Walkthroughs

Ever wonder where those gritty posters promoting hyped boxing matches come from? Check out this behind-the-scenes video in which New York-based photographer Monte Isom offers a brief glimpse into how he recently photographed boxers Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Márquez for their upcoming fight (Pacquiao vs. Marquez IV).

Photographer Jeff Cremer recently captured the highest-resolution photo ever shot of Machu Picchu, the most popular tourist destination in Peru and one of the New 7 Wonders of the World. Unlike other gigapixel projects that we've shared here in the past, this one is very well documented, offering an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how these gargantuan images are made.

If the movie Jaws gave you nightmares, then you're probably not well-suited to do the kind of photography that photographer Michael Muller spends his free time doing. Muller dives into the ocean and snaps close-up portraits of deadly sharks, often without a cage for protection. The video above is a short feature on Muller's pastime by the TV show "Last Call With Carson Daly."

Photographer Bryan Soderlind recently did a photo shoot with his buddy, professional wakeboarder Rusty Malinoski (the first person to ever land a 1080 in competition). Instead of the usual setup photographers use for wakeboarding photography, the two decided to try something crazier: lighting the action from the air using a battery-powered strobe placed in a helicopter.

Photographer Stephen Wilkes has become well-known for his project titled "Day to Night," which features single images of various locations that capture the passing of a day. CBS News recently caught up with Wilkes and aired the feature above. In it, the photographer talks about how the project began and walks through how the composite images are shot and created.

Here's a dissection video for those of you who like photography better than biology. It's a Khan Academy lesson that offers a glimpse into how digital cameras work on the inside. The camera being dissected is a Vivitar V25, a 2.1 megapixel camera that you can pick up for around $18 from places like Walmart. Although it's basically the digital equivalent of a disposable camera, the camera still shares some things in common with higher-end digital cameras. You might be able to learn an …

Stacking long-exposure photos of stars leads to some pretty neat photos and time-lapse videos, but what happens if you use a similar technique for clouds? That's what photographer Matt Molloy does. His "photo stack" images of landscapes show clouds that look like smears and brush strokes across the sky.

If you've ever wondered what a Nikon D700 looks like when completely disassembled, today's your lucky day. Czech photographer Martin Kozák recently did a complete teardown with a ruined D700, and then snapped the still life photo seen above.

The 2012 election season is now over, and photojournalists who have been scrambling for many months on the campaign trail can now take a breather and reflect on their experiences. Reuters sent us the video above in which Reuters White House photographer Jason Reed offers a short 2-minute-long behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to photograph Barack Obama as he hustled around the nation, "from riding in motorcades through the streets of Manhattan to flying in Air Force One."

Chinese photographer Liu Bolin (AKA "The Invisible Man") has received quite a bit of attention over the past seven years for his self-portraits showing himself blending into various scenes with a carefully painted body rather than digital manipulation. His photographs have attracted the attention of Ford, which recently commissioned Liu to create a series of advertisements to promote the 2013 Ford Fusion.

Here's a nice little video in which photographer Matthew Jordan Smith tells the story of a portrait session he had years ago with American actor/dancer/singer Gregory Hines. After finding himself in a sticky situation with a subject that wouldn't offer the personality and emotion Smith wanted to capture, he reached deep into the knowledge of Hines that he had accumulated through his research; one particular fact saved the shoot.

Check out this album cover portrait photo of the Belgian indie pop band SX, shot by photographer Benjamin Von Wong. While it looks appears to show the band standing in the ocean with the sun rising (or setting) in the background, it was actually shot in a much more controlled environment: a swimming pool.

Here's an interesting video in which renowned photojournalist Steve McCurry shares some thoughts on documentary portraiture. Titled Close Up: Photographers at Work, the video takes us behind-the-scenes with McCurry as he shoots some candid portraits on the street and then reviews some of his most prized shots captured over the course of his career. (There's a brief glimpse of the original film slides of his iconic Afghan Girl photo.)

Shooting portraits of strangers in cars isn't uncommon, but have you ever tried using off-camera lighting to illuminate their faces? That's what photographer Jonathan Castillo is doing for his ongoing series called Car Culture.

Over the past couple of years, German photographer Markus Reugels has attracted quite a bit of attention for his high-speed photographs of water drop splashes. His project, titled "Liquid Splashes", consists of split-second photos that make colorful splashes look like tiny glass sculptures hovering in the air above a mirror. In the video above, Reugels introduces himself and his work, and takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour showing how he goes about creating his beautiful photographs.

Check out this geeky Instagram-inspired Halloween costume created by photographer Eric Micotto. What's neat is that it actually "works" as a camera: it's powered by a Nikon D800 snapping photos through the "lens", and has an iPad on the back that acts as the camera's giant LCD screen. Subjects who have their photo taken by the costume can run around to the back to take a peek at how it turned out.

