Last November, I packed up my life in New York City and moved to London. As a freelancer, it’s been an interesting exercise in starting over with client lists for both journalism and corporate assignments — but it’s also been incredibly liberating. It’s given me more time than I’ve had in ages to work on personal projects.

For the four years that I spent as a full-time freelance photographer in NYC, I always tried to set aside a few weeks a year for wandering abroad, with no real objective beyond taking photographs and exploring new places. I’ve produced some of my favorite images on those trips, but unfortunately they’re usually a huge drain on my bank account — and it always meant missing out on work back in New York.

Here, the temporary downtime (it took me a couple months to get the right visa to work in the UK) has allowed me to schedule a six-week trip to Vietnam to work on a couple documentary projects and the time to work on a series of double exposures for a project that’s currently on Kickstarter. The combined landscapes are part New York, part London, created entirely with my iPhone.

Check out Daniella’s project on Kickstarter and more photos here.

Atlanta-based photographer Kendrick Brinson shares photos of the Doo-Nanny Festival in Seale, Alabama.

The Doo-Nanny Festival is in a magical place in rural Seale, Alabama. Camping, art everywhere being created and shared and sold, live music, and then the ceremonial burning of the well, uh, “doonanny.” We went with a group of friends and I hope to make a tradition of it.

See more photos on Kendrick’s blog.

LA-based photographer Dan Krauss shares photos of the Leyenda Eterna festival in the Mexican desert.

Fourteen hours of driving to get to and from this hot spring oasis in the middle of the Mexican desert to spend 32 hours at the best party of my life. I think it was worth the headache.

See more photos on Dan’s blog.

Belgium-based artist and photographer Marcin Owczarek shares a series of surrealist photo montages called “Dystopy Land.”

My art has always been focusing on condition of our globe and the condition of man. My anti-utopian, critical photography is based on the anthropological research. I focus on exploring and interpreting the impact of: new technologies, bio-science, unconscious, fears, morals, social situations, behaviors, habits – over-human life. As a result, I create the image of the 21 century and the image of our current society.

See more photos on Marcin’s website.

Honolulu-based photographer Elyse Butler Mallams shares a roundup of her favorite photos taken with Instagram.

I’m always documenting my life in various mediums, recently I got my first iPhone, and the camera and Instagram app has been a really fun, easy, and useful way to photograph and share my everyday life. Here is a roundup of some favorite images I’ve taken with Instagram the first couple months. Follow me @oceanelyse.

See more photos on Elyse’s blog and on her instagram page.

Sometimes, I wake up and think: “Y’know, shooting regular product shots is just too easy. I know!! I’ll pour some paint over my whole set — that’ll make things interesting.”

If you can’t see the video above, please click here.

I’ve never been one to settle for “good enough.” Honestly, normal kind of kills me. The first motion project I worked on was so normal that my soul died a little inside. I needed to seriously amp up my creativity and push the limits of my imagination to be happy with my work.

The videos you see here have been years in the making — maybe even longer. The ideas behind them have been brewing in my head since I first starting learning time-lapse techniques back in school at Brooks Institute. I took tons of classes in time-lapse and extreme high-speed photography, and ended up majoring in Industrial and Scientific Photography. Funny as it sounds for a sports photographer, I never took a single Sports Photography class! I was obsessed with warping time, bending reality and testing the technical limits of photography.

If you can’t see the video above, please click here.

Eight years on, I still love seeing motion sped up or slowed down. My first time-lapses were of nature and the night sky, out on camping trips. Before I ever thought about adding motion to my commercial work, I was just out there freezing my butt off and having the time of my life!

At the urging of one of my mentors, a producer in Los Angeles, I began to think about putting together a director’s reel and pursuing motion jobs. Motion is such an important part of the visual landscape now, and I couldn’t ignore that the industry was moving in that direction. It was time to jump out of my comfort zone and try something new. I decided to build a reel of around eight spec projects, each showing something unique, creative and representing who I am as an artist.

Like the honor student that I was, I threw myself into studying everything motion. I had worked with high-speed motion cameras before, but I knew that I needed to learn everything I could about motion to do it well. If I was going to do this, I had to do it my way. A little crazy, a little different — but definitely me.

