To capture a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to photograph a wedding, photographer Jaroslav Repta mounted a GoPro video camera to his DSLR and used it to film his camera's point of view throughout the wedding day. The video above shows this footage along with the resulting photographs that were delivered to the couple.
Here's an interesting behind-the-scenes mini-documentary showing Scott Schuman (AKA "The Sartorialist") shooting his street fashion photographs in Tokyo, Japan. Unlike many street photographers, Schuman first approaches his subjects and asks for permission.
An earlier post here on PetaPixel showcased a wonderful image of a flock of cell phones and the method used to create it. In a rather snarky comment, I said to get back to me when they started tossing babies, and linked to my daughter merrily jumping in her crib with her toys. Mike was kind enough to approach me about writing up a small walk-through on how I created my image, and who can honestly turn down a chance to show off their baby daughter looking so cute?
Award winning Korean photo studio Indylab shot this award winning advertisement without the aid of computer generated imagery. Instead, they manually tossed and photographed phones one at a time, and then composited all the images afterward.
This video was shot by a German film crew in the early 1980s, and shows American street photographer Garry Winogrand at work. Although he died of bladder cancer at age 56, his photographic output during his lifetime was enormous, even compared to other photographers: …
Faking toy camera effects with apps or software is a big fad these days, but Joel Pirela of Blue Ant Studio went a step further: he built his own homemade digital Lomography camera using some walnut wood, hand-polished aluminum frame, parts from a 5-megapixel Vivitar Vivicam, and an Olympus OM series lens.
Here's a video in which interior photographer Roger Brooks walks through how he goes about lighting, photographing, and stitching residential interior photographs.
This behind-the-scenes video shows how fake rain inside a studio was used to shoot a series of action shots for Men's Health magazine.
This behind-the-scenes video shows Montreal-based photographer Von Wong doing a photo shoot with a tango dancing duo. The shoot was spontaneous, with none of the locations preplanned, which gave Wong the opportunity to explore the environment.
If you've never done film photography before, then you've never experienced the excitement that comes from seeing your images for the first time after your film has been processed. After photographing his way around the Great Lakes, photographer Ed Wargin sent his medium format film to the lab for processing: …
If you've never shot with a large format camera before, you might find this video illuminating. In it, photographer Simon Roberts walks us through the process of making prints using a 4x5 plate camera, from setting the camera up to watching the giant prints roll out of the machine.
Photographer Sharon Rainis recently collaborated with wedding dress designer Erez Ovadia for an underwater photo shoot in which models wearing wedding dresses were photographed 20-meters under the sea. In an interview with MegaPixel, Rainis shares some of the challenges involved in such a unique shoot: …
Photographer Blair Bunting made this photograph for a Discovery Channel ad promoting the show Deadliest Catch. Can you figure out how Bunting shot it without putting the model's body at risk? The trick is to use a few high powered leaf blowers and some liquid that looks like blood.
Photographer Jay P. Morgan made this informative walkthrough showing how he shot a photograph that combines artificial light with the evening sky: …
Update: Looks like the video was removed …
In this video, commercial photographer Jay P. Morgan walks through how he went about shooting a composite sports photograph of Mexican soccer player Rafael Márquez.
Photographer Zack Arias has written up a lengthy and insightful post detailing how he goes about updating and editing his portfolio: …
John (AKA knife141) loves turning junk into unusual creations, and one day came up with idea of building a camera for the sole purpose of confusing strangers. He took a $15 digicam and transformed it into a Argus C3 from the mid-1900s: …
Photographer duo Joachim Guanzon and Marden Blake (AKA aesonica) created this short behind-the-scenes video showing how they recently shot and Photoshopped an Audi A4 photo for a print advertisement. You can read a longer how-to over on the aesonica website: …
Photo enthusiast Robert Simpson created this informative behind-the-scenes video detailing how he created a composite photograph showing tiny children running along a bookshelf. Although a ton of planning and preparation went into the shot, everything was done at home on a small budget rather than in a fancy studio. This may inspire you to dream a little bigger using your current resources.