Want to see how studio lighting equipment is made? David Selby of Lighting Rumors was recently invited to tour the Shenzhen factory of a Chinese lighting company called NiceFoto, which sells gear both under its own brand name and to various international distributors under different marques. He snapped a number of photographs showing various workspaces where equipment is assembled.

In the Star Wars universe, Lightsabers are hand-built as part of their wielders' training, and each one is as unique as the person who made it. Photographer Matt Abelson seems to have the same idea about cameras: he builds high-quality one-of-a-kind pinhole cameras based on his own designs.

Back in June, a National Geographic crew was given the task of filming and photographing a cheetah running at full speed. While there are plenty of videos and photos out there showing this, the magazine wanted to track alongside the cheetah as it ran (rather than simply capture it from a fixed location). The short behind-the-scenes video above shows how they went about doing this.

Santa Fe, New Mexico-based photographer Brad Wilson decided last year that he wanted to photograph something "a little less predictable," so he decided to shoot fine art studio portraits of wild animals using all the things he has learned through years of shooting human portraiture.

Earlier this year we received a call from across the Atlantic Ocean. The editors at Wired UK magazine had an incredibly ambitious project ahead of them that they asked us to be a part of: one week, four photographers, over thirty photo-shoots, and a triple gate-fold cover featuring sixteen of the brightest and most inspiring minds in the world at the MIT Media Lab. How could we say no?

Remember those hilarious underwater dog photographs that went viral earlier this year? Seth Casteel, the photographer behind those shots, emailed us yesterday to say that he had been invited onto Good Morning America to talk about his work and how he creates it.

Photographer Gary Land was recently hired by Nissan to shoot a series of car advertisement photographs featuring the famous Heisman Trophy-winning football players Charles Woodson, Bo Jackson, Robert Griffin III, and Herschel Walker. Luckily for all of us, the team produced a series of behind-the-scenes videos offering short glimpses into how the photographs were created, the gear they used, and tricks they came up with to their turn ideas into reality.

Bellamy Hunt over at Japan Camera Hunter has a fascinating account of what it's like to attend a photography workshop taught by famed street photographer Bruce Gilden, a "famously outspoken photographer who does not mince his words": …

Ross Ching has created a new people-less time-lapse video for his Empty America series. The featured city this time is Seattle, Washington.

A couple of weeks ago, photographer Mike Simons of Tulsa World covered the annual college football game between the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns football. Known as the Red River Rivalry, the series considered one of the greatest rivalries in American sports. To capture what photographing the conclusion of such a big game is like, Simons decided to wear a GoPro camera on his head to record a first-person point of view.

We first featured photographer Matthew Albanese's Strange Worlds project back in 2010, not too long after the project's inception. His amazing images appear to show beautiful outdoor scenes, but were actually shot on a tabletop in his studio. He creates extremely detailed dioramas that take months to complete, and then uses various photographic techniques to make the scene look like the real world. It's like the opposite of using tilt-shift lenses to turn the world into a miniature model.

If you've been following the news over the past week, you probably know that the Space Shuttle Endeavour spent October 11-14 rolling through the streets of Los Angeles, going from the Los Angeles International Airport to its new home at the California Science Center. News crews and large camera-wielding crowds were constantly by the shuttle's side, documenting its progress.

Here's a neat idea of thinking outside the box: high-speed photographer Scott Dickson added a pair of sunglasses to an ordinary water balloon pop photograph, giving the splash some personality (and a "bowtie").

The photo above is the album cover for Jay-Z's 2009 album Blueprint 3, featuring a photo of a pile of musical instruments and recording equipment with three red lines across the front. It might look Photoshopped -- an easy way to create such an effect -- but it was actually done with perspective trickery and good ol' fashioned hard work.

Photographer Benjamin Von Wong shot the portrait above a couple of days ago using a Nikon D4, a $9,000 Nikon 400mm f/2.8G lens, and a few iPhones for lighting. The extremely shallow depth-of-field was achieved using 36 separate exposures and the Brenizer Method.

We've featured a few projects recently that combined portraits of people with photos of nature and various objects. While the look can be easily faked in Photoshop, a more satisfying way to shoot this kind of shot is to do the double exposure entirely in-camera.

Photographing a lightning strike from close-up is a difficult and dangerous task, but Toronto-based wedding photographer and weather buff Richard Gottardo managed to capture something even crazier: a double-exposure photograph caused by the bolt of lightning itself.

ReutersTV shared this video today in which its Social Media Editor Anthony De Rosa meets up with The Impossible Project VP Dave Bias to talk about the company and what it's up to. Bias gives a demo of the new Impossible Instant Lab -- similar to what we shared from Photokina -- showing how it takes iPhone pixels and "melts them back down into chemistry".

