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Sony’s new A99II produces virtually noiseless video at ISO25600

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Extreme low light performance isn’t a new thing. We’ve been able to pretty much see in the dark since Nikon launched the D3s. But, now that the megapixel wars seem to be mostly over, it’s the next big metric in camera performance. Who has the highest ISO? Who does it with the least amount of noise? The most amount of detail? The best colour?

Sony’s E mount shooters have enjoyed extremely good ISO performance with the A7R II for a little while now. Now, the A mount users can also benefit from that same extreme performance, especially when it comes to video, in the form of the soon to be released A99 II. YouTuber Bramansde shows just how well it performs straight out of the box, in a scene lit by only a pair of small candles.

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The $2,500 21,600fps Chronos camera smashes its Kickstarter goal on day one

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A few weeks ago, we told you about the new high speed slow motion camera, Chronos. Well, it went live on Kickstarter a couple of days ago, and was fully funded within just a few hours. And that number just continues to climb. With a CAN$65,000 (~$45,000) goal and 27 days left to go, it’s already reached a whopping CAN$187K (~$138,000).

With frame rates ranging from 1,057fps to 21,649fps, it’s the first truly affordable ultra high speed slow motion camera out there. A camera that’s been in development for the past decade by just a single man, David Kronstein, to even get it to this point is an incredible feat.

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How to shoot and edit panoramic landscapes with the Syrp Genie Mini and Photoshop

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A couple of months ago, Syrp updated the firmware on the Genie Mini to add a couple of very cool new features. One of those was the ability to automate the shooting of panoramic still images for stitching. It’s not a difficult process to accomplish, but there are one or two gotchas and things you have to look out for.

In this video from The Slanted Lens, Jay P Morgan explains the whole process, from start to finish. With the New York cityscape as his subject, Jay walks us through setting up the Genie for the sequence, shooting the images, and then stitching them together in Photoshop.

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Artist photoshops the funniest Black Friday deals ever

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These are actually from last year’s Black Friday sales, but they’re too funny to not share for those who missed them. Created by serial prankster Obvious Plant (AKA, Jeff Wysaki) these fake flyers were placed in Target last year to promote some pretty good deals.

Thinking about switching over to a standing desk for your photo editing? Want to create some Star Wars action scenes with miniatures? Why not check out Date Time R2-D2 and C-3P Fro. Need a runner to replenish memory cards and fetch spare batteries on your shoot? Well, spend over $75, and you’ll get a free falcon!

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PhotoTracker Lite is the new free plugin to help you find photo thieves on the web

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It’s no secret. Copyright theft is rife on the Internet. Finding online photo thieves to send DMCA takedown notices and a bill is even a full time job for some people. But what if you want to look for yourself? Well, there are a few services out there, but checking them all individually, manually, can be a very time consuming process.

Now, thanks to PhotoTracker Lite, it just got a whole lot easier to find copies of your images around the web. It’s available as an extension for Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi and Yandex.Browser. Essentially, it gives you a right click context menu that brings up searches in the four most popular reverse image search engines out there.

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Power your camera for days on a battery that takes seconds to charge

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Now this is an idea I think we can all get behind. Anything that keeps us charged faster and for longer while out shooting can’t be bad. So, imagine being able to go out and shoot as much as you want for as long as you want without having to worry about your battery life at all. And if it does run out, you can recharge it in just a few seconds.

Such batteries are the vision of scientists at the Univercity of Central Florida, using supercapacitors. Supercapacitors store more energy and can be recharged more than 30,000 times without degrading. Using phones a a comparison, most phone batteries tend to last only around 1,500 charges before severe degradation kicks in. This is why your 3 year old iPhone barely lasts til lunch despite charging overnight.

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This 3D printed lens produces amazing results

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In the past, the thought of making your own lens would probably seem like a fairly impossible mission. For most of us, it still seems pretty out of reach. Not for determined photographer and weird lens master, Mathieu Stern, though, who created his own 3D printed lens.

Making your own 135mm f/1.8 has to come with a pretty huge sense of accomplishment already. Upon first using it and seeing the results, though, you can’t really fail to be impressed. Obviously, the lens is manual focus, and doesn’t feature any fancy features like image stabilisation, but I think we can let that slide.

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OK Go raises the bar again with The One Moment music video shot in just 4.2 seconds

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For American rock band OK Go, boundary pushing music videos have become the standard. They’ve done the long one-shot takes with crazy optical illusions, shot with a massively co-ordinated cast of dancers, and they’ve even levitated in zero G. Now, they’ve done it again with their latest music video for new song, The One Moment.

The entire video, again, is shot as a single take. The main action in the video took only took 4.2 seconds in real time. After that, it bounces back and forth between real time for a few seconds, and then back to super slow motion with people flying through the air over fountains of paint. It’s a ridiculous video, and the amount of planning that must’ve gone into it to get it right first time just doesn’t bear thinking about.

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Somebody finally used a DJI Ronin gimbal to hold their drink

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Shooting video in hot sweaty dance clubs is thirsty work. But one ambitious young filmmaker has managed to solve that problem. Using his DJI Ronin upside-down, Israeli photographer and filmmaker Oleg Balzanov manages to keep refreshed while he films and dances.

It’s not a new idea, but it is the first time I’ve ever actually seen anybody pull it off in the real world. After posting the video to Facebook, it’s proving to be quite popular. I do wish it had lasted just a few seconds longer, though, to see what happened at the end. It looks like somebody was just about to bump into him. Now that really would be a stabilisation test!

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US District Court dismisses Carol Highsmith’s $1 billion copyright claim against Getty

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Although some quite enjoyed the idea of seeing Getty get a good legal spanking for once, that is not how things are turning out. US District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff has dismissed all of Carol Highsmith’s federal copyright claims. After the dismissal on October 28th, he left three of Highsmith’s state law claims intact. Those, too, have now been voluntarily dismissed after Highsmith and Getty have reached an agreement to settle the case.

For those who missed it, Highsmith filed suit in July after she discovered that Getty had been charging fees to license images she had created without her consent. She only realised this after they attempted to bill her for the use of one of her own photographs and did a little digging. They had attempted to sell almost 19,000 images she had created.

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