Pictures

The square Instagram App icon has become very well known to most of us. What if it was real? The team over at ADR studios rendered what it would look like if the icon became a real camera. Would it be something that you would buy if it was a possibility?

For many of us, Polaroid cameras hold a special place in our hearts. What started as the original instant camera evolved into an art form beloved by hipsters and pro photographers alike. Polaroid has struggled lately, as digital photography has forced the instant photo classic out onto the fringes. App developer Appadana licensed the Polaroid name to build an iOS version of their cult classic camera and make it modern. The result: Polamatic.

I bet most of you never heard of the term "Scanography" before, but its ok, I just learned about it a week ago. The idea of Scanography is using a regular paper scanner as a camera, and take pictures of whatever can fit in or around the scanner. The results are somewhere between scary to magical. Check out the best Scanography photos found on Flickr!

Smoking is totally bad for your health, and the health of the people around you. BUT, I think we can all agree smoking is awesome for your pictures. With the right light, location or theme, you can get great and memorable shots when the model is smoking.

Personally I never smoked, and never going to try, but I really enjoy looking at portraits of smoking girls and guys. Check out this collection of 15 amazing portraits of smoking people.

Today, Bon Appetit featured a very comprehensive blog post from food photographer William Hereford. Rather than just talking about just a particular technique or style, Hereford also writes to the burgeoning food photographer/enthusiast and tries to answer the question: What is the camera you should go with if you want to get into commercial food photography? The answer may surprise you.

This is what it looks like when day and night meet in a single image. Including the prep time, it took photographer Chris Kotsiopoloulos thirty hours to capture the hundreds photos needed to stitch this together. The shot was taken in Sounio, Greece. It got so cold at times that he had to use a hairdryer to keep the lens from fogging up. See the full post for more details!

Massoud Hossaini, who is also the first Afghani to win a Pulitzer Prize. Hossaini's work captures the horrors of violence that occur in Afghanistan on a regular basis. The photo was captured just as a suicide bomber took his own life and that of many others in the vicinity. A girl dressed in green screams as blood runs down her face, and she is surrounded by bodies of the wounded and dead.

It's easy to think that models are perfect in every way because when we see images of them they have had hours of hair and makeup, they are lit by some of the most talented photographers on the planet, and then they are retouched by the most meticulous Photoshop artists around. In this post we get to see side by side comparison shots between each model without makeup and then after the full production. Each of these models looks pretty normal except for the last one that looked incredible even without makeup.

Photographer turned wet-plate artist Ian Ruhter basically dropped everything and cashed in his life's savings to follow his passion, morphing his van into a massive camera and making enormous wet plate prints as he travels the country. From hand-making the silver emulsion to the financial risks of shooting at a whopping $500 a plate, this video "Silver & Light" gives an in-depth

A great photo makes us feel. It makes us stare. It takes us places we have never been, or even places we long to remember. Great photos show us a side of the world we wish was real, or perhaps what is all too real. We are all capable of truly great photos, and our Fstoppers Facebook Group proves that every single day. To honor these great Fstoppers of the world, we award the best of the best from each month with a badge of honor: the Fstoppers Featured Photo. Here are the best from March 2012.

Remember the World Press Photo contest winners from earlier this year? Well, World Press Photo recently introduced (just last year, actually) a similar contest for multimedia and video entries. The winner is a stark, harrowing, and sobering documentary view into the Kommandokorps in South Africa, an apartheid-era relic that still lingers in the country.

Clowns are usually known for making kids happy (or scared to death), and for smiling and laughing all the time. They are also known for being active and with a lot of good energy. But what happens when clowns go back home and back to reality?

Try wrapping your head around these statistics. Approximately 3.5 trillion photos have been taken since Daguerre captured Boulevard du Temple 174 years ago. The global photo count is rising swiftly due to the accessibility of digital cameras and camera phones. Today, more pictures are taken every two minutes

With a lot of the recent Photoshop screwups we've all seen in the media, people have been asking us what some of the before shots look like and what post processing goes into a cover photo. We'll, here it is.

Who doesn’t love watching the X Games? Those athletes are crazy. Just as captivating, though, is this behind-the-scenes two-part video on The Northface and X Games Baldface commercial. Director Todd Jones pulls out all the stops in this two part BTS documentary, breaking out a Phantom HD Gold, a helicopter, and building one really enormous jump.

Brothers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas make quite the team. They're wildlife photographers based in Britain who have devised some clever means to get closer to some of the world's most dangerous animals. In 2009, they created a remote-controlled camera nicknamed BeetleCam and set out to photograph animals in their natural habitat. Armed with the knowledge they gained from the first trip, they went back a second time, and their results are nothing short of stunning.

Manipulating photos happened way before Photoshop was around. This series shows before and afters of famous and notable figures before the digital era began. Truly fascinating, you can't help but wonder what level of dedication it took to make these happen.

I thought I had seen pretty much every type of water drop photo over the years, then I stumbled upon these. Markus Reugels is a floor installer in Marktsteinach, Germany as well as a part-time photographer. Markus has created a way to reflect images into water drops while capturing said drops in midair.

Just about everyone I know is hooked on critically-acclaimed series Breaking Bad. (A high school chemistry teacher with cancer turned meth dealer? How could that not be interesting?) But as TV still photographer Ursula Coyote will tell you, shooting

Every month I see some incredible photos uploaded to our thriving Fstoppers Facebook Group. With over 3,000 members, this group has some amazing talent. To honor these great Fstoppers of the world, we award the best of the best from each month with a badge of honor: the Fstoppers Featured Photo. We have some stellar images earning this honor in February of 2012.

Few years back I traveled with my family to Italy, where I captured one of my favorite images to date - random girl sitting on very old stairs. This week I decided share with you some great images where the stairs are the main object. Using the stairs makes me tired, but photographing them is a lot of fun. Check out the Full Post, and share with us some of your own stairs shots.

As many of your may know, we have a vibrant and extremely active Fstoppers Facebook Group that has grown by leaps and bounds since Lee and I launched it in late October. I have personally been blown away by the quality of many of the images posted therein. If you're looking for some inspiration, the Fstoppers Facebook Group is a great place to start. I wanted to showcase what I considered to be the best, most well executed photos of the last month here for everyone to appreciate. Look forward to this as a monthly thing. If you have some stunning work you want to share with the Fstoppers, you might just find it here featured as one of the top shots of the month. View the full post to see them all and tell us what you think.