3D light painting can be done by using a 2D image rather than a single point of light. In the past, we've shared creative examples of iPads being used in this way to light paint everything from ghostly figures to creative animations.

Here's an interesting way to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how a portrait shoot was done. After photographing British comedian Frank Skinner, UK-based photographer Harry Borden took all the unedited photos from the shoot and turned them into a one-minute time-lapse movie. The resulting short film is a glimpse into how a session progressed from one pose to another, and the different ideas that were tried.

North Carolina-based photographer Daniel Lowe sent us the gorgeous video above, which shows star trails forming and floating across the sky. Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show stars as points of light, rotating around Earth's pole. Lowe's video shows the long streaks of star trails doing the rotating, making the video even more surreal and magical.

Photokina 2012 came to an end in Cologne, Germany today. If you weren't able to make the show this year and are wondering what the show was like, we've collected some photos of the fancy booths set up by major camera makers. Hopefully they can provide you with a glimpse of how the big brands went about showing off their latest and greatest wares.

At The Impossible Project's booth at Photokina 2012, there was a Impossible Instant Lab camera printer/camera being demonstrated. This is the device that was announced a couple of weeks ago that lets you quickly turn your iPhone photos into Polaroid pictures (i.e. Impossible's instant film or whatever stock you have left).

Some weeks ago, I received an invitation from Leica for a special launch party they were planning to hold the day before Photokina 2012 opened. The event was titled LEICA - DAS WESENTLICHE, which translates to "The Essentials". Aside from stating that there would be product premieres and "photographic and musical highlights", the invitation did not reveal much else about the event, which went down this past Monday. Here's a first-hand account of what it's like to attend one of these Leica …

I'm in Cologne, Germany covering Photokina right now. It's the day before the trade fair opens, and as I was walking through the exhibition center to a press event (which I'll write more on soon), I passed by some of the main exhibition halls. Instead of the squeaky clean "photographer's Disneyland" that guests enjoy when the fair is up and running, everything was a mess, as companies were working hard to set up their impressive displays.

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to be a photographer covering New York City's Fashion Week 2012.

Photographer Benjamin Von Wong recently traveled to the city of Bratislava (the capital and largest city of Slovakia) to photograph ballet dancer Ana Beschia and a number of dancers from National Slovak Theater. Using mostly natural ambient light, Von Wong captured the dancers leaping, dancing, and posing in various locations around town.

San Diego-based photographer Tim Mantoani, the guy who shot giant Polaroid photos of famous photographers holding their works, recently got his hands on Lot #1 of The Impossible Project's new 8x10 instant film. To test it out, Mantoani busted out his large format camera and 8x10 processor, and then visited a local surf shop to create a multi-shot panorama.

In daguerreotype photography, the first commercially successful photographic process, a positive image is recorded directly onto a silvered copper plate. Although mercury is traditionally used to develop the plate, there's a way of creating daguerreotypes called the Becquerel method that eschews mercury in favor of non-lethal ingredients.

Last week, a seascape photo I made showed up on link-sharing powerhouse Reddit. It caused a bit of a stir since it is a copyrighted image and was rehosted and posted without my permission. A lot of the photographers in r/photography and r/pics (where it was originally posted by a user) made it known that it was I who had created the work. I’m very grateful for both the exposure that posting gave me, and even more grateful for the support I received from my fellow photographers and Redditors.

Steward Magazine has published a fascinating interview with photographer Anton Kusters, who spent two years documenting a yakuza gang in Tokyo, capturing highly intimate glimpses into what life is like in the criminal underworld.

Earlier this year, we shared some amazing work by Swedish retoucher Sanna Dullaway, who takes historical B&W photographs and colorizes them. YouTube user IColoredItForYou is another master of restoring, retouching, and colorizing, but what's awesome about his work is that he creates behind-the-scenes videos showing how the edits are done. The above time-lapse video shows how he recently used Photoshop to colorize Margaret Bourke-White's famous 1937 photograph, titled "Bread Line during the …

The folks at Mexican agency Golpeavisa were recently tasked with creating a portrait of world-renowned Danish chef René Redzepi for a cover of ClasePremier magazine. Instead of doing a digital illustration like they've done before, they decided to flex their creative muscles and try their hand at making a portrait out of food using perspective photography. After a good deal of planning and setting up, the cover above is what resulted.

This fascinating behind-the-scenes video shows what it's like to work as a sports photographer for the New York Times. It follows around Barton Silverman, a photographer who has been working at the Times since March of 1962. Over the past 50 years, he has covered many a championship game and has photographed many a legendary athlete.