What you see here is a non-manipulated photograph by Wolcott Wilhelm showing a Chevy muscle car with a see-through hood that shows the engine underneath. It was created by splitting the exposure time between having the hood up and having it down.
This video shows a beautiful way of displaying your photographs using a birch-wood plaque and clear epoxy resin. You can order them from The Resin Man for your Facebook photographs, or you can try doing this yourself for your next photo project.
If you were given the seemingly impossible task of photographing a giant 300-foot-tall Redwood tree, how would you go about doing so? National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols chose to use raise up a special rig of three Canon 1Ds Mark II DSLR cameras into the air, photographing dozens of photographs that he stitched into a beautiful panoramic tree photo. The photograph was used as the cover photo of the October 2009 edition of the National Geographic.
Flickr user Vincent Riemersma shot this beautiful photograph of colored liquids splashing up the side of wine glasses champagne flutes using a Nikon D300s, a custom rig for sliding the glasses down a ramp, and a sound trigger.
The Super Bowl isn't just the biggest event in the NFL season, but one of the biggest events for the world's best sports photographers each year. Here's a neat behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to shoot the Super Bowl as a Sports Illustrated photographer.
Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how Annie Leibovitz went about shooting Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette for Vogue magazine. Back in August 2010 we also shared a video of Leibovitz shooting Sean Connery for Louis Vuitton.
Patryk Kizny created this short HDR time-lapse film titled "The Chapel" that explores the inside of a Protestant chapel located in Zeliszów, Poland built in 1797. The HDR imagery gives the video a eerily beautiful surreal look that makes the video look like it came from a video game.
Design firm XNcreative shot some photographs with a Canon Rebel 550D (T2i) while flying over various locations in the western US, but didn't feel the still photos captured the original grandeur of the locations, so they decided to turn the stills into a motion-faked video. It was all done using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Apple Motion. You can find a walkthrough for how it was created here if you want to try your hand at this 3D effect.
What does it take to shoot portraits of random strangers on a sidewalk? Photographer Clay Enos, known for his portraits for the movie Watchmen, walks us through his process for capturing impromptu portraits of passers-by on a white backdrop.
Derick Childress spent three nights shooting a massive light painting photograph with the message "Emily, will you marry me?" drawn out on the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina as a proposal to his girlfriend Emily Kern. The final image was made up of about 800 individual stills that each took 10 seconds to expose.
Ambrotype photography came into use in the 1850s, and involves creating a positive image on a sheet of glass. This behind-the-scenes video shows ambrotype photographer Harry Taylor creating three portraits using this process, and should be interesting to watch if you've never seen this method of photography before.
When Calle Hoglund had his buddies over one night editing a music video, he got the idea of creating a photo manipulation with his friends looking out from photo frames. The project took three hours from start to finish, and luckily for us they created a stop-motion behind-the-scenes video showing how it was done.
Here's an easy to follow video in which commercial and advertising photographer Jay P. Morgan walks us through how he went about shooting a portrait of a jazz player with a three light setup.
Certain higher end flashes have a strobe (AKA repeating flash) mode that can flash repeatedly, freezing a moving subject in various positions in a single exposure. This tutorial will teach you how to create a similar effect using light painting techniques, resulting in the above photo.
The Internet viral sensation "Double Rainbow" video was captured on January 8th, 2010. About two weeks later on the 23rd (and long before that video went viral), I saw a double rainbow myself when looking out my window. I quickly grabbed my camera (a Canon 40D at the time) with my 16-35mm lens (I wanted the widest shot possible) and ran out to shoot the rainbow.
Photographer Mike Collins created this simple video that gives you a visual look at the difference between full frame sensors and crop frame sensors when using the same lens. The video uses a Canon 5D Mark II for the full frame shots, and a Canon 7D (1.6x crop factor) for the crop shots.
My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn't much light to work with, and I didn't bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven't done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here's a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used …
Living in the Southwest United States gives me a great opportunity to capture lighting. Every summer “Monsoon Season” arrives, officially June 15 through Sept 15th, in Arizona. Prevailing northwesterly winds carry humid air north out of Mexico where it meets the hot air of the desert, resulting in powerful thunderstorms nearly everyday. The thunderstorms often produce localized areas of heavy wind, thick blowing dust (Haboobs), rain, and most importantly, lightning. I regularly track the …
Here's an interesting video created by Make Magazine showing how UC Berkeley architecture professor Charles Benton uses kites to capture amazing aerial photographs. Benton creates his own gear for mounting his DSLR on a kite and controlling it from afar -- you might be surprised at how creative some of his contraptions are (for one rig he uses a disposable camera, rubber bands, and a ping-pong ball).
You know all those eye-popping slow motion videos we feature occasionally on PetaPixel? Many (if not most) of them were filmed with the Phantom HD Gold camera. This camera is capable of shooting thousands of frames per second, and costs a staggering $2,500 to rent for a single day.
Asters of any kind provide such potential in photography: the colours and the gentle curve of their tiny thin petals combines with their close-growing nature to give the impression either of flowers fighting each other for space and light or of a mass of colour, huddled together for comfort. The clump of asters shown in this shot are a soft, luscious purply-cerulean-cornflowery-blue. Light seems to dance off the petals. Or it would, had there been much light when I took this. Instead, it was a …
The stop motion music video for Oren Lavie's song "Her Morning Elegance" took the web by storm last year, amassing over ten million views on YouTube and receiving a Grammy nomination.
