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This is what happens when you are too drunk and they change the lens cap

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A friend who shall remain anonymous (for his own protection) shared this discussion he had with me. His friend, Jake Redacted, just bought a new camera. I suspect he’s never seen one of those new lens cap designs, where you “Pinch” the lens rather than push on its sides.

Obviously, pushing the sides of the lens cap will not help here, as it uses a different mechanism. But even if this is the first time you are seeing this type of lens cap, you have to be seriously drunk to not figure it out.

This, of course, was the perfect setup for the following discussion:

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When Iceland’s goalkeeper is not denying Messi, he is directing commercials for Coca-Cola

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Thór Halldórsson is an accomplished goalkeeper, I mean, not every goalkeeper gets to deny Messi from a penalty shot. But, when goalkeeper Thór Halldórsson is not keeping the goal, he is working as a film director.

In fact, one of the latest Coca-Cola commercials, the Icelandic Coca-Cola ad for the World Cup 2018, was directed by Halldórsson and it’s pretty awesome. It’s quite a clever commercial, making use of the Icelandic team SKOL cheer. (hit the just to see what it is).

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We are giving away over $6,500 in gear to help you kick-start your cinematography passion

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UPDATE: this sweepstake is now over, a notification was sent to the winner, and he is announced on the sweepstakes box below. Thanks to our awesome sponsors for providing the prizes. Rhino Camera Gear, RODE, Spiffy Gear, B&H, ProGrade Digital & Think Tank Photo – we are looking at you guys!

If you are passionate about cinematography, you’ll wanna hear this. We teamed up with some great companies to bring you a sweepstake that will kick off your cinematography career. Or, if you are already knee-deep, it will give you a serious boost.

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how to fix the three most common skin issues in Photoshop

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If you are doing any kind of beauty work, you know that skin is one of the hardest things to deal with. You want to make the skin look good, while not ending up with a porcelain face that looks too smooth and textureless to be real.

There are many tricks of the trade for beauty retouchers and Stefan is sharing three of his favorites: 1. How to remove Peach Fuzz (turns out that this is how you call those little facial hairs). 2. How to remove goosebumps. Yea, I know, the easy answer is heat the room up. If you don’t have control over the room temperature, and your model looks like a duck (or a goose), not all is lost. And 3. How to eliminate bruises.

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How to fix the Sony A6300 overheating issue

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For a long while now, we’ve been using the Sony a6300 as a second camera/frugal 4k camera. The quality is superb and really, we could not be happier. Well, that’s a lie, we could be happier if the darn thing did not overheat after 15 minutes of use. OK, skipping to another story: Over the last few weeks, we’ve moved from our old fleet of Sandisk Extreme Pro cards to Prograde V60 cards.

We noticed that after the move to the UHS-II cards, the a6300 is no longer overheating. At least in out controlled studio environment. For testing, we turned the AC off (as you can probably tell) and plugged the a6300 into a Tethered Tools case relay to get uninterrupted power. The SanDisk Extreme pro lasted about 15 minutes, while the Prograde lasted the entire 30 minutes.

Now, here is the interesting thing, the Prograde V60 are USH-II cards. (you’ll see that the cards have more contacts). Once we moved to those cards, the camera stopped overheating and we can reach the “imposed” 30 minutes recording that the camera provides, effectively doubling the recording time we get from it.

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Here are three sub $20 way to create good diffusion for filming

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If you want to get soft flattering light, you would need to diffuse it. This video by Todd Blankenship, covers three ways to diffuse your point light source.

Of course, the first thing that Todd does is showing you how not to diffuse your light. As you may have guessed, simply throwing some baking paper on a light source will not diffuse it. If you clip the backing paper directly to the diffuser it just does not make your light source bigger.

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One photographer’s rant about shooting BTS on high-end jobs

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Tim Wallace is a high-end car photographer, while he is not restricted to cars, you’ve probably seen his work with Porsche, Lotus, Ford, Aston Martin, and others on one media or another. I’ll admit, I stalk him on social media, because he produces stellar images, but also because he is a witty guy, and his insights are fun to read.

This rant of his, caught my eye and I think it’s spot on to the point of epic, so I asked Tim’s permission to share it with DIYP readers:

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Here is the craziest Steadicam shot ever from the Eurovision contest

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Back in the days before gimbals were invented, we had the Steadicam. Now, I am not saying that Gimbals are easy, but getting a good shot from a Steadicam is somewhere between science and art.

Speaking of art, did you catch that Eurovision contest yesterday? it was Epic. So epic that we felt obliged to share an email we got about Eurovisions and Steadicams.

The shot above was taken at the 2009 Eurovision contest while Belarus were playing their song and it’s stellar. Before hitting the play button below, see if you can guess how the shot above was taken. Then see the clip below

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One photographer’s biggest issue with the Sony system

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If you are using one of the Sony A7X system as a stills camera, you are probably familiar with the EVF. It’s that little monitor at the back of the camera that shows you what the exposure looks like depending on exposure settings.

Of course, you can also set the monitor to show you a constant “proper” exposure regardless of the camera setting. You can decide on this behavior using the “Live View Display: Setting Effect On/Off” menu. When you are at Setting Effect On, the EVF will match hour exposure settings, kinda giving you a preview of your soon-to-be-exposed photo. When you are at Setting Effect Off, the camera will give you a constant exposure. Now Rob Hall has an issue with the third option…

When you add a strobe, or a Sony compatible trigger though, the camera will move into a new mode and show you what it thinks a “proper” exposed subject will be, if you used the flash correctly. Sadly, you have no control over this override and once a strobe is introduced, you are stuck with this method of EVF display.

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