Here's an illuminating (pun intended) video walkthrough by photographer Eric Curry, showing how he went about creating a photo of a B-25 bomber. His technique for lighting the plane is similar to the real estate photography walkthrough that we featured last weekend, and involves lighting the scene a bazillion times from different angles, and then combining the different parts of the photo in Photoshop.
A couple days ago 60 Minutes aired a piece on Alex Honnold, a climber who scales insane cliffs with only a pair of climbing shoes and some chalk. To capture footage of Honnold doing a death-defying climb, they attached GoPro cameras to various points on the cliff and had photographers hanging nearby with Canon 5D Mark II DSLRs. The result is an amazing glimpse into an activity that only a handful of people on earth would even think about attempting.
The popular deal-a-day website Woot made this fun behind-the-scenes video showing how the site's product photographs are made.
Here's an interesting behind-the-scenes video that shows what a workday is like for fashion photographer Peter Stigter.
If a camera lens has been abused, mishandled, or is just plain worn out, there are telltale signs that a knowledgeable buyer can look for to help appraise the value or lack thereof in a used camera lens.
Back in 1996, National Geographic released a documentary film titled "The Photographers" that gives the world a behind-the-scenes look at how the magazine's amazing imagery is created: …
Here's an educational time-lapse tutorial by Los Angeles-based architectural photographer Mike Kelley in which he walks through how he goes about photographing buildings. His technique might be described "manual HDR" -- after shooting the building over a longish period of time to capture different lightings, he then enters the scene and lights different areas of the building using two Canon 430EX Speedlites. Afterward, he loads the stills into Photoshop and selects different portions of the …
Want to adorn a wall with a giant print using your own photography? Here's a great video in which photographer Lee Morris shares how he shot, printed, and framed a massive 5-foot-wide panoramic print for less than $150 -- super cheap compared to the $1,000+ you might pay to have it professionally done. After shooting multiple photos on a bridge in Rome, he merged the images using Photoshop, had a metallic print made by Bay Photo Labs, and then framed it using a large mirror he found at Bed Bath …
The giant "GRIT" seen in this photograph wasn't added in post-processing. The secret? Blue painters tape.
Here's a video in which renowned street photographer Joel Meyerowitz shows us his method of doing street photography. His quiet, friendly, and "invisible" style is quite different from Bruce Gilden's in-your-face technique. The New Yorker also has a great video on Meyerowitz's photography.
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, photographer Richard Misrach visited the empty city and documented the destruction. Although he shot roughly 1,000 photos using an 8x10 large format camera, he noticed that many of the snapshots he captured using a point-and-shoot camera told an interesting story of what had occurred. These photos, which showed the graffiti messages left by residents fleeing their homes, were subsequently published in a book titled "Destroy this Memory". In the video …
This short film, found in Contacts, Volume 1, is a fascinating video in which photographer William Klein takes us beyond his iconic images to discuss the stories revealed in his contact sheets.
Here's a behind-the-scenes video showing Chinese photographer ERIC getting up close and personal with strangers on the streets of Hong Kong and Mainland China. He uses a Mamiya 7II and a large Metz flash, chewing through medium format film as though he was shooting digital. It's interesting to see how people in China seem less defensive about this kind of photography compared to people in New York, Derby, or Hollywood.
Last year we featured the work of Matthew and William Burrard-Lucas, two brothers who mounted their Canon DSLR to a remote-controlled car to shoot close-up photographs of dangerous African animals. The behind-the-scenes video above was just published yesterday, and shows the RC DSLR being driven up to different animals, all of which are clearly thinking, "what the heck is this thing"? They should offer these "BeetleCams" for sale. I want one.
The 684th triple play in the history of baseball happened yesterday in a game between the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, and Boston Globe staff photographer Jim Davis managed to capture photos of the rare occurrence (they happen a few times per year) through anticipation and preparedness. Here's a short video in which Davis explains how he did it.
