Most of the time when we shoot an image, we have a pretty good idea of how we want the final result to look, even before we’ve hit the shutter. But sometimes we want to experiment and see how the image might look processed a different way. And maybe now and again we’ve no idea what we want to do with it and just want to see what our options might be....
Hi, Kersten here. I’m a portrait photographer based on the outskirts of London, England, and co-host of the Camera Shake Photography Podcast. Now, you may not have heard of it but if you ARE one of our tens of listeners out there – it’s nice to meet you. It comes as no surprise to most people that the last 18 months have been, to put it mildly, challenging. Over here in the UK we had to endure several total lockdowns, which meant that business as we know it went south and especially for us portrait photographers, life got a whole lot more complicated....
Advertisements Build I’ll start with the build quality. Over the years I have been fortunate enough to use and own other high end photo equipment. I used to own a Canon 5D Mark IV as well as a Fuji X-Pro3 and have shot extensively with the flagships like the 1DX line. The SL series is a different breed of build. These machines are made to last. By no means are the likes of Canon, Nikon, Sony…you name it, badly built cameras, it’s more so that when you pick up an SL for the first time, you know you’re holding something special....
The My Rode Reel short film competition is one of the highlights of the film world and every year it gets bigger and better. For 2020, they’ve outdone themselves, and have a massive $1 million in cash prizes for the winners. This is the largest cash prize of any short film competition, ever. But they’re also giving away a whole boatload of gear, too! My Rode Reel has been running since 2014, and since that time it’s seen more than 16,000 films submitted and given out over $3....
Recently, Charbax at ArmDevices visited the Sony stand at CeBIT when he noticed a couple of large sensors on display. Also on the wall behind them he spotted Sony’s medium format sensor roadmap. This roadmap shows two very promising sensors on the way for 2018. The first is the IMX461, a 100MP upgrade to the current 50MP IMX161 sensor which resides inside the Hasselblad X1D-50c and Fuji GFX 50S cameras....
Blind Spot Gear’s Power Junkie has become an extremely popular piece of kit. Wandering around the halls of NAB and IBC, I saw them powering gear on many stands, and I’ve seen a lot of filmmakers using them to power their gear. But now, Blind Spot Gear has kicked things up a few notches with their new Power Cage & Bracket. As with the Power Junkie, Blind Spot Gear is launching the new device via Kickstarter, with pledges starting at only £30 ($38) for the bracket, £89 ($113) for the cage, and £99 ($126) for both....
Introduction Double exposure photography involves combining two or more images into a single frame. This allows you to work with your shots and add textures to create surreal scenes. Words don’t really do them justice so here are some of my examples: How do they work? There are two types of double exposures: in-camera and post-production. In-camera double exposures are when you take two photos on a single frame. It started in film photography where you could rewind the film, then shoot over the same frame again....
Advertisements The winning images are stunners which certainly deserve a wider audience. The contest was judged by Max Rive of the Netherlands and John Weatherby of the USA. Max was the final round judge. Without further ado lets enjoy the images. Grand Prize Winner Grand Prize Winner: Francisco Negroni Photo Title: The Perfect Fear Photo Description: “The picture shows a perfect “dirty storm”; the most violent moment during the eruption of the Calbuco volcano in Chile....
Sliders are an essential tool for filmmakers. They help us get those super silky smooth shots that even a gimbal can’t. The problem is finding the right slider. The market varies so much with regard to the price of a slider based on its materials, features, and length. The Zeapon Micro 2 slider is a beast of a slider. After using it for just a few weeks, you will forget everything you know about sliders....
I’m going to open this post with a very subjective, but completely honest, opinion. The Zhiyun Crane 2S (first look review here) instantly became my favourite gimbal as soon as I took it out of the box. Ever. That’s it. Review over. Ok, not really review over, but it really has become my new go-to gimbal for DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. The Crane 2S is the followup to Zhiyun’s extremely popular Crane 2 (review here), launched in September 2017....
The solar eclipse is over, but the hype isn’t. As a matter of fact, some of us living far from North America are even more hyped after the eclipse – because now we get to see the photos. And where can you find lots of awesome photos of space? In NASA’s image library, of course. They have published the images of the 2017 solar eclipse right after the event, and as you can expect – they are simply stunning....
Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest always brings us some stunning photos, and the 2018 contest was no exception. The winners from 19 categories were selected and their photos show the beauty, versatility and sometimes harsh reality of the world around us. Dutch photographer Marsel van Oosten won the overall Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2018 title. The winning photo titled “The Golden Couple” frames a pair of golden snub-nosed monkeys....
NASA has their rich media library available to the public, and they made it easier than ever for the users to access and search. Sophia Nasr, an astro-particle physicist, has created a true-color image of polar vortex on Saturn’s North Pole. A young scientist used three raw images taken by Cassini and merged them in Photoshop to create an image that shows what we would see if we were orbiting Saturn in a spacecraft....
This year’s Dog Photography Awards faced some stiff competition with so many beautiful, inspiring and generally cute furry entries. The award is split into 3 categories: landscape, action and studio. So take a moment in your day to ‘paws’, and look at the winning images. Studio: First place was awarded to Franca Lombardo from Switzerland for her super sweet portrait of Kairo the pug puppy in a vintage set of weighing scales....
Everyone is a photographer, and that includes celebrities. But some celebrities take their photography more seriously than others, investing both significant time and money into developing their craft. Here’s a small sampling. Jeff Bridges The Dude photographs! Jeff Bridges is well-known for his on-set photography using a Widelux camera. The panoramic images have become somewhat of a signature look for him, and led to the publishing of his book “Pictures....
This is an interesting look at the world in which we live. As Principle Digital Imaging Evangelist at Adobe, Julieanne Kost has travelled most of the known world. And during her travels, she’s shot many photographs of the places she’s had the opportunity to visit. While recently looking through the images, she started to notice a pattern in the images she’d chosen to shoot. That pattern was colour. It is indeed an interesting question....
Sometimes you just have a ton of gear to lug around, especially if you do commercial photography or filmmaking for a living. Grip trucks are common in Hollywood and for huge production companies, but they don’t come cheap. The team at video production company Threefold, though, has figured out a somewhat more economical solution – They converted a 1995 Ford Diesel E350 ambulance into a custom grip truck. Mostly, no matter what vehicle you go for, you’re going to have to do some custom conversion to turn it into your ideal grip truck....
Joker has been one of the biggest movies over the last couple of years, taking home both the best actor and best original score Oscars. But one of the things the movie is also well known for is its lighting. The movie uses a lot of blues and oranges, which is actually pretty common these days, but it does it in a somewhat unique way. In this video, the A-Team takes a look at how you can recreate the lighting in Joker practically, using gels instead of grading in post, with both higher-end gear as well as low budget options....
If taking photos of speeding bullets is hard, imagine how hard it is to take photos of a nuclear bomb going off. (I mean aside the obvious issue of having yourself and the camera being completely decimated if you were at any reasonable distance). I mean, if you developed a nuclear bomb, you wanna see how it works, right? Well the fire call created by the explosion was created so fast and expanded so rapidly that it was virtually impossible to capture....
On April 12th, Doc Jon, a wildlife photographer who was taking photos around Madeira Beach, Florida chanced upon what he calls a ‘one in a trillion shot.‘ It shows an osprey clutching a baby shark with a small fish in its mouth. It’s a perfect representation of the food chain, and it’s become viral all over the world. “On this day I saw an osprey overhead very high up about 400-500 feet above me, and he was circling with a fish in his talons,” Doc Jon shared....
