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First look at the Lensbaby Twist 60

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I was super excited to hear a few weeks back that Lensbaby had a new lens in the works and even more excited when I heard it was going to be a lens with the swirly bokeh effect.

In the past this swirly visual effect had been the money-train for Lomo and their Petzval lenses in the form of the 85mm and the soon to be publicly available 58mm. I own a lot of the Lensbaby lenses and I’ve been very pleased with the resulting optical effects from their previous products so I was certainly pleased to hear Lensbaby were taking a crack at the swirly bokeh effect now too.

Nest Cam could’ve been the ultimate timelapse camera

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Nest Cam got a lot of things right when they created their home security camera series. It shows such incredible promise as a powerful timelapse camera, but by screwing up the software, they shot themselves in the foot in what could have been the easiest-to-use high-quality timelapse camera out there.

Here’s how they got things wrong, and why the camera is useless to timelapse photographers.

Review: The f-stop Sukha is a massive, modular backpack for backcountry photographers

When it comes to adventure-oriented photography bags, it doesn’t get much tougher than f-stop, a bag manufacturing company that has put a great deal of effort into its growing Mountain Series lineup.

One of the largest bags in their Mountain Series lineup is the Sukha. Today I’m going to break down every intricate detail of the bag to explain my experience with it over the course of a two month review.

11 Lessons Photographers Can Learn From Cindy Crawford’s Favorite Photographers

Cindy Crawford in without a doubt one of the most famous and photographed models of the past 30 years. In the 80’s, Cindy along with Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington and Kate Moss became known as the original “Supermodels”. I think it’s a safe bet to say that she’s worked with the best of the best photographers over that time.

From Scratch To Portfolio In One Hour – A Test With ADOBE Portfolio

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I have previously worked in an advertising agency as a web developer – so working on web sites is not a strange thing for me. On the other hand, I am a photographer and a retoucher, and I have yet to find a venue to host my work. I keep asking myself “Where can I present my pictures?”. I usually don’t answer, because talking to myself would be crazy.

Yesterday, Adobe announced a new feature to Adobe CC users – ADOBE portfolio.  Now, I have a huge amount of confidence with Adobe’s product (even if they screw up here and there) so I wanted to test this new platform and see if I can use it for my portfolio platform.

So far I was always disappointed by portfolio providers, and could not find the one that will quite fit my taste. Now, I’ll admit that I probably did not test all the portfolios on the market, but I did test quite a lot. Well – Adobe has some experience in the field: both as the top dog for image editing software, as well as a having a strong presence in the web development arena on the other. Lastly, Adobe are Behance, so they should know something about portfolios and presentation.

Everything above the jump, was my thoughts. The rest of this review is written in real time as I experience the platform.

A Beta Test Report On The Nikon D5

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So, Nikon has spoken and the D5 is now a $6,500 14 frames per second, 20.8MP, 102,400ISO beast. But how does it run in the field? Nature Photographer Ole J Liodden took a beta D5 (or actually two beta D5s) out of the spin for two months and came back with a very positive state of mind.

Ole tells DIYP that while he had the cameras for two months, those were beta units so he only had access to the JPG functionally of the camera and had not have the opportunity to edit any NEF files, but still he was very impressed. Ole was also told that the final non-beta version of the sensor is even better:

Sometimes A Good GoPro Gimbal Is All You Need (A Review With A Chicken)

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A while back we needed to shoot some action so we looked for a GoPro Gimbal. The market has a ton. We got the Feiyu Tech G4 from RCgeeks (if you live in the US you can get it here), and we were very pleasantly surprised.

As a gimbal, it does what you’d expect from a gimbal – keep the camera smooth, but the marker-sized form factor along with the the great performance made it into a trusted companion. I carry it around and it produces instantly usable footage.

You can check the full review after the jump

Want To Retouch Like Von Wong? You’ll Want To Check Out This Tutorial

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If you are unfamiliar with the work of Benjamin von Wong (previously), you have probably not read DIYP in the last few years. Ben creates epic, inspiring, larger than life art and now he released a set of video tutorials explaining how he works. But I am going too fast, let me take it from the start.

Von Wong has done some amazing work, but many of his first creations can be related to his crowd-funded trip to Europe. In this tutorial, Ben breaks down those photographs and explains his entire workflow on editing them. After watching this section of the tutorial, I can say that this alone is worth the package, as the amount of information that Ben fires while editing is incredible. If you know Ben, you know that the pace is pretty fast and expect a rate of about one tip per ten seconds.

But Ben does you one over and also includes two more sections: a Lightroom tutorial section and a Photoshop section. Both are critical for understanding how to optimize your workflow. Hit the jump to see the full review.

Custom SLR Dual Camera Strap Makes it Easy To carry Two Cameras At Once

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Despite having a direct impact on one’s ability to capture fleeting moments, not to mention the amount of shoulder and neck pain at the end of a long day, many photographers don’t spend the time or money upgrading the strap that came with their camera.

For some the camera strap is arguably one of the most important pieces of gear after the camera and lenses, and when you’re using two cameras it becomes twice as important.

Whether you’ve already discovered the wonderful world of ergonomic camera straps or you’re still using OEM junk, you owe it to yourself to check out Custom SLR’s Dual Strap.

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