Photographer Philippe Echaroux tells us that he recently completed a photo shoot for a series he calls, "The Pigment Party". Echaroux's idea was to capture studio-lit portraits of models posing serenely amidst explosions of colorful powders. After covering the studio with tarps, hanging up a black backdrop, and setting up his lighting, Echaroux had his assistants toss pigment powders of various colors onto the model's face.
A number of years ago, England-based photographer Dave Miller wanted an at-home darkroom, but didn't have the luxury of converting a spare room in his house into one. He did, however, have a nice garden area that wasn't being used, so he decided to upgrade the grassy area with a shed -- a darkroom shed.
Brighton-based photographer and product designer Maxim Grew recently came up with the idea of building an instant camera out of a Polaroid film holder and a stack of wooden popsicle sticks.
The photograph above may look like some kind of imaginary scene conjured up by a Photoshop wizard, but it's an actual photograph showing a real model swimming with a real whale shark.
Photographer and film professor Cy Kuckenbaker scored a viral hit in December 2012 with a clever video showing five hours of airplane landings condensed into a 30-second composite time-lapse. That video has been viewed more than a million times over the past couple of months.
Focus stacking is when you combine multiple photographs of different focus distances in order to obtain a single photo with a much greater depth of field than any of the individual shots. This can be done by turning the zoom ring on your lens, but this can be difficult to control (especially for highly magnified photos). It can also be done using special rigs designed for the purpose, but those are generally quite pricey.
One of the biggest stories in the sports world over the past couple of weeks has been the hoax involving star football player Manti Te’o and a girlfriend that never existed. After the news spiraled into the national spotlight, Te'o agreed to an exclusive off-camera interview with ESPN's Jeremy Schaap to explain his side of the story.
A good number of websites are talking about the new official portrait of President Obama. It was shot in the Oval Office back on December 6th, 2012 by official White House photographer Pete Souza, whom we've written about quite a few times in the past.
After recently purchasing a Nikon 1 V1, Swedish photographer Sven Hedin decided to work on making the camera work with an external flash. Not just any external flash, mind you, but a vintage flash unit -- the kind that uses disposable bulbs.
If I get a photography idea, I tend to just go with it and see if it works. I had driven out to my parent's place early in the day and the idea just came to me. I think at first I thought, "Man, I wish I had thought to shoot moon-lit snow the day before when you could make a snow man for the op."
Walkthroughs of photographs that aren't easily reproducible (or are impossible to reproduce) might not be very useful to many, but it's still interesting to learn how rare shots come about. An example would be the photograph above, captured by photographer Bryan Hanna last week. Hanna was aiming to capture a long-exposure nighttime photograph of a landscape in the foreground and the night sky in the background, but he accidentally snagged something even better: a fireball zipping across the sky …
If you have your 35mm film processed and printed at your local lab, have you ever wondered how it's done? In this post, I'll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour on the entire process.
One of my favorite recent projects was a deceptively simple image of an ant on black. Black is easy enough to arrange for the upper portions of a photo. Just make sure foreground lighting is powerful enough to overwhelm the ambient light. Black all around is a challenge, however.
The photograph above is reportedly the world's largest piece of long-exposure light art. It was created by light painter Michael Bosanko in a 35,000-square-foot aircraft hangar in Coventry airport in October 2012.
Give James Bond, Jack Bauer or Chuck Norris a spork, and they'll figure out a way to overpower bad guys wielding guns. What happens when you give a seasoned photographer a cheap digital camera designed for toddlers? …
I recently captured the macro liquid splash photograph above, and found that it came out looking like it was computer generated. Here's a brief description of how the photo was created.
You might recognize this iconic photograph of Michael Jordan flying through the air during the 1988 NBA Dunk Contest in Chicago. It was captured by renowned Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss Jr., a man who has created some of the most memorable photographs of athletes over the past fifty years (another of his iconic photographs is "The Catch").
Dereck and Beverly Joubert have spent the past 30 years living among lions in the African country of Botswana, capturing incredible photographs and footage of the majestic creatures that have garnered widespread praise. They are considered two of the world's preeminent experts on the big cats, having created tens of films, books, scientific papers, and articles in National Geographic magazine (along with a list of filmmaking awards, including five Emmys).
Last week we shared a guest post by photographer Martin Legeer on how he built a Matrix-style bullet-time camera rig using 50 Canon DSLRs. Shortly afterward, Greek photographer Theodoros Tziatzios of Real Creations sent an email telling us about his own camera rig projects, which use double the number of cameras.
