Natan Dvir decided to re-shoot photographs that he captured last year after the storm.
Kirk Crippens was inspired to take photographs by his grandfather. In 2010 he was Top 50 Photographer in Critical Mass and nominated for the Eureka Fellowship. In 2011 he was Top 50 photographer for the second consecutive year and participated in eighteen exhibitions. In 2012 he was AIR at RayKo. In 2013 he was AIR at Newspace in Portland, Oregon. He is in the MFA, Houston collection and was recently curated into an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Wherever you stand on the idea of having children, one of the advantages seems to be the infinite photographic possibilities opened up by having a cute child at your disposal. Whether you're talking Photoshop trickery or just watching them grow up, we've seen plenty of creative and adorable photos and videos come out of the photographic parent/photogenic child relationship.
One incredibly creative example that is currently making the rounds on the Internet is mother and photographer Queenie Liao's series Wengenn in Wonderland.
If you're not familiar with the light painting photography of Darren Pearson then you're really missing out. Even if you're not a big fan of light painting, his work truly is something to behold -- whether it's his photos or the short skateboarder animation we shared with you at the beginning of the year.
But that skateboarder animation's got nothing on the video that Pearson released just a couple of days ago.
In 2009, photographer Hannah Price made a cross-country move from Colorado to Philadelphia, and along with the inevitable change of scenery came a different, more surprising change: for the first time in her life she started having men catcall her on the street.
Being a photographer, she didn't react the same way most women might. Instead, she began turning her camera on these men, birthing the now-viral photo series City of Brotherly Love.
A few days ago, we stumbled on a new set of short interviews with portrait photography master Gregory Heisler that cover everything from lighting, to relating with your subjects, to getting creative, to (and we know you're all interested in this one) getting hired.
We don't typically share two time-lapses in the same day, since most people see that genre as over-saturated as it is, but today we have good reason to. The first is a landscape time-lapse so gorgeous National Geographic took notice, and this one, well this one may completely change the way you look at tilt-shift where time-lapse is concerned.
The "quit your day job and go on the adventure you've always dreamed of" piece of advice is given so often as to almost be cliché. And yet, many of us are still blown away when someone actually finds the guts to do just that.
And, well, if they capture a time-lapse so gorgeous it gets National Geographic's attention in the process, all the better for us photography blog types.
In 2012, New Jersey-based writer Emily Helck was one of the several thousands of women under 40 diagnosed with breast cancer. Knowing that the following year of chemo and surgery would be harrowing, she decided to document it by taking photos of herself every week for a full year.
The resulting video, which went up online at the end of September, has turned into an inspirational viral sensation that has accumulated over 700,000 views.
Two days ago, the late great Robert Capa would have turned 100 years old. There was quite a bit of revelry surrounding what would have been the iconic photographer's centennial, but even though gallery openings and the like all paid homage to the great conflict photographer, one particular release is perhaps most special of all.
Thanks to an incredibly fortuitous set of circumstances, the International Center of Photography has managed to get its hands on and release a copy of an incredibly rare interview Mr. Capa gave back in October of 1947 -- affording anyone who didn't know him the first ever opportunity to hear his voice.
One of the great things about photography is that inspirational stories aren't hard to come by -- whether it's tragic circumstances that are being brought to light by a daring photojournalist or a success story about a young photographer who is just discovering his passion for this industry.
Street photographer Flo Fox's story is yet another kind of inspirational. It's a story of overcoming unimaginable adversity, and a rock hard determination not to let any of life's curveballs get in the way of doing what you love.
Photographer Jordan Matter's Dancers Among Us photo series and book has earned him the kind of viral fame that many a photographer dreams of, but more inspiring than his success is his attitude and the joy he seems to take in his work.
We've found reason to share Czech astrophotographer Miloslav Druckmüller's breathtaking work once before when we showed you his composite of a total solar eclipse. Now he's back with another composite image that shows a nightscape the likes of which you've probably never seen before.
We first shared photographer Carli Davidson's ridiculously cute SHAKE series back in 2011 before it had gone quite so viral. This week, her high-speed photographs of dogs making hilarious faces while shaking off water have been released in book form, accompanied by the above super slow motion video of the puppies in action.