National Geographic recently gave expedition photographer Jimmy Chin the assignment of shooting a feature story on the Yosemite climbing culture. This jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes video shows the lengths to which Chin goes to capture shots that few photographers would dare attempt. It's both beautiful and inspiring.
Street photographer Bruce Gilden has a pretty distinct style of getting into strangers' faces and firing off a flash held in his other hand. Eric Kim -- who recently started doing street photography full-time -- created this behind-the-scenes video showing himself employing Gilden's trademark style, though instead of a Leica he uses a Canon 5D. The lens he's using is a Canon 24mm f/2.8, and the flash is a YN-560.
Here's yet another example of the crazy visual effects found on today's TV shows -- this time it's from HBO's series "Game of Thrones". Just making composites this realistic using still images would be difficult enough, but for video? Wow.
Los Angeles-based photographer Dave Hill created this video showing all 11 photographs in his Adventure series deconstructed, giving us a glimpse of how they were put together. Hill lights and shoots different portions of his photographs separately, then combines them all into a single image using crazy Photoshop skills. Reminds me of Disney's amazing multi-plane camera.
Street photographer Eric Kim generated some buzz last month by recording himself shooting on the street with a GoPro mounted to his Leica M9. Now, he's back again with an even cooler point of view: through the Leica M9's viewfinder itself. This 10 minute video of Kim doing street photography in Santa Monica was recorded using a HTC EVO 4G smartphone stuck to the back of his camera.
Photo restorer Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Imaging wrote an interesting article describing how he restored a tintype photograph from the 1870s brought to him by a client.
Street photographer Eric Kim wanted to capture what it's like to roam around on the streets and shoot photographs of complete strangers (without their permission), so he mounted a GoPro HD 960 video camera to the top of his Leica M9 and then walked the streets of LA. You can see some of the resulting photos over on Kim's blog.
Here's a neat little behind-the-scenes video in which Michael Ivins, the official photographer of the Boston Red Sox, talks about his experiences with shooting baseball. He offers some good tips that apply to other sports as well (e.g. try and anticipate).
Argentinian photographer Irina Werning's "Back to the Future" series of photographs features people reenacting photographs of themselves taken decades ago, and has made Werning a well-known photographer after going viral on the Internet over the past year.
Ever wonder what the fees involved in doing photography for an ad campaign look like? Jess Dudley, a producer over at Wonderful Machine, has an insightful post on A Photo Editor breaking down an estimate he recently did for a client: …
Some friends of mine asked me to shoot a quick band photograph of them recently without any preparation or planning. Luckily, the location was pretty nice (we were at a hostel) and the weather was a bit cloudy so there wasn't harsh sunlight.
IT consultant and photo enthusiast Viktor Takacs didn't have much success when he tried capturing lightning on camera, so he decided to build this fancy do-it-yourself trigger (which he named "Zeus") that automatically snaps a photo whenever the photodiode detects a flash of lightning. He even built a knob into the device that can be used to adjust sensitivity. The demo above shows the trigger reacting to manually triggered flashes from a strobe.
Those epic photographs of stars and galaxies that you see on sites like NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day don't actually look like that straight out of the camera. Instead, a good deal of post-processing magic goes into each photograph. How much magic? Countless black and white photographs shot with different cameras are carefully weaved together, and color is added to enhance the final image. The video above gives a quick and interesting two minute tour of how they post-processed one …
I imagine, almost everyone interested in photography has seen the stunning pictures created with a technique called light painting. You set your camera to long exposure, 20 to 30 seconds or even longer, and use a light source, a flashlight or LED light, to "paint" with it. Most pictures have some kind of magic touch to it because you see only the track of light afterwards and not the actual light source. Light stencils are somewhat related to light painting. It uses the long exposure as well …
If you want to know the ins and outs of shooting a college basketball game, check out this awesome behind-the-scenes video with pro sports photographer Miguel Olivella. In it, he walks us through things like where to be, what gear to use, camera settings, and various tricks he has under his sleeve that help him get the perfect shot.