If you shoot film and aren't much into chemicals (or don’t have a basement in which to keep a gigantic 5×7″ enlarger), you’ll soon find yourself needing a way to import those beautiful pictures you’ve taken onto your computer. What? Why didn’t I say, “you'll need a scanner”? After all, it’s not 1987 anymore -- scanners are as common as toaster ovens.
Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how I recently created two band photos that feature motion and blur. The premise for this shoot actually started as far back as a couple years ago. I was on the search for a fun and energetic band with which to create a couple of promo images that featured motion. It took 2.5 years to find the right band for the shoots, but when 604 Records recording artists Fighting for Ithaca came calling, the perfect fit had been found!
Newer weatherproof compact and high-end cameras often feature "freeze-proofing" as one of their attributes, but unless you live in an extremely cold environment (or enjoy sticking your camera inside a freezer), you probably haven't experienced temperatures low enough for even an ordinary camera to break down.
Back in March, a client for whom I’ve done some light consulting work asked me if it was possible to capture a 360-degree-image that can be rotated afterwards. I said of course, but didn’t think that much about the consequences -- it's a project that would wake me up at nights for the next few months.
For a recent National Geographic story on giant sequoia trees, photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols was tasked with capturing a photograph showing the sheer size of one of the largest trees in the world. The video above offers a short but interesting glimpse into how Nichols and his team went about doing so.
For the past three years, San Diego-based photographer Octavio Aburto has had a specific photo idea brewing in his mind. He wanted to photograph the incredible underwater tornado that forms when massive groups of fish congregate to reproduce. This past November, he finally got his photo opportunity while diving with his friend David at Cabo Pulmo National Park in Mexico. The beautiful 24-second video above shows what Aburto witnessed.
Wet plate photographer Ian Ruhter has received a good deal of attention over the past year for using a custom camera van to create giant collodion process metal photos. When he's not turning large sheets of metal into photographs, he's sometimes working on the opposite side of the spectrum.
Brooklyn-based photographer Joey L has spent years working on an amazing set of portraits titled "Holy Men," which features religious ascetics from around the world.
For a recent assignment for Men’s Health magazine, photographer Adam Voorhes was tasked with creating photos of chili peppers exploding.
San Francisco resident Ryan Tatar is passionate about two things when he's not sitting at his desk at a Silicon Valley tech company: surfing and photography... and usually a combination of the two. He has attracted a good deal of attention in both worlds with his lo-fi photographs of surfers, captured with old analog cameras and expired and/or cross-processed films.
National Geographic photographer and filmmakers do some pretty crazy stuff and use some pretty crazy gear in order to capture the perfect shot. They're the type of people who see a large shark and, instead of fleeing the scene, think to themselves, "we should attach a camera to that thing." And then they actually do it.
Photo-editing wizard Corey Barker of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals wanted a photo of his house decorated with Christmas lights but was too lazy to physically put up the decorations... so he did it in Photoshop. All the colorful lights and decorations you see above were 'shopped in.
The Pacific Trash Vortex, also known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," is an area the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean in which there's 6 times the amount of plastic as there is natural plankton. Photographer Kim Preston wanted to draw attention to this growing problem, so she shot a series of photographs titled Plastic Pacific that features everyday household plastic objects made to look like the sea life they're choking to death.
Reuters has released this interesting behind-the-scenes look into what it was like to be a news photographer trailing President Obama as he made an official visit to the nation of Myanmar in November -- the first by a US president. The video offers a glimpse into how hectic the job is, as photographers must rush from place to place, out of vans and into venues, in hopes of capturing a historic and newsworthy shot.
Back in 2011 and 2012, Paris-based photographer Max Riché shot a creative series of portraits of athletes (including several Olympians) in the French National Sports Institute. Titled "Becoming an Athlete," the project featured a strobed-style look that shows the athletes progressing from ordinary people to world-class athletes, all within single frames.
Fashion company Pierre Cardin did a marketing campaign earlier this year that revolved around the slogan: "Simply Cool." It enlisted the help of Brazilian art director Cláudia Xavier and luxury still life photographer Norimich Inoguchi for a series of advertising photographs. The creatives decided to convey that "it's cool to wear Pierre Cardin" in a very literal way: they photographed various clothing items and accessories frozen into large blocks of ice.
Here's an update on photographer Dennis Manarchy's Vanishing Cultures project, which we featured at the beginning of the year. Manarchy has just released the new video above that sheds some light on how the idea came about and how everything came together. After building the world's biggest film camera, Manarchy has been using the "largest-format camera" to document 50 different cultures all across the United States in an epic 20,000-mile road trip. The resulting portraits will be displayed in …
New York Times staff photographer Fred R. Conrad was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of acclaimed color photography pioneer Joel Meyerowitz. Freelance videographer Elaisha Stokes went along to shadow Conrad, and captured this interesting behind-the-scenes video in which Conrad shares some thoughts on the experience of pointing a lens at a master of pointing lenses.