As a creative, the most terrifying thing in the world is the blank page. Nothing came to me at all in the beginning, and I started to get nervous. I went out in nature, and remembered my night sky time-lapses from school. I messed around on YouTube, and eventually (after watching a few dumb cat videos) came across some videos of an artist pouring layers of paint over boxes, the dried product of which he sells. My brain started waking up and I thought about how cool it would be to use pouring paint in a time-lapse motion project. I had to make the idea my own and take it to a new (and admittedly crazy) level, so I came up with the idea to play the video in reverse, gradually “revealing” a product from beneath the paint.

If you can’t see the video above, please click here.

Just like the paint pouring over my set, there was no stopping once I got started. Soon, I’d shot ten of these projects. With each project came a new concept, new challenges, new failures and new triumphs. I kept pushing the technique and pushing my imagination. My rockstar team and I had a lot fun making these videos; I hope you like the results!

Technical Information:

It was all cameras on deck when we went to shoot these videos. My Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III and 5D Mark II were the main cameras because they produce images of such an awesome quality and resolution that you can use the still frames in a print campaign. Additional angles were captured with my older cameras that I hang onto and refuse to sell: a Canon 20D, Canon 1D Mark II and a Canon Rebel XTi. For the Vans video we had two extra angles captured by an EOS 60D and a 7D. One camera was mounted to the ceiling for overhead shots, but all the other cameras were setup on tripods. That’s a lot of legs!

Another fun problem you might have guessed is how to sync all those cameras to fire at the same time. I started out using multiple intervalometers on all the cameras, but my preferred method turned out to be using one intervalometer and a PocketWizard transmitter on the main camera and using PocketWizard receivers on all the other cameras to trigger the shutters in unison. This allowed me to stop all cameras with just the intervalometer on the main camera, instead of running around the room and up on the ceiling to shut off half a dozen intervalometers. This strategy was way simpler, and meant fewer chances to bump a tripod leg or the set — a time-lapse shooter’s worst nightmare.

To get saturated colors and maximize my depth of field with minimal noise, I used a low ISO and closed down the aperture as far as I could. For a few shots I opened up to f/1.8 just to mix it up and show a very shallow depth of field in a few frames of the final video.

Since I started out as a still photographer, my primary lighting kit contains strobes. Not wanting to pop those expensive bulbs thousands of times for a single project, I opted for a continuous light source. I wasn’t ready to make the financial commitment to a whole new lighting kit, so I went down to the hardware store and picked up some work lights. They’re cheap and easy to use. For diffusion, I mounted an old white pillowcase to a picture frame. My wife was horrified, but I was working with what I had. The pillowcase got a little singed, but we managed to not set anything on fire.

I did some calculations to ballpark how many shots I needed to end up with a full minute of footage that would play at 24-30fps. I figured that I needed about 1,800 shots per camera, and if I the shoot last six hours I needed to take a shot about every 12 seconds. I ended up playing it safe and taking a shot every 7 seconds instead. This was just enough time to run up to the set, drop a bit of paint and duck out of the way before the next shot. The intervalometer was crucial to capturing a consistent interval of shots. For the Vans shoot, we had to shoot every 11 seconds to give us more time to tug a stitch or nudge the skateboards. We ended up with more usable shots at the slower shot interval than if we’d set it at a 5 second interval and caught arms reaching into the frame.

Whenever you’re trying to do something new and different, there’s always a higher risk of failure. But you’ll never learn from your mistakes if you don’t fail, you’ll never fail if you don’t try, and you’ll never succeed if you don’t try. It’s all worth it for the final product and hearing someone say, “WOW.”

Paris-based photographer George Holroyd shares his diary project about his progressive neurological disorder, Essential Tremor, which can cause debilitating tremors and loss of coordination.

“We pass through the present blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is lifted, can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.” – Milan Kundera

Several years ago, I was diagnosed with Essential Tremor, a progressive neurological disorder which can cause debilitating tremors and loss of coordination, when the symptoms that I have had since adolescence eventually worsened to the point that I began experiencing difficulty in performing simple everyday tasks.

