How?

How in the name of the Jolly Green Giant did Meg Wachter get anybody to pose for these portraits?

Was it bribery? Hypnosis? Did she promise them a guest spot on “You Can’t Do That On Television”?

Probably all of the above.

Tell ya what we’d do if we wanted to get pictures like these, though:

We’d host a big end-of-summer BBQ/pool party, with lots of soupy side-dishes, and we’d wait ’til everybody all had their bathing suits on, and then we’d break out the camera for the hugest, sloppiest, food-fight photo extravaganza there ever was! Yeah!

We’re not saying you have to spend this coming weekend that way, it’s just, you know, it is the end of summer. And they would be really awesome pictures. We’re just saying.

Meg Wachter’s “Dumped” Portraits

p.s. Congratulations to the winners of our Lomography + Photojojo Photo Tip Contest! First prize goes to lauramary, followed closely by shanegoguen, tom_ashor_bhaan, halfawakehaiku, and ginnymae.
Thanks to everyone who entered- you’re all brilliant!

Flickr, Facebook, your blog… so many wonderful places to share your pictures.

And yet, such a giant pain in the butt to tag and organize and upload photos separately to every single site. Sometimes it’s almost not worth the effort.

Until now! (Cue burst of golden light and singing choir!)

Pixelpipe’s a new service that uploads all your pictures to all your favorite sites at once. Here’s how it works:

• Choose all the destinations you usually send photos to (like Blogger, Picasa, YouTube and nearly 50 other sites).
• Add titles, tags, and captions to your chosen photos or videos.
• Click upload, and relax while Pixelpipe send all of your photos to their various destinations.

Easy, right? Also, did we mention that it’s free? And there are free software add-ons that let you upload straight from Picasa, and your mobile phone, and stuff like that.

So there you go: more sharing your photos, less pain in the keister.

Simplify Your Life at Pixelpipe.com

On July 2, 1982, “Lawnchair Larry” Walters strapped himself into a lawnchair tied to 45 helium-filled weather balloons, and floated away into the sky.

14 hours later, after disrupting flight paths at LAX and blacking out a Long Beach neighborhood by floating into some power lines, he shot the balloons with a pellet gun and returned unharmed to terra firma.

Don’t do what Larry did.

If you really want to see the view from on high, do what David Trawin did instead: hang a camera from a bunch of balloons and send it aloft to take pictures for you.

Read on for full instructions on how to make an aerial balloon camera rig, in Part Three of our continuing quest to get our cameras higher and higher into the air.*

David Trawin’s Aerial Balloon Camera

*What will be next? Dirigibles? Trained eagles? Sending candygrams to the Air Force until they let us borrow a fighter jet?

p.s. Don’t miss Part One: Kite Photography and Part Two: Camera-on-a-Stick!

OK, hands up if you want to print your own T-shirts but can’t be bothered with all the equipment that silkscreening requires.

Jeebus, that’s a lot of hands. Well, we’ve found a way to mimic screenprinting that takes half the time and only requires some freezer paper and fabric paint.

It’s so easy you may find yourself printing photos on everything:

• Score some button-downs at the thrift store and print pictures of office supplies on them.
• Print silhouettes of your childhood pets on a canvas bag and carry your own menagerie with you.
• Take profile shots of your BFFs and print each silhouette portrait on a different shirt. Make your friends arm-wrestle for the privilege of being your shirt-of-the-day.

Let the printing obsession commence!

Custom Photo Silhouette T-Shirts
via Craft

p.s. If you want to try your hand at genuine silkscreening, here’s a simplified version.

p.p.s. Amit will be at Photokina next week hunting down fun photo gear. If you’re there and want to meet up, drop him a line!

The iPhone Army* has a new weapon: photography applications, and lots of ‘em. But who has the time to page endlessly through that collossal archive? Who wants to install every app and try to figure out a) what it does, b) whether it does it well, and c) if it’s worth the price?