Taking a page out of The Beatles' book, Slovenia- and Croatia-based band Zebra Dots has an album cover for their debut record that features a zebra lane cross walk. Instead of strolling across it, however, the band members are lying on top of the thick lines, with their bodies blended into the zebra lines and their heads serving as dots. (You can also see it as musical notes on a staff).
We've featured photographer Nick Fancher's pegboard backdrop experiments a couple of times now (see here and here), and each time the setup gets fleshed out a bit more. Yesterday, Fancher released the above time-lapse video that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how he constructed his "white room" inside his tiny basement (the ceiling is just 7-feet-hight).
A few weeks ago we shared a custom-built workspace by a photographer named Tom Brinckman. This week we have a glimpse into photographer Dan Jahn's dream studio, a 2800-square-foot space in downtown Denver, Colorado that Jahn designed every inch of himself.
Earlier this month, we wrote that the world's first 3D photo booth had popped up in Japan. The studio looks like it's designed for ordinary portraits, except the "photographers" capture you with fancy handheld scanners and then turn your into miniature sculptures instead of photographs. Since then, more information has emerged that provides a better look at how the whole thing works.
It has been a long time since I have asked for something photo related for my birthday. I usually don’t ask, just because I’m very particular about what equipment I use, and my friends and family know it. But this year, it was different. I thought about dabbling in some old school photography, so I asked for a Polaroid 600 camera. My fiancée stepped up to the plate and delivered, gifting me an awesome 1983 Polaroid Sun 600 LMS. I had some fun with my first pack of film, but then it was …
Philippe Echaroux is a young French photographer who makes a living shooting portraits of celebrities (among other things). Recently, he carried out a personal project that had been brewing in his mind for some time: using his celebrity portraiture experience and style for spontaneous portraits of ordinary strangers encountered on the street. The short video above shows how Echaroux roamed around with his small team and set up makeshift photo studios for each of the portraits.
Back in August we shared a mesmerizing stop-motion video titled "Dream Music: Part 2" and created by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams. The team spent 6-8 hours of work photographing every 3-4 seconds of the 8-minute music video. All in all, the project took six months to complete. The video above presents a behind-the-scenes look at how the whole thing was done, with director's commentary, deleted scenes, and a bunch of time-lapses of the time-lapse being shot.
Slovenia-based professional photographer Borut Peterlin was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of painter/illustrator/author Milan Erič for influential Slovenian magazine Mladina. Peterlin decided that he wanted to create a wet plate collodion photo, but spent weeks worrying about whether he would be able to accomplish it given the tight schedule of the on-location shoot.
If you've ever played any of the Pokémon video games, you probably know it feels like to spend hours or days trying to capture a rare monster in order to fill in another entry in your Pokédex. National Geographic photographer Tim Laman knows that feeling through his photography project titled Birds of Paradise. Laman spent a whopping eight years photographing all 39 birds-of-paradise species in the rainforests of New Guinea -- the first time it has ever been done.
Last October, Jennifer Lopez made headlines around the world after showing up at a Chanel fashion show in Paris with her 4-year-old daughter (wearing $2,400 in jewelry) and 25-year-old boyfriend in tow. Photographs of the trio sitting in the front row quickly made their way to the front pages of major newspapers and websites.
I was recently offered the opportunity to direct a filler piece by Filler Magazine that involved telling a beautiful love story through fashion and dance. I also shot a series of artistic still photographs in which I used shutter drag to add motion-blur to the images. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the shoot.
Earlier this year, we shared a beautiful short documentary, titled "Silver & Light", which featured Los Angeles-based photographer Ian Ruhter and the gigantic wet plate photographs he shoots using a van that he converted into a massive camera. Since then, Ruhter's work has received a good deal of attention; the video now has nearly 1 million views, and Ruhter has been traveling around the country and using his special photography to tell the stories of people he meets.
When Space Shuttle Endeavour was making low level flyovers of famous landmarks across the United States a couple of months ago, Adobe Lightroom Quality Engineer Ben Warde was able to photograph it flying by the Golden Gate Bridge. The 10-minute video above shows how Warde post-processed one of his best shots from that day using basic Lightroom adjustments. While the information may be basic for many of you, it should be helpful for people who are just starting out with programs like Lightroom, …
