I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself placing my camera onto stacks of boxes and books more times than I can count. Sometimes, the tripod’s not around when you need it, so you just have to work with what you’ve got. Well, if you’ve got a table lamp around, Peter McKinnon will show you how to turn it into a tripod. And it will literally take you only ten seconds to do it....
Shooting with a drone gives you an entirely new perspective and opens up plenty of new possibilities. Whether you use it for photography or video, using a drone requires some skill and planning if you want to make the best out of it. Stewart Carroll from Drone Film Guide shares a fantastic set of tips that will help you make your drone footage look more professional. These tips will not only help you get great shots but also teach you how to make the best out of your drone....
Two rumours have started spreading out of Chinese forums and social media, purportedly detailing specs of an upcoming Sony A7R V. I have to admit, they seem unbelievable without even having looked at them. Even though Sony has had an often… aggressive refresh cycle, this seems way to soon, even for them. The A7R IV was only released in September 2019. If the specs are to be believed, the rumours seem to be more of an incremental change rather than a revolutionary one, in order to bring the A7R product line more in line with other recent bodies we’ve seen from Sony recently (higher resolution EVF, new menus, etc) and features the competition is pushing – like 8K video....
It seemed inevitable after Getty images aquired the free image site Unsplash last year that they would eventually start a paid version. Well, it actually happened. Unsplash has announced a paid tier called Unsplash+ which will be a subscription-based format. But don’t worry, the free version will still be available. Unsplash+ offers paying members access to “curated content” available for commercial licenses with extra legal protection and unlimited downloads....
Many countries are in lockdown again, and many of us are stuck at home. If you don’t feel like learning and being creative, that’s perfectly fine. But if you do – this is the video for you. Spending time at home is ideal for mastering editing skills, and Nigel Danson has seven suggestions for you. In the video above, Nigel talks about seven editing skills you can improve or learn from scratch: four in Lightroom and three in Photoshop....
Photo community and a contest platform Viewbug has launched a new service that helps you make money by photographing strangers. It’s called Viewbug Gigs, and it lets you upload your photos of people you take in the street, at events, at the beach, or any other place. The concept requires you to share your Viewbug profile with these people and have them buy photos of themselves that you took. The concept sounds cool, but it does have certain drawbacks, and we’ll go through them in this article....
I know not everybody’s a fan of the pop-up selfie cam – mechanical moving parts n’ all – but I think they’re fantastic. They free up that screen space, they aren’t hindered by having to try to look through the display, and there’s no risk of scratching them when your phone’s just rolling around in your pocket. Chinese smartphone manufacturer VIVO, though, has taken the pop-up selfie cam to a whole new level with their new IFEA concept camera – which has won a Red Dot Award for the design....
Vivo’s next flagship smartphone will have a giant gimbal-style camera, a teaser posted to Chinese social media site, Weibo suggests. The gimbal-like smartphone camera technology was first shown off in March in Vivo’s Apex 2020 concept phone. According to The Verge, Vivo was inspired by the way a chameleon’s eye works and its effectiveness and that this system 200% more effective than the types of optical image stabilisation found in most smartphone cameras today....
The Canon EOS R3 is the hot topic in the Canon camp right now. Development of the new camera was announced in April and Canon’s already teasing us with more information about it with features like oversampled 4K video and new AI-powered vehicle tracking AF for motorsports shooters. Most of us have only seen photos so far, but Gordon Laing managed to not-quite-get-his-hands-on the real thing. In an in-person briefing by Canon about the new camera, he got to at least see one (well, a pre-production model) up close – even if they wouldn’t let him turn it on and use it, or even touch it....
We can’t dive down a waterfall, especially if it’s the tallest one in the world. But thanks to technology, we can see what it would be like from the safety of our home. Drone pilot Ellis van Jason sent his FPV drone down Angel Falls in Venezuela, the world’s tallest waterfall, and ended up with some impressive footage that he shares in his latest video. Ellis and his friends spend two weeks on an expedition through the jungles of Venezuela....
Watch as NatGeo photographer gets jumped by a giant tiger-lion mix Photographer Steve Winter was recently working on a story about captive tigers in the US for the December issue of National Geographic. While he was taking photos, a 275-pound mix of lion and tiger jumped on him, and the whole incident was caught on camera. A post shared by Steve Winter (@stevewinterphoto) The video was filmed by Nick Ruggia in Safari Sanctuary in Oklahoma....
We’ve seen different kinds of anti-drone technology so far: from eagles (thankfully, that was canceled) to an aerial battering ram. And now there’s the Drone Dome laser, developed by an Israel-based company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems (or just Rafael). It uses a high power laser beam to track and take down hostile drones, even a few of them at once. Rafael shared a video to show off the technology, and it indeed seems pretty powerful....
Just when you think you’ve seen it all when it comes to timelapse, Julian Tryba creates something you want to watch over and over again. A few years after making his fantastic Boston Layer-Lapse, Julian has created one of New York City. This time, there were 10 times more layers, so he came up with the solution to automate the process. The 2:40 minute timelapse took Julian 22 Trips to New York, 352 hours of filming, and 232,000 photos taken....
I’ve always been fascinated with the conservation process and how delicate and complex it is. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll enjoy this video from The Museum of Modern Art. In this video, conservator of photographs Lee Ann Daffner will guide you through a process of conserving one of the oldest objects in NoMA’s collection: an almost 200-year-old daguerreotype. For us, it’s easy to print as many images as we want from a digital file or a 35mm negative film....
If you hadn’t guessed by the title, we’re giving away three brand new Lowepro camera bags and winning is as simple as typing in a number. We filled the new Lowepro PhotoSport BP 24L AW III bag with bubblegum and all you have to do to enter is guess how many of them we managed to fit inside it! There’s a famous experiment where you fill a jar with bubblegum and ask a whole bunch of people how much is in there....
What if your house burnt down? Have you still “made it”? 3 weeks ago I was sitting, much as I do now, winding down on a Saturday evening, finding some time to write a newsletter and blog. I had just released an image shot for Kohler, a company whose advertising I had wanted to be a part of for a long time, and wanted to write something around this image and the process to create it....
Submerging your film in liquid might not seem like a good idea, but when done properly it’s a photography technique that can garnish unexpectedly beautiful results. Without any post-processing work, you can get a distorted effect with vivid streaks of color and interesting textures. Photographer Polina Washington is an expert in these “film soups” and describes the process as a risk that could destroy your work. “But, if even one image turns out well, it’s worth it,” she says....
I guess we all know that most of the stuff on Instagram is fake: likes and followers, travels, faces and bodies, even pancakes! So it’s probably not a surprise that a young woman recently posted a fake hiking photo which was taken in her own backyard. But what makes it funny is that she got busted for it by her own sister. Casey Sosnowsky posted a photo on Instagram where she poses surrounded by nature, wearing sportswear and carrying a water bottle....
Have you ever wondered why camera lenses produce a circular image circle (in general) but sensors are rectangular? Of course the answer is mostly historical – the format of a 35mm photo is in 3:2 aspect ratio, a ratio that people have long known to work well due to human binocular vision. But lenses, in general, are circular. they produce an image circle, a circle that, in general, allows the 35mm sensor to just fit inside it....
The graphics tablet scene has been hit hard with the launch of a range of tablets by XenceLabs. Founded in 2019, XenceLabs is formed mainly of former Wacom employees. According to them, they were stuck in a rut and hitting brick walls put up by upper management when they were at Wacom. The designers, developers, and engineers could not smash through this brick wall and decided to go ahead and make XenceLabs to break free of the corporate shackles....
