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GoPro to relaunch the Karma drone later this year

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For a drone surrounded in so much controversy, you think they’d rename it the GoPro Drama. From long release date delays, to falling out of the sky, and the inevitable recall, it’s not had a good time. GoPro even got to the point where they were giving away free GoPro Hero5 Black action cameras to Karma owners to convince them to return them.

GoPro have now issued a press release, though, that the Karma is set to be re-released at some point during 2017. They haven’t said exactly when that’ll be yet, just that it’ll happen sometime this year.

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Godox launches new 200Ws hotshoe strobe thingy without a hotshoe

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I’ve become a big fan of Godox (Pixapro, Flashpoint, etc) over the last couple of years. They sprang out of nowhere, and in no time at all built up a solid following. They are the first company to offer a complete self contained solution that covers everything from speedlights to studio strobes. But their latest addition is something of an oddity. It’s not quite a speedlight, and it’s not quite a strobe, but somewhere in between, and both at the same time.

The Godox Witstro AD200 is a 200Ws flash unit with two interchangeable heads. One is a bare bulb, like the AD180/360. The other offers a more traditional speedlight-like fresnel head. But it doesn’t have a hotshoe, so you can’t easily mount it onto your standard speedlight bracket. It does, however, have 1/4-20″ threads in the side and underneath. One big advantage of this over something like the AD180 or AD360 is the weight savings. It doesn’t use an external power pack, but a built in a LiIon battery.

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This is the story behind Robert Capa’s D-Day photos on Normandy Beach

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Every iconic photograph through history has a story to go with it. Sometimes, the picture tells the story all by itself. Robert Capa’s photographs of the D-Day landings on Normandy beach are a prime example. But there are other stories, too. The photographs themselves takes on a life of their own. Studying them infers things that aren’t immediately apparent.

Sometimes, the film itself can also literally have its own story. As is the case with four rolls of negatives sent by Robert Capa to LIFE Magazine from the Normandy landings. Ultimately, only one of those rolls made it to the magazine. Here’s the story as told by John G. Morris, former photo editor of LIFE.

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The Blue Room is an epic Speedride through a natural ice tunnel

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Speed riding is a terrifying combination of freestyle skiing and paragliding. Described by those who participate as “staggeringly difficult and dangerous as hell“, it’s very impressive to watch. When Swiss speedriding pioneer and Olympic snowboarding medalist, Ueli Kestenholz discovered a massive natural ice tunnel, he knew he had to go through it. So, he contacted photographer Marc Weiler.

An insane location, 3,000m (around 10,000ft) above sea level in the snow and ice. The shoot presented a rather unique set of challenges for Marc. He needed to pack as light as possible, but have plenty of power and speed to be able to capture both inside the tunnel with the outside sky. With a pack that weighed 20kg, it can’t have been easy, but well worth it from looking at the results.

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This Chrome plugin shows you how Facebook sees what’s in your photos

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There’s been a lot of buzz lately around AI, “deep learning”, computer vision. It’s all to do with image recognition. Apple and Google have also been implementing it with their mobile operating systems to help categorise your shots. Facebook also does this, too, although it rarely makes itself obvious. It’ll often see faces, and ask if you want to tag somebody. Sometimes it’ll even recognise the person. But that’s about it.

Facebook actually looks at a whole lot more, though. If you want to go digging through page source, you can find this information out yourself. But, it’s a bit of a hassle. Now, a new Chrome extension overlays the information right on top of the image in your browser. While primarily intended for those who use screen readers, it does offer insight into how Facebook automatically reports or censors certain images.

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Canon’s new G9 X Mark II 8.2fps RAW burst mode, dual lens and sensor stabilisation

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Canon have updated their popular G9X compact camera with a couple of new additions. While it remains largely unchanged from its Mark I predecessor, it does feature a couple of pretty significant changes. The two biggest two being the massive speed increase from a 1fps Raw “burst” to 8.2fps as well as a new dual IS system utilising both the sensor and lens.

Although compact cameras seem to be slowly dying off due to the advancements of cameras in smartphones, it isn’t stopping some companies. Some people just prefer the versatility of a zoom lens and better ergonomics. The G9X Mark II is also the first Canon PowerShot to feature Bluetooth as well as Wi-Fi and NFC, as well as improved AF tracking.

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Panasonic’s new Lumix GH5 shoots 4K@60fps without cropping and 4:2:2 10Bit footage

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This is the one that many Panasonic video shooters have been waiting for. And it seems to have many of the features they’ve been asking for, too. The Panasonic GH5 has a new 20.3MP sensor with no low-pass filter, new processor, dual SD card slots, and in-body stabilisation. It boasts the highest ISO capabilities of any Lumix camera, for outstanding low light shots. It also has a new 225 point AF system, up from the GH4’s 49 point AF, which can track moving subjects for both stills and video.

Previous big announcements with this camera included a couple of major attractions for video shoots. One was that it would shoot 4K video at 60 frames per second, and the other was that it would shoot 4:2:2 10Bit footage. It is capable of these, but not at all framerates. At 60fps, 4K video is 4:2:0 at 150mbps. At 30fps, it will shoot 4:2:2 10Bit at 150mbps. It can, however, do 4:2:2 4K 60fps over the HDMI. In the future, however, a firmware is planned to allow 4:2:2 10Bit with 4K at up to 400mbps recorded internally to SD.

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Nikon finally launches the D5600 in the USA along with a couple of compacts

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Nikon’s D5600 entry level DSLR has been available in some parts of the world for a couple of months now. At first it wasn’t looking like it was going to be released in the USA at all. Today, however, Nikon have officially announced the Nikon D5600 in the USA. It’s a minor update to the D5500, but it offers potentially significant workflow differences, depending on what and how you shoot.

The first is the addition of BlueTooth, which brings the Nikon D5x00 product range in line with the new SnapSeed protocol. For timelapse shooters, you now have the ability to convert your stills sequence straight to video instead of keeping individual files. Handy if you’re more worried about storage space than quality. Finally, you can now scrub through your images in playback mode using the touchscreen LCD.

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This action camera is the first to feature FLIR thermal imaging

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It’s getting pretty hard to innovate with action cameras these days. They pretty much already have all the features most users could ever need now. The only real way to go up now is to improve the quality. Better picture, better dynamic range, better sound, less compression, and so on. The folks at FLIR, though, have very different ideas.

They’ve just announced the new FLIR Duo, FLIR’s entry into the action camera world. What’s so special about it? Well, as well as having a regular 1080p video sensor, it also contains a Lepton thermal imaging sensor. That’s right, this little action camera can see heat. Your drone can now literally become the Predator, and it even has video output for streaming with FPV systems.

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Putting a night vision lens on your camera won’t help it see in the dark but it does look pretty cool

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I’m a huge fan of old and weird lenses. They have unique qualities to them that can be difficult or impossible to achieve in post. So, when I see new a new video from Mathieu Stern, it always piques my interest. His latest video shows off a very strange lens. Designed for military and police night vision systems, this rare C Mount 75mm f/1.3 manual focus AstroScope lens produces some pretty wild results.

Lenses for night vision cameras aren’t exactly optimised for the visible colour spectrum, so they have some very crazy aberration and colour distortion. The sensors used in night vision cameras are also generally quite a bit smaller than those found in APS-C or full frame cameras. This means there’s also a fair bit of vignetting. But the results have a strange dreamlike quality to them that I think is very cool.

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