Posts

Have you ever watched footage of people skiing and wondered how it was shot? Well, if you’re filmmaker Antoine Frioux you’ll likely be using some sort of gimbal to create incredible follow-shots of the action. This time, however, Antoine decided to try out filming with a DJI Ronin 4D that shoots 8K video, just to see how it would come out. I must say the results are impressive, and the behind the scenes footage of him actually skiing whilst operating the camera is pretty incredible!...

Do you think that one day we’ll be able to teleport? Well, if you have an idea and good video editing skills, you can even do it now. In a way. Stop-motion animator Kevin Parry “teleported” himself across the USA using his animation skills, and he did it all just to get one good touristy photo. Check out his teleportation in the amusing video below. During May 2018, Kevin drove around the United States....

Digital cameras have become so high resolution these days that you might wonder why somebody would want to build one of their own from scratch with a resolution that’s not even a fraction of what digital cameras could do a decade ago. But some things just need to be done because they’re fun. YouTuber Sean Hodgins has been working on this idea for a long time, and now he’s finally made and released a 1-kilopixel DIY camera....

The Aurora Australis and the Milky Way are each incredible to observe and shoot on their own. But when they are both in the same frame, it’s an awe-inspiring sight. They can be seen together in the night sky in the South Pole, and Martin Heck recently released this incredible timelapse showing this inspiring sight. Martin is a filmmaker and a timelapse photographer from Germany, and he’s a founder of Timestorm Films....

Looking back through my archives, I realized that I’ve covered topics like film selections and scanning film but to date I’ve skipped one really important part: metering and exposing color film. This is something I get quite a few questions about so bear with me while I try to be very thorough and cover topics from different lighting conditions and how I would meter with the various film types, both color negatives and slides....

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K sounded like something of a unicorn when it was first announced. 12-bit 4K RAW video for less than $1,300? It was truly unbelievable. But since its release last September, it’s proven to be very real a very capable camera. It pretty much has no competition at this price point if video is your focus. But is it really just $1,300? Is that all you have to buy?...

Camera and lenses aren’t the only photographic essentials that cost money. A decent machine with plenty of RAM and fast storage (preferably SSD) and rather expensive serious photography software are must-haves, too. That’s at least how the conventional photographic wisdom goes. It may be so if you are making a living with your photography. But you don’t have to throw your hard-earned money into the bottomless pit of photography, if you are willing to look away from “industry standards” and “de facto” tools....

A few years ago, I became interested in what stuff looks like when falling through space. Specifically, I wanted to see the accidental shapes which occur when something is unrestrained in the air. First, I asked a young woman model to jump from a wall about two feet high. This way I could see the configuration of her body when she was in mid-air and not posing. Interestingly, when she was concentrating on something else — the landing — and her pose was sort of beyond her control....

For as long as aerial drones have been a thing, we’ve seen people try to use them around water. Typically, it’s either landing on water or taking off from water with “floating landing gear“. We’ve even seen drones that can both fly and sort of swim (more bobbing up and down, really) underwater, as well as drones that don’t fly but are dedicated to underwater use. Well, now, a new drone developed as a collaboration between Japanese telecommunications company KDDI, commercial drone manufacturer PRODRONE and underwater robotics company QYSEA which takes the best of both worlds and marries them together....

Photographing a rocket launch can be very unfriendly to your camera, as we have seen before. But today, a post on my Facebook feed appeared and I saw just how bad it can get. NASA photographer Bill Ingalls was photographing a rocket launch on 22 May 2018 and he shared the photos of his poor camera after it. It’s completely melted, but hey – at least he saved some of the photos....

When you bring together animals and GoPro cameras, you can get some really interesting shots. Kyle Naegeli aka The Fish Whisperer decided to take a dive into muddy waters of a local pond. But not literally – he strapped a GoPro onto a turtle, so it filmed the underwater world of its little home. Kyle strapped the camera onto a red-eared slider turtle. In the video, you can see the animal as it walks up the bank to eat fish from his hand, but also as it swims underwater, showing you the flora and fauna of a pond....

Since I started shooting film again, I’ve only shot black and white film. Usually either Ilford FP4+, Kodak Tri-X or Kodak TMAX. But when I first started to enquire about having it developed, I was confronted with some pretty ridiculous prices. £12 they wanted, just to develop a £4 roll of film. That’s when I decided to develop for myself and got my cost down to £0.25 per roll. But why is it so expensive to have black and white film developed in a store when colour film is arguably more expensive for us to develop at home?...

When I received my first camera I only shot jpegs. That was all I knew. A few months later a friend of our daughter came for a visit. She told me that it would be an idea if I started to shoot in RAW. I was like: “Say it again….what?” My ignorance was almost tangible. However, I took the challenge and have never looked back. Little did I know that my yes would start a life long learning and cost me a small fortune in editing software....

Drones have become the hit “toy” over the last few years. Sure, they’re an expensive, grown-up toy, but for most of us, they’re still a toy nonetheless. And there is so much choice out there now. Chances are if you’re reading this, then either you own a drone or you know somebody who does and you’re thinking about getting your own. And who could blame you? They’re pretty amazing. But have you ever thought that maybe you shouldn’t?...

This is going to be a winning combination for many photographers. Cameras and Lego (not Legos). This “Hasselblad 503CX Film Camera“, it may not surprise you to learn, is not actually a camera at all (yet). It’s a lego construction created by Lego user, helenfigures (we’ll just call her Helen from here). Helen is attempting to convince Lego to turn this into an actual kit. She writes that she is a photographer and that the Hasselblad 503CX is on of her favourite cameras....

I guess most of us expect the items with Leica’s logo to be expensive. But this “fake Leica” that doesn’t even take photos will surprise you with its price tag. It’s a stainless steel sculpture, a mash-up of several Leica models. It’s made by Chinese artist Liao Yibai and reaches whopping $99,995. Netherlands-based camera store Leica Store Lisse posted a listing of this pricey “Fake Leica” on eBay. They note that it’s a “very rare and sold out edition” of the sculpture....

Building your own motorised camera gimbal or slider seem to be the in thing at the moment. In fact, I built one myself recently (that’s for another post, though). This one, though, from Michael Klements at The DIY Life is pretty cool and incorporates a slider with a motorised pan axis so that it can track a subject as it moves from one end of the rail to the other....

According to the results of a survey Sony published in 2012, as much as two thirds of non-professional DSLR users have never or rarely taken their camera out of auto mode. There may be plenty of reasons for this, such as buying a camera for fun or as a status symbol. But one of the reasons is that the initial learning process can be way too confusing for the beginners....

I immediately took it into Photoshop and used my color picker because I just had to prove myself that my eyes aren’t deceiving me. I made sure my point sample was set to point sample (the individual pixel). You can’t see my cursor on the print screen but I picked the deepest red I could find. Uhhh… they all came out gray. That just makes me a little angry! It’s putting my brain in for a complete spin....

Those of you who follow Eric Paré’s work know him for amazing light painting photos and tutorials. But this time, he did something completely different, which could make Canon lovers among you laugh and cry at the same time. The title is not a joke – Eric and his partner Kim Henry actually baked a cupcake in a Canon 5D Mark IV’s body. As Eric points out as a joke, he always likes to keep his gear “safe, secure and clean....