LED lights seem to be the 2022 version of 2021’s wireless microphones. Every company seems to be jumping on them. And while they didn’t release a wireless microphone, Zhiyun has entered the LED market by releasing the Fiveray FR100C LED light stick. They say it’s “5x brighter than the alternatives” at 100W and it has a built-in 6-cell (22.2v) 2600mAh battery. It was actually announced yesterday along with the company’s new Weebill 3 gimbal, although it seemed to slip largely under the radar....

Well, this is pretty awesome news. Zhiyun have updated its 3-axis motorised handheld gimbal for DSLRs & mirrorless. To be clear, this is the “Crane-2”, it is not “Crane v2”, which is a revision of the original Crane. I know, it’s confusing, but that’s what it is. Zhiyun have doubled the load capacity with the new Crane-2 to a whopping 7lbs. They’ve also added an integrated follow focus control, an OLED display, and battery life has increased from 12 to 18 hours....

It seems like only 11 months ago since Zhiyun announced the Weebill 2 (review here) but already were’s seeing another announcement from Zhiyun in the form of the Weebill 3. It incorporates what Zhiyun calls a new and updated Sling 2.0 design for DSLR and mirrorless cameras, with improved ergonomics, a built-in microphone, fill light and a powerful built-in battery that Zhiyun says supports “all-day use”. It doesn’t have the flippy-out LCD of the Weebill 2, which suggests that Zhiyun may continue to sell both models concurrently – at least for a little while – but its new design is geared towards long shooting sessions and keeping things as light as possible while providing more support to your wrist carrying your camera rig....

ZY Optics has announced the release of their Mitakon Speedmaster 50mm f/0.95 lens for L mount. The fast aperture manual focus lens is designed for use with full-frame mirrorless cameras and is compatible with the complete line of L mount cameras from Sigma, Panasonic and Leica. The Mitakon Speedmaster 50mm f/0.95 was initially offered in full-frame format with Sony E mount in 2014. A Mark II came in 2017 and it was then refreshed in 2019 with a new Mark III version....

Shooting slow motion is now easier than ever. Many cameras being released now will shoot 60fps. They may only do it at 1080p, but they can do it. If your final project is 24fps, that means you can slow down 2.5x without losing a single frame. If you’ve got a camera that shoots 120fps or 240fps, then you can slow things down even further. With 1,000fps cameras for our phones on the way, we can go even more slow-mo crazy....

Photoshop’s selection tools seem to evolve and change with every new update. Techniques and technology evolve to make selections a little easier than they were before. At least, that’s the theory, sometimes they just get more frustrating. But, there’s still no one technique that works for everything. This video from Nathaniel Dodson at Tutvid is a long one. At 37 minutes, you’re not going to be finding any instant fix magic bullets....

So far in this year’s DIYP gift guides, we’ve covered cameras, lenses, lights and bags. But whether you shoot stills or video, at some point you’ll likely need something to mount your camera to. So here are some of the new ones that have come out over the last year or so and the ones that we use the most. As video tripods go, this is one of my favourites of 2019....

When the clouds evaporate and your DVD, Blu-Ray and hard drive backups are no longer readable, what are you going to do about accessing your data? Valuable personal images might be gone forever (of course, that’s also a good argument for printing your photos), or perhaps you shoot for a living, and keep a permanent archive of all your work. It’s a lot of hard work to maintain reliable digital backups and to keep shifting all your data from one storage medium to the next generation every few years – especially when some hard drives might not be as reliable as we were led to believe, and cloud services have the potential to accidentally delete data at will....

Gimbals are fantastic tools for filmmakers. Personally, I’m quite partial to Zhiyun, having a Smooth C, Crane 2 and Crane 3 LAB at my disposal. In this video from Mango Street, we see five shot transitions that you can only really get easily if using a gimbal. They’re using the DJI Ronin-S in the video, but you can apply these transitions to just about any gimbal these days. Orbiting Hyperlapse This transition, as the name suggests, involves orbiting around your subject....