There are a total of six piece types in the game of Chess, and Italian photographer Francesco Ridolfi has managed to bring each of them -- in both black and white versions -- to life in his creative fine art portrait project "Chess Portraits."
There's a belief that being successful as a photographer these days runs the possibility gamut from difficult to almost impossible, but examples like Wyn Wiley seem to run contrary to that belief. Wiley is a very successful 21-year-old photographer, and in the Lincoln Nebraska TEDxYouth talk above, he blows minds by sharing his incredibly optimistic and inspirational world view.
Photographer Richard Renaldi's 6-year-long project Touching Strangers has been an incredible success. From viral Internet fame to a full-fledged photo book that exceeded its Kickstarter goal eight times over, there's something profoundly moving about complete strangers posed together, sometimes quite intimately, on the streets of NYC.
In the video above we get a behind the scenes look at how Renaldi does what he does, and how his subjects, sometimes reticent at first, often wind up feeling at ease and connected to this perfect stranger they didn't know existed 10 minutes ago.
Late in 2012, photojournalist Daniella Zalcman moved from New York City to her new home in London. Zalcman adores both cities for, among other things, their photogenic nature. And so she decided to mix the two together into a creative series of double exposures dubbed New York + London, using her smartphone.
You can worry all you want about photos being stolen via Flickr, but maybe someone will like your photo enough to buy it... and put it on the cover of a platinum-selling rock album... and boost you overnight from the fuzzy border of hobbyist/professional to a high-profile career as a portrait and fashion photographer.
Each year, London's Natural History Museum hands out awards for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and the winner of this year's competition brought home top prize with an ethereal, beautiful and accidental photo of elephants at a watering hold in the Northern Tuli Game Reserve in Botswana.
The NASA spacecraft Cassini has sent back some incredible imagery of the planet Saturn over the years, much of which is being put to use to create an IMAX movie. But thanks to the work of a Croatian software developer, we now have a full, breath-taking, high-resolution photo mosaic of Saturn in all its glory as it looked on October 10th.
When we first covered Brandon Stanton and his Humans of New York project almost a year and a half ago, he had accumulated about 3,000 portraits of people from around New York City. Now that number has grown to over 5,000, and the blog that started it all has birthed a book and the kind of viral fame the Internet it known for.
Back in early July, we got a chance to share photographer Pelle Cass' intriguing Selected People series with you. For this series, he combines hundreds of exposures to create what amounts to a time-lapse in one frame: showing what a particular location looks like over the course of many hours, but capturing it as a single moment in time.
We dedicate a lot of time to finding and sharing relevant, inspirational and sometimes humorous stories with you here, and once in a while, we inadvertently help make something wonderful happen.
That was the case with the Anderson family, who recently got in touch with us to tell us how a simple photo tip we shared changed their lives for the better. With their permission, we're sharing that story with you.
Elaine Mayes has been a photographic artist for more than fifty years. She also taught photography at The University of Minnesota, Hampshire College (founding faculty), Pratt Institute, Bard College, ICP and retired as Professor Emerita from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts where she was Chair of the Photography and Imaging Department from 1996 until 2001.
Her work has been exhibited and collected widely, and recent exhibitions include The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Steven Kasher Gallery and The National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner's insane Red Bull Stratos skydive from the edge of space. As the whole world watched, Baumgartner plummeted towards Earth from a mind-blowing 128,100 feet, ultimately landing safely.
The man free fell for a total of four minutes and twenty-two seconds, and if you want to watch the whole inspirational/terrifying experience from his point of view, now you can.
Model maker/collector and photographer Michael Paul Smith is a master at recreating incredibly accurate outdoor scenes using his extensive die-cast model car collection and forced perspective.
Mixing up miniature cars, detail items and buildings into a scene whose backdrop is the real world, he shoots the gorgeous miniature vistas of the town he has created and named "Elgin Park" -- and he does it all with a cheap point-and-shoot.