The series, “And I” is a diary; a collection of glances which illustrate a reality distorted by frustration, embarrassment, and a growing sense of social isolation. It serves as a visualization of the impact that Essential Tremor has on me and my closest relationships as I continue to come to terms with the new realities that I am presented with.

See more photos on George’s website.

Atlanta-based photographer Raymond McCrea Jones shares a series of images made out of many layered photographs from a single day.

“Abstraction Layer” is an ongoing series that stems from a question I’ve often asked myself, “what would it look like if I could condense all the photographs I create in one day into a single image?” So I started experimenting with the layering of photographs. Each final product is a glimpse into a single day’s worth of shooting. What I love about this series is the freedom of expression it allows me that isn’t possible with most of the other work I shoot. These images are clearly “manipulated” and I’m not trying to fool anyone otherwise. By manipulated I mean these single moments that I’ve captured yet they are combinations of many moments. With all the drama surfacing lately about the integrity of photographers and how much processing is too much, it’s nice to be creating something totally removed from that discussion. However, I still enjoy the honesty that these images convey of scenes and moments that did realize themselves over the course of a day. And the longer you look at each of these images the more you see something new. This experimental work meant to be a commentary on the throwaway digital culture we live in as well as a simple aesthetic exercise.

See more images on Raymond’s website.

Snowflakes lit through color gels accumulate on a sheet of glass during an experimental shoot in East Chicago, Ind., early Friday, February 22, 2013.

East Chicago based photographer, lighting designer, and filmmaker Guy Rhodes experimented with macro photography and captured some interesting photos of snowflakes.

Despite measly 5″ snow accumulation forecasts disappointing the snow lover in me, Chicago is expecting its largest snowfall of the season so far today. In the past weeks, unseasonably devoid of snowfall, I’d caught wind of a few great examples of snowflake photography online. Today’s storm brought a great opportunity to try my hand at lighting and photographing these microscopic gems first hand.

I’ve never done any sort of macro photography at all, nor do I own the proper gear to do it, so focusing in on something as small as a grain of sand with only my standard lenses was my first challenge. On one of the snowflake photo websites I visited, someone mentioned shooting though a reversed lens. I tried several combinations of lenses, forwards and backwards, while shooting flecks of pepper on my desk.

Continue reading and see more photos on Guy’s blog.

After much trial and error with numerous lenses and configurations, I found that shooting through a backwards Canon 28mm-70mm f2.8 zoom lens with my Canon 100mm-400mm f4.5-f5.6 zoom lens gave me a passable macro setup. I used a glass picture frame as my shooting platform for the snowflakes, held with 2 c-stands. A third c-stand was used to stabilize my body and the camera. Focusing on the snowflakes was done by sliding the camera and my arms down the c-stand (while intently controlling my breathing) until the snowflakes and ice crystals were sharp, all while holding the backwards lens against the front element of the lens attached to my camera.

I was really expecting the snowflakes to look like the stereotypical kinds you cut out of paper in elementary school, but alas, today’s storm produced flakes that looked more like little cylinders. These snowflakes are of the “needle” variety, and only occur when the air temperature is around 23 degrees Fahrenheit (which it was exactly at the time I shot this).

A blue gel on my Alien Bees B1600 strobe made these lackluster snowflakes start to blossom, and letting them accumulate on the glass (playing with my very limited depth of field as they piled up) produced some interesting effects as well.

Photographer Martin Stranka is raising funds to publish a emotive minimalist fine art book with his favorite images from the last 5 years.

I am a self-taught professional photographer. My distinctive vision of photography etched as a unique space located in a balance and serenity, while my sophisticated images exists in that narrow space of a few seconds between dreaming and awakening. During the last 3 years I have gathered over 40 international awards from different competitions including Professional Photographer of the Year, Sony World Photography Awards or International Photo Award.

I found an amazing book printer right here in Czech republic which published books for world known photographers, so I could not be luckier. They specialize in beautiful photography books, and I will be working with them one on one to create a high quality art book. It will be a hardcover gem that will really hold its own on bookshelves and coffee tables, and it will feature all of my favorite images from my last 5 years. All books will be numbered and personally signed as a limited edition. I plan to publish the book after this crowdfunding project. I want you to love this book as much as I do.

Learn more about Martin’s project, see more photos and help him reach his goal here.