About a week ago I did a shoot with the band Strange Birds as we were walking there was a point that I saw light rays trickling down right in front of us. I told all of the guys to stop and arranged them to my liking.
Portrait photographer Gregory Heisler has done quite a few portraits for Time Magazine covers, including a few for their Person of the Year issues. This is an informative video where he steps through how he went about photographing Rudy Giuliani at the top of Rockefeller Center with the Empire State Building in the background. If you're interested at all in portraiture and/or lighting, you'll find this video quite educational.
Editor's note: This walkthrough was originally published on Clint Decker's Flickr account. We found it pretty informative and asked him to share it here.
The main thing with in flight hover fly photos is not to try, by that I mean if you go out to take one you will end up normally chasing a hoverfly all over the place with little chance of success. I only take them when an opportunity arises.
HBO posted this interesting behind-the-scenes video that gives a glimpse into the kind of special effects that went into filming the popular miniseries John Adams. It's pretty crazy how they construct entire realities around the actors using CGI.
This music video by YouTube celebrity Joe Penna (AKA MysteryGuitarMan) shows him dancing in various locations while the world around him moves in slow motion. What's even cooler is that he also published a behind-the-scenes video showing how you can do the same thing. Check it out!
This photograph, titled "Easy Rider", was shot by photographer Chris McVeigh (AKA powerpig on Flickr). The photograph seems so unbelievable that many people asked whether it was faked using Photoshop.
Freddy Wong's YouTube channel is a must-subscribe if you're interested in video editing and home-brewed CGI. A couple months ago we featured an amazing video they made where an entire action scene was done using light-painting techniques. What's neat about their channel is that they also create behind-the-scenes clips explaining how each one was made.
Here's a really neat video about the making of a Speedo ad campaign that is running all across Europe right now. The video traces the production from its conceptualization to its final post-processing and illustration. The actual shoot and filming took place at the Pinewood Studios Underwater Stage in the UK, where several major films were also shot, including many 007 and Harry Potter movies. It's pretty remarkable to see so much equipment underwater.
Ever wonder how top photographers deal with their files? Chase Jarvis just put out an awesome blog post and behind-the-scenes video describing his entire workflow from capture to backup.
Peter Funch is a New York City-based photographer who we featured a while back in a post titled "4 Creative Projects that Bend the Reality of Street Scenes". Funch photographs scenes for extended periods of time, and then combines people who share something in common. In the photograph above, he chose to include only people who were carrying manila envelopes.
Two weeks ago we featured the short film "The Last 3 Minutes" by cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, which showcased the potential of the Canon 5D Mark II for filmmaking.
My dad is an avid stamp collector. While he does have some US stamps in his collection, he mainly focuses on older stamps from China.
Photographer Jon Beard has a terrific set of photos called "Burning Bulbs" in which he breaks lightbulbs and photographs them with the filaments exposed.
Editor's note: A few weeks ago I discovered James' photography in PetaPixel's Flickr pool and was completely blown away by his photos of exploding lightbulbs that shattered drops of water instead of shards of glass. The concept was so creative that I asked him to teach all of us by guest posting here on PetaPixel. I hope you all enjoy this walkthrough and his photographs as much as I did.
Editor's note: Whenever I see a hummingbird, I always want to shoot a low depth of field photograph of it, but I've never been able to. Thus, I was pretty impressed when I came across this photograph of a hummingbird in flight in our Flickr group pool, and asked David if he would write this guest post teaching PetaPixel readers how to photograph hummingbirds.
Went to Bodega bay to do some crabbing for the first time, and took this photo while walking to the beach (it's the untouched RAW): …
Here's an unprocessed portrait I took a couple days ago.
Crater Lake in Oregon is such a beautiful place that post-processing isn't really even needed for photographs taken there. Here's an unprocessed photograph I took there this past summer on a road trip with friends: …
Today I'll be doing a post-processing walkthrough with the following photograph I took about a week ago: …
As a lot of the interviewees we've had on PetaPixel have shared, a great way to improve in your photography skills is to experiment. Even though many of the experiments I share on PetaPixel have nothing to do with directly improving your photography skills, they've definitely helped me gain a deeper understanding of various aspects of photography, post-processing, and manipulation, and I hope they can do the same for you. Today, I'll show you how to take photographs of multiple yous. Let's get …
One of the results of always carrying around my camera is that I end up with a lot of portraits of my friends. I had lunch with a few of my buddies last Sunday, and snapped this photograph while waiting for a friend: …
I was over at Lake Tahoe attending my brother's soccer tournament this past weekend, and took this photograph from behind the opponent's goal: …
Here's a photograph I randomly snapped on a tennis court a few days ago: …
On the same day I was experimenting with the light painting I described in a post yesterday, I also fiddled around with long exposure portraiture. I had my buddy Aaron pose for me at his desk in near darkness. The only sources of light in the room were his laptop screen, a few LED flashlights that I placed on his desk in various directions, and a lighter that Aaron held in his hand.
I love experimenting with photography, and trying out interesting new techniques, angles, and styles. One of the things I've really enjoyed playing around with over the years is drawing pictures with light using long exposures.
Here's a photograph I took of my brother skateboarding (or attempting to) back in 2005: …
A few weeks ago, I was taking photographs of my friend Tommy at his Berkeley graduation using a Canon 40D and the 24mm f/2.8. I had originally purchased the 24mm as part of a package and was planning on selling it off, but decided to keep it after being shocked by its quality and versatility. Anyhow, here's an unprocessed photograph of my friends Tommy and Jacob I took right after the graduation: …
