Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Balloon lights are an uncommon light source for most of us. But such lights are often used in TV and movie production. They’re essentially huge light sources that are overhead of your subjects using very bright bulbs. The balloon part of it acts like a big diffuser to help soften and spread the light out more evenly. They’re not cheap, though.
But this DIY option from Todd Blankenship at Shutterstock shows us a way to make one fairly easily using some shower curtains, LED strips and helium.
Shooting through stuff like crystals and whatnot isn’t a new idea, but it’s not one that’s really been developed, commercially. Sure, you can go on Amazon and buy a crystal to shoot through, but it’s not easy to work with unless you want to build some kind of custom rig or just hold it yourself in front of your lens.
Lensbaby, though, has been working on this idea, and they’ve created the new OMNI Creative Filter System. At the moment, it’s essentially a ring that screws onto your lens with magnetic… divots, I suppose, into which you can mount one of several different “filters”.[Read More…]
On Monday 17 June, a masked gunman opened fire at a federal courthouse in Dallas. Tom Fox, a Dallas Morning News photographer, was just a few feet away from him. He managed to capture a photo of the heavily armed staring straight into his lens, and it’s as impressive as it’s chilling. In the video below, Fox speaks out about his encounter with the gunman and his thoughts during the tense moments.
Earlier this month, GQ magazine published an article about tech titans who visited Brunello Cucinelli’s Italian village. The photo following the article showed fifteen men and two women of Silicon Valley. But something about the photo looked off. And indeed, it was – there were actually no women in it, they were Photoshopped in before the photo was published.
Getting to play with a prototype camera is a little like Christmas morning mixed with Texas Hold’em. There is a childlike excitement in getting to be one of the first in the world to try something totally new, yet it’s also a gamble, and even the best strategy can change with the flip of a card.
You can spend hours preparing for a certain shot, setting up the lights, setting the scene, and then in a flash some odd warning can pop up on the screen and you can’t consult Google or call customer service as, chances are, nobody else has had this problem yet.
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.
Here’s a real treat for all astrophotography fans and space enthusiasts. Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year has just announced its shortlisted images of the 2019 competition. And just like in the previous years, the selected images are absolutely breathtaking!
With major password leaks we’ve recently seen, there’s an increased chance that your Instagram account will be hacked. In case this happens, Instagram has just introduced a new, easier way to recover your account.
The pursuit of ultimate optical clarity has been the goal of lens manufacturers for decades. When you look back on the lenses of old, they have vignetting, sharpness issues, weird bokeh, chromatic aberration and all kinds of “problems” (some people refer to this as “character” and is exactly the reason why they like those old lenses).
But Canon’s RF mount takes a step closer to that optical precision that they strive for. In this four-and-a-half-minute video, Canon explains why the RF mount is such a big deal, and what makes it so much better than the EF mount used in their DSLRs.
This is interesting for your iOS folks. There’s a new Kickstarter in town for something called the HyperCube. It’s an interesting little device that sits in between your phone’s charger cable and the USB socket and provides a microSD slot as well as a USB slot for plugging in a hard drive, SSD or flash drive.
When it hits retail (which won’t be for a while), it’s going to be $49, although it’s as low as $29 right now through the Kickstarter campaign.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
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