The rules might say to keep your electronics stowed during takeoff and landing, but sometimes, you just can't help yourself. And even though we certainly don't condone breaking FAA regulations, the above photograph is a prime example of one of those times when not being able to help yourself pays off.
Taken by photographer James Kastner, the snap beautifully captures the sun glinting off the One World Trade Center just as the glare on the harbor aligned with Liberty Island. It's no wonder the shot has gone viral.
What does it take to get your time-lapse picked up as a Vimeo Staff Pick? Well, in photographer Alexandr Kravtsov's case: "a broken camera, lost flash drive, nearly 100 subway rides, 24,000 photos, endless hours of post-production and rendering and 480GB of material." But the time-lapse that came out on the other end probably made the whole experience worth it, and gives us a great foot on which to start the week.
Well, thanks to the US Government shutdown, space photography lovers who frequented site's like NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day are left looking for other outlets. Thankfully, there are plenty out there, not the least of which is the space imagery archive of the European Space Agency, or ESA.
NASA may be experiencing a 97% workforce cut, but the ESA is still very much up and running, and their Observing the Earth and Space in Images webpages will give you plenty to browse through until Congress gets its act together.
New York-based photographer Leland Bobbé has put together a fascinating series of portraits that examine the idea of gender fluidity by showing New York City drag queens in half-drag. The series is called "Half-Drag ... A Different Kind of Beauty" and has earned Bobbé several awards and exhibitions, along with some well-deserved press attention.
"You should've seen it! I was that close to the dude's teeth!" No doubt there was some pretty excited talk going around a South African seal colony recently, after a young pup narrowly escaped a shark attack by balancing on the great white's nose.
Irish wildlife photographer David "Baz" Jenkins captured the decisive moment in an image that's quickly gone viral worldwide.
Purposely distressing and destroying negatives was never a part of photographer Rohn Meijer's plans, but when he discovered a box of old negatives in his basement that had been exposed to 15 years worth of moisture damage, an idea took shape.
The photos he found that day had a pleasing quality about them, and so Meijer, a fashion photographer by trade, decided he would start taking his old fashion shoot negatives and nearly destroying them into works of art.
Red Bull has an appreciation for the potential of mixing photography with death-defying stunts. If you need an example, look no further than some of the Red Bull Illume projects we've covered in the past.
But Red Bull's most recent foray into photography didn't have to do with epic light painting or expensive gear: instead, the company teamed up with three top U.K. Instagrammers to document the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in stop motion.
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky classifies the predominant theme of his work as "nature transformed through industry." And his fantastic series of aquatic aerial photographs, dubbed Water, perfectly exemplifies that.
Being a photographer can sometimes be a lonely prospect. Even photographers that often work with people as subjects or on crowded streets will have to put in countless hours alone, editing their work. This fact only makes it even more important for photographers to actively reach out and form communities, if not for the sake of their work then at least for the sake of their social lives and sanity.
At times, wildlife photographers have to show an incredible amount of patience to get the perfect shot. Wild animals (much like humans, actually) rarely do exactly what you want them to, and when they do, you and your camera have to be prepared.
But still, how long could you possibly have to wait? Hours? Days? Weeks maybe? For Nat Geo photographer Steve Winter -- who was chasing the perfect shot of a Mountain Lion with the lights of Los Angeles in the background -- that patience had to extend a full year.
It’s cold. The air is stinging my ears and my hands are numb. I pull back on my gloves and resume huddling in the conner of the courtyard. It’s December in Aleppo and the air is bitter, but the overwhelming sense of dread comes not from the cold, but from overhead. Early morning, midday, through the night; the aerial bombardment doesn’t stop. The sound of a jet buzzing overhead and those terrible trails of white streaming from the underbelly as missiles launch. Distant blasts and then closer ones. Mortar strikes as well. Silence and then an explosion.
Stunning, breathtaking, gorgeous, take your pick, any number of adjectives would work to describe the world's coral reefs. But, sadly, another word would work as well: disappearing.
As a combination of climate change, overfishing and pollution is slowly destroying the reefs, one project is using panoramic imagery to catalog what's happening and help the scientific community come together to solve this problem before there aren't any reefs left to save.