Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I’ve never had the chance to have a good look around an active film lab. I’ve been developing my own film at home for years now, and film labs have mostly died out since then. But there are still a few out there, and they seem to be making enough to stay in business, too.
Jay P Morgan at The Slanted Lens had the opportunity to get a good behind the scenes look at what goes on inside one of them. The Richard Photo Lab in Valencia, California. And, fortunately for us, he filmed it.
I don’t know about you, but for me, when it comes to photographing people, dancers make the absolute best subjects. They just have such control over every part of their body that allows them to produce the most amazing shapes. I don’t get to photograph them anywhere nearly as often as I’d like.
Somebody who does photograph them regularly, though, and extremely well is photographer Omar Z Robles. With a long history in performing arts, Robles now focuses exclusively on dancers. And in this video from SmugMug Films, we get some insight into how he works as he photographs dancers on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.
Coming up with new and different camera & editing techniques for your videos is challenging. There are millions of them out there, that Hollywood has been using for decades. But now they’re accessible at home, with just a little crafty camera work and some editing. But it’s easy to overuse the same handful of techniques.
Well, Jordy at Cinecom is here to show you 5 cool camera & editing tricks you might not have tried before. They’re straightforward techniques that anybody can master with enough practice, but they may require a little planning ahead.
The original AirSelfie, released in 2016, was a pretty interesting idea. A phone-sized drone for shooting selfies. But it didn’t seem to really take off (no pun intended) due to a few limitations. The camera is low resolution at only 5MP and the battery life meant you only got a few minutes of flight time.
With the release of the AirSelfie2, that flight time has now doubled (so you get 5 minutes instead of 2 or 3) and the camera’s seen a resolution increase to 12MP. The larger photos also mean that the internal storage gets a bit of a bump, too, going from 4GB to 16GB.
It’s an odd pairing, DJI and messaging app Line. They’ve come together to produce Spark drones themed on one of their “Line Friend” characters. That character is a bear, called Brown. The newly themed Spark is, naturally, brown. And it features pictures of the bear on both the drone itself and the controller.
Taking a break from their usual “X tips in Y minutes” type videos, COOPH interviews concert photographer Michael Agel in this one. It’s a peek into the world of somebody who’s been doing music photography for a living for over 30 years. COOPH caught up with Michael during the Montreux Jazz Festival, where offers up some advice for budding concert photographers.
SSDs have been creeping up in capacity and creeping down in price over the last few years. It, perhaps, isn’t happening at the same pace we saw with mechanical hard drives, but it is happening.
SSDs are the storage medium of choice when you need fast access to files – like when booting up your operating system or loading software. But they’re prohibitively expensive for most. Samsung plans to change that with new 4TB SSDs designed not cloud storage or enterprise level application, but for consumer end users.
Vertical video is the bane of the 21st century. We all (well most) wish it would just go away. But with Instagram Stories, IGTV, Snapchat and a bunch of other apps that thrive on vertical video, it’s going nowhere. And now it seems that Arri is getting in on the action with an adapter plate that allows you to mount your Alexa Mini vertically on the tripod.
The new round head for the Godox AD200 looked intriguing when it was first announced. And while they’re not quite shipping just yet, photographer Rob Hall has got his hands on one. He decided to put it head to head against the AD200 using the Fresnel head with the MagMod magnetic modifier system to see how they compare.
Understanding exposure is vital if you want to make informed decisions about your photography. And specifically understanding the exposure triangle. The relationship between ISO, aperture and shutter speed. It’s a delicate balance that newer photographers can often struggle with. But let Aaron Nace guide you through it in these videos with a little assistance from Star Wars Lego.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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