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You can use pretty much anything as a camera lens – even shoes and potatoes

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When it comes to weird lenses, Mathieu Stern is pretty much the undisputed king. But it seems we have a contender for that title who’s out to prove that you can use pretty much anything as a camera lens – as long as it’s a pinhole camera lens – as German film director and photographer Simon Meyer has been showing off on TikTok. Everything from potatoes and shoes to rolls of toilet paper and even a cuddly toy Elmo.

As mentioned, you are limited to basically using it as a pinhole camera, but differently sized objects essentially allow you to get a different focal length. Sure, you could just use an empty tube for something like this and cut it to to the length you need, but where’s the fun in that?

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202 photography quotes to inspire you in 2022

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“A picture is worth a thousand words” is the first sentence that springs to my mind when I think of photography-related quotes. And while I agree with it, I must admit that I highly respect words, too. Just like photos, there are wise words that can inspire you.

So, to start off the year 2022, we bring you 202 quotes that photographers and other artists said about taking pictures. Some of them will amuse you, some of them will make you think and reevaluate your attitudes. You’ll find some of them relatable, yet get completely mad at the others. But ultimately – all of them will inspire you to think and to create. Is there your favorite one on this list?

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Photographers, here are three gifts to give yourself in 2022

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During the holiday season, we think a lot about what we’re going to give to our family and friends. We buy and make gifts, wrap them up, write the cards, and anxiously wait to give them to the ones we love. But what about us? Do we love ourselves, too?

I admit that I sometimes forget how to do it. In case you’re anything like me, I made you a little reminder. I give you three gifts that you can give yourself in 2022 or even this Christmas. And don’t worry – you don’t even need any money for two out of three!

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“The Gift of Room Tone” is three minutes of people being told to sit in silence in front of the camera

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Room tone is literally how the name sounds. It’s a recording of the room’s tone. Its background noise. What’s going on when people are quiet. It’s the hum of the air conditioning unit, the hum of a PC fan whirring away in the background, the dull roar of traffic driving by outside the window. It’s used to help fill in the background of silence and audio dubs recorded elsewhere in a clinically noise-free studio as well as help to transition audio from one scene to another.

It’s one of the most boring parts of filmmaking, visually speaking, but The Criterion Collection made a short film out of it anyway. Called The Gift of Room Tone, this almost three-minute video shows people doing what they do when told room tone needs to be recorded. While the video below shows quite a few relatively unknown faces, it also includes some popular famous ones like Christopher Walken, Martin Scorsese, Frank Oz and Jake Gyllenhaal.

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How the pandemic forced me to shoot local and fall in love with my country again

It’s been two years since the coronavirus pandemic began. So much has happened over that time: the world has turned upside down, and so have we. Our lifestyles have changed to different extents, and each of us misses something we used to do all the time, and maybe even take for granted.

What changed most for me was traveling: I used to cross the border at least three times a year, exploring new countries or new places in the countries I’d visited before. However, travel restrictions have changed it all. The pandemic forced me to do something I’d keep postponing – exploring my own country. So, when the lockdowns were over, I started traveling across Serbia and reminded myself of how many beautiful and photo-worthy spots you can find locally. And now, I invite you to share this journey and some of my insights with me.

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Five things no one teaches you about photography

When we start learning about photography, there’s so much to grasp: from basic camera settings to lighting, composition, editing… However, there are some things no one teaches us, and it’s how to make our work meaningful and how to keep ourselves happy and fulfilled as photographers. In this video, Adam Karnacz of First Man Photography discusses five things no one teaches you about photography, and they will surely make you think.

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This guy wrote a piece of software to composite every photo he’s ever taken into a single image

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Sometimes, you come across some photography experiments that are so unique you just have to share them. And this project from Andrew Eckel is one such experiment. He’s a musician, artist and software engineer. Before covid, he would regularly play shows in Boston, but with most of the planet being largely shut down for almost the last two years, he’s had a lot of time to explore other pursuits.

He wanted to have something to sell besides CDs and started working on a book of lyrics. He decided to fill the book with colourful artwork and remembered a programming technique he’d learned in college to average out images to remove outliers. He thought maybe he could create his art using something that does the opposite. So that’s what he did. He pulled on his C++ knowledge to write an application that highlighted the differences between images. The outliers. And it looks pretty amazing.

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There is no such thing as a “correct” exposure – Your camera’s wrong and it’s all subjective

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There’s always a lot of talk about “getting it right in-camera”, often by people who shot on film and didn’t realise how much the lab compensated for their shortcomings when they dropped their film off to be processed at their local high street place. They go on about various “rules” and “correct” ways of doing things and one of the big ones is exposure. And, well, a lot of the time even exposure can be quite a subjective thing.

In this video, James Popsys talks about exposure after having some of his images criticised for being overexposed. And, well, yes, he does admit that they are a tad brighter than he’d planned, but he still maintains that there’s no such thing as a “correct” exposure and I can completely see his argument.

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You should probably delete the work that you’re the most proud of and here’s why

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In writing and filmmaking, there’s a term called “killing your darlings“. In Journalism, it’s the slightly more macabre “killing your babies“, but the end result is the same. It’s trimming the fat from the content in order to make it efficient and bring it to the point. For a writer, it means cutting out unnecessary large passages because they distract from the story. For a filmmaker or editor, time and budget constraints might mean cutting out scenes you love just because they don’t add to the story. For Journalists you’re often cutting the story short simply to make it fit in the allotted space.

Full-time photographer and part-time nomad, Adrian at aows believes that this principle also holds true for photographers. We need to often need to delete (or at least hide) some of the work we’re most proud of, because it’s just not very good – no matter how we might feel about it. And I’m inclined to agree with him.

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Are you guilty of making these six mistakes before you even hit record?

When it comes to shooting video, many of us will cut corners, especially on small scale lower budget productions.  It’s all too easy to just grab a camera and start shooting without actually putting any real thought into it. And usually, this lack of forethought shows in the final result.

In this video, Epic Light Media talks about six of the most common mistakes people make when shooting a video. They’re nothing to do with making sure batteries are charged or packing extra memory cards and while not all of them will apply to all situations, they’re all things that you’ll want to keep in mind if you decide to start taking video more seriously.

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