We set our intrepid researcher Matt Nuzzaco (photographer extraordinaire and all-around nice guy) to the task and we are proud to report his findings. Here for your reading pleasure (categorized, rated and generally twitterpated) may we present:

Matt’s Roundup of Every Single iPhone Photo App

*similar to the Kiss Army but with less makeup and shorter boots.

p.s. Attention mad scientists: enter our Photo Tip Contest, this week only!

Enter your tips and photos on the Photojojo Forum, and be sure to get your submissions in before midnight on Sunday, September 21!

Remember the first time you made a mixtape? Up all night, headphones on, slaving over a hot stereo until you got it exactly right?

Making your own postcard at Postcard.fm feels like that. Except it’s practically instant, so you can skip the up-all-night part!

All you have to do is choose your greatest photo, upload a song that captures the moment, and send it off with a message to your favorite person. Here’s one we made.

You can make a musical postcard for any occasion, but if you’re looking for some ideas try these on for size:

Best Valentines Ever: Send a foxy photo of you along with your intended’s favorite sappy love song. Hot-cha!

Party Invites: Send a festive postcard with all the party info to yourself, then forward the link to all your friends.

Sorry I Broke Into Your Apartment and Stole All Your Socks: OK, fine, maybe we’re the only ones that need to send those on a regular basis.

Now get out there and start mixing it up!

Make Your Own Postcard at Postcard.fm

In these last, dreamy days of summer, there’s nothing we’d rather do than lie around in the park and stare at the clouds.

And take pictures, of course!

Horst (hb19 on Flickr) has been doing just that, and it looks like he’s redefined the science of cloud manipulation*.

He finds the perfect sky or set of clouds and gives them their object counterpart. The cloud shooting out from a bottle’s top. The sun’s perfect, shiny orb behind his ET-like finger. The fluffy ice-cream cloud on top of its cone. hb19 gives new meaning to the art of cloud watching.

Summery skies abound. Take our advice and point your lens skyward before the winter chill descends.

hb19’s sky play photo set

via Crystal Ginn (You, too, can send us tips via twitter. Just start your tweet with @photojojo)

* Speaking of which, did you know China fired 1,104 rain dispersal rockets to prevent rain during the Olympics’ opening ceremonies? We live in the future!

p.s. Peep these pics from our lightpainting events in NYC and San Francisco last week!

Sure, you can press a button and take a mini motion picture.

But what about the well-loved, handheld, movie-in-your-pocket flip book? Our favorite form of animation, the flip book is the original, prehistoric movie. We’ve doodled thousands of stick figures in the corners of our notebooks. It’s time for photos.

We’ve made digital flip books. We’ve made stop-motion videos. We’ve even uploaded photos and purchased a flip book from FlipClips for 10 bucks or so.

Then we stumbled across The Curious Blog’s beautiful, handmade flip book.

We had to try it ourselves.

We’re flippin’ out over the final product: a squat little choppy movie, our DIY photo flip book will make your thumbs sore from showing it off to all your photo-loving friends.

Photojojo’s DIY Photo Flip Book

It’s no secret we love Project 365. We’re a curious bunch, and often it’s the best way to get to know someone (including yourself).

What happens when the logic’s applied to your town? Your neighbors?

Larry Strung knows. He’s taken Project 365 to the streets of his humble hamlet, Hamilton, Ontario. And we love his town.

Each day he photographs (and posts online) a different citizen. It’s like finally getting to meet all your neighbors, one day and one neighbor at a time. The biker who rides at 6 am, the doctor, the farmer, the mayor. Talk about a complete picture of a place.

Take a cue from Strung and hit the pavement while it’s still warm enough to do so. Meet your neighbors from behind your lens.

Larry Strung’s Hamilton365

p.s. Live in New York City or San Francisco? Come out to our awesomely fun photo meetup Wednesday night (organized with our pals at JPG Magazine and Lomography). Read more…