If you’re unfamiliar with what lens flare is then it’s the hazy washed out areas in an image that appear far brighter than they should do. You usually can’t see flare with your own eyes but when you take a shot, there it is and often it’s an undesired effect that can ruin several aspects of your photo including contrast. Sometimes we want to use flare to add interest or drama to a shot but a lot of the times in the studio it is one thing we want to avoid as much as possible....

With the flood of new mirrorless cameras on the market offering 10-bit video, and those expected in the new year, it looks like Sony is taking no prisoners. Sony Alpha Rumors is reporting that Sony is about to announce two 36-megapixel and 60-megapixel sensors capable of shooting 8K video at up to 6o frames per second. And they may even offer 16-bit RAW stills. According to SAR’s source, which they say has been 100% correct in previous information shares, the specs for the two sensors are very impressive....

It’s that time of year when landscape photography is starting to become popular again. The snow’s all but disappeared for most of us. Even the continual rain seems to have died down a bit. The sun’s coming out, and the gorgeous rich green environment and vivid colours are coming back to nature. But shooting landscapes isn’t always as easy or intuitive as one might hope. Many landscapes look so impressive in person that it’s difficult to really capture what caught your eye in a photograph....

Tutorials don’t need to be long and in-depth to get the point across. A prime example of that is the latest video from Daniel Norton on behalf of Adorama Pro. In the 85-second video, Norton shows how a simple two-light setup can be used to create strong, dynamic portraits. Specifically, Norton shows off how a gridded beauty dish in combination with a rim light can bring out the strong features of a subjects facial structure....

Yes, that’s right, it’s finally coming. Photoshop is to become an iPad app. Apple’s dream of turning the iPad Pro into a desktop replacement is potentially about to become a little more true thanks to a report from Bloomberg today. All I can say is, it’s about time! Bloomberg reports that Adobe is working on a new cross-platform version of Photoshop, as well as other applications. These cross-platform apps will allow users to run the full versions of those applications on the iPad, and then continue edits on other devices, like a desktop or laptop....

Now, I know, you just read the title and thought “Woah!” but before you get too excited, we’re not talking editing features like Premiere Pro or Rush here. We’re talking about a similar type of editing capability to those which you get with still images in Lightroom. Except, you can also trim the in and out points of the video, too, to make those short social media clips. But yes, Adobe has today announced that Lightroom for both desktop and mobile now has video editing capabilities....

Adobe has announced a new import and exposure interface for Adobe Premiere Pro. And while I described it as a “facelift” in the title, it’s more like major reconstructive surgery. Like John Travolta & Nick Cage levels of different. It’s currently in public beta, so you can all go and have a play with it, but it comes with a whole new streamlined way of importing your media and exporting your final results....

A few months ago, it was revealed that imaging genius Marc Levoy had stepped down from his position as Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he’d been working on the types of computational photography processes that are common in most of today’s smartphones. You might also remember Marc as the Stanford professor that put his entire digital photography course online for free. Well, now he’s gone to work for Adobe, as Vice President and Fellow to develop Adobe’s new universal camera app....

It sometimes seems like the phrase “with great power comes great responsibility” has never been more true than with Adobe Photoshop. Originally released in 1990, Photoshop has grown into an application that offers both the most amazing possibilities ever available to photographers as well as the option to potentially do harm by manipulating images to show something that isn’t real. Adobe researchers Richard Zhang and Oliver Wang, along with Sheng-Yu Wang, Dr Andrew Owns and Professor Alexi A....

Adobe has released version 32.1 of the popular video editing application Premiere Pro. The new version comes with a bunch of new features, but topping the list are stylised animated graphics created from captions (including speech-to-text captions) and an update to Premiere Pro’s collaborative features, with sequence locking and easy sharing. Other features include improved masking tools and expanded XAVC HDR support, along with improved and new support for ARRIRAW and RED V-Raptor XL support....

It’s been a long time coming, but Affinity Photo has finally been released for the iPad. Mac users have had Affinity Photo for a good while now, and Windows users finally got their hands on it last year. And Affinity Photo for iPad uses the exact same backend as the desktop versions. But fully optimised to take advantage of the iPad’s hardware and touch capabilities. If the trailer’s anything to go by, Affinity Photo’s debut onto the iPad looks like it’s one heck of an app....