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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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Go behind the scenes to see how this VW bus was shot in the snow

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The photography of Mexico based Felix Hernández is nothing short of remarkable. Felix specialises in turning dreams into reality, at least, photographically, and he does it in some absolutely amazing ways. Utilising an array of techniques including miniatures, dry ice and even cigarette smoke, his work shows some elaborate thinking.

In this video, we get see some of that process, and a look behind the scenes on how the image “Inner Trip” was made. Felix describes this image as “a journey to my inner self”, bringing yet another dreamy vision to life. Utilising miniature models, long exposure photography and some light painting, he sure seems to have had been on a great ride.

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When a $30,000 RED camera meets a red bowling ball who wins?

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If one were to pay attention to Internet commentators, the big winner here is MXR Productions. They seem to have gotten quite a bit of traffic to their Facebook page since posting this video. While shooting a commercial for a bowling alley, they decided to get a shot of a ball approaching the camera. Unfortunately, the operator didn’t quite pull up early enough, and the ball clipped the bottom of the camera.

Shortly after the bump, we see the lens fall off the RED Epic camera, and a couple of chips from the bowling ball go flying into the air. Some have doubted its authenticity, but MXR Productions insist that the incident genuine, and not faked. Many Internet sceptics, however, disagree. Take a look for yourself.

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This modifier comparison shows off over 100 different lighting setups

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Flash modifier comparisons can be extremely useful things. Without having to get up out of the comfort of our chair, we can very quickly and easily see how different shapes and sizes of modifier affect how light falls on our subject. Here’s one we discovered by photographer Michael Quack and the team at Visual Pursuit comparing a very wide array of Hensel modifiers.

Hensel modifiers aren’t exactly inexpensive, but if you want the best quality, you generally have to pay the highest prices. While you may not be specifically looking at buying Hensel gear, it’s still a useful comparison. With the subject, lights and photographer remaining the same for each shot, you can quickly get a feel for the differences that modifier design can make in your image.

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German photographer sues Facebook over image metadata stripping and wins

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It’s long been known that Facebook strips the metadata from photographs and other images that are uploaded. I’ve never seen an official answer from Facebook as to why they do this, but the leading theory seems to be one of privacy. With 136,000 images being uploaded to Facebook every single minute, that’s a lot of potential GPS and other private information. But it does also total up to a lot of potentially wasted storage space, too.

Photographers have moaned against the removal of metadata for a while, but German photographers association, Freelens, and specifically, Freelens executive committee member and Berlin photographer, Rainer Steußloff has challenged this practice in court. The ruling came in a few days ago, and the photographer won. It is now illegal for Facebook to strip metadata in Germany.

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Photography community comes together to battle the epidemic of stolen equipment

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There’s an interesting discussion that’s popped up on Facebook recently, started by award winning photographer Rutger Geerling, over what we may be able to do to help better protect our equipment out in the wild. We’re not talking about the bags we leave laying around filled with gear we’re not currently using, but items actually on our person that are all too easy to steal.

Without intervention and design alterations from the manufacturers themselves, it seems there’s very little we can do, but there are some great suggestions offered in the comments on the Facebook post, though.

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