Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Good sliders aren’t cheap. Most cheap sliders are rarely good. But when your budget’s ultra low, what are you going to do? Either you buy something that you’ll probably use twice and throw away, or you build your own.
The latter is the option chosen by YouTuber Atti Bear in his most recent video. In it, Atti shows us how he build his slider with items bought from Ikea for a total price of less than $20.
Floor dollies are fantastic tools for giving your camera some motion when shooting video. The problem with them, though, is that you need a perfectly flat stable surface on which to use them. The slightest imperfection or bump becomes obvious and easily noticeable in your footage. This is why so many photographers and filmmakers user sliders instead. But, what if you could get that same smooth motion with a tripod?
Well, with this fairly straightforward conversion, you can. In this video from ImaginetMedia, our host BobB204 (we’ll call him Bob) talks us through converting a regular cheap floor dolly. It’s a pretty straightforward process, but there are some tricks to help make life easier.
Creating super long slider or dolly shots is something many timelapse photographers and filmmakers dream about doing. For some, hyperlapse techniques and a lot of post production work is the answer. For others, that’s far too much work. When you look at the whole process, you can quickly see why. For others, the solution is a cable cam zipline type system.
It works with the Syrp Genie (review here), to provide you with a level of control that is otherwise difficult to achieve. Until now, though, these have been DIY solutions. In fact, you can see our own DIY Syrp Genie cable cam here. Today, though, Syrp have released their official cablecam, the Slingshot.
DIY dollies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes using a variety of tricks and technology. Sometimes, though, you just have to go back to basics. That’s exactly what’s in this entertaining video from filmmaker David Sandberg. This is the second such dolly David has made since leaving his previous one in Sweden.
Using a variety of inexpensive items available at any hardware store (with the exception of the skateboard wheels), David builds a very respectable dolly. He might describe it as “a sh**ty dolly”, but I don’t think so. This type of dolly is almost exactly what I used when I first started with video around a decade ago. The PVC pipe track makes it easy to get smooth sliding moves on
This is one of those unique repurposing projects that would have never occurred to me. Having never owned a train set in my life, why would it? I didn’t even know they came in such scales that would be capable of shifting a DSLR. It did, however, occur to the folks at Granite Bay Software, creators of GBTimelapse.
In this video, we see how the “Loco Moco” system works. A laptop running GBTimelapse powers the whole thing. Signals get sent out through a USB interface to the train and camera. This controls when the train moves, and when the camera takes its shots.
As visual creators, if and when we begin on that journey from stills to motion, one of the first things we learn is the power of a moving camera. Once confined to the likes of big production companies, camera dollies and tracks have now become an almost essential piece of kit for many filmmakers and timelapse shooters.
Rollocam have now entered into this market with The Hercules, a pocket sized, but pretty powerful motorised camera dolly system for both video and motion controlled timelapse sequences.
When it comes to quick tip, it does not get any quicker than this. Instructable’s Paige Russell came up with this quick and clever short run dolly with a book for cart and corn starch for wheels or bearings.
This is what you get when you put a BBC wildlife cameraman (Rob Drewett) and a buggy racer/design engineer (Andy Nancollis) together in the same workspace: a really sweet looking 4WD buggy that can pack your camera over all sorts of terrain at speeds of up to 40mph. Collectively called Motion Impossible, the two based the BuggyCam design on a race proven remote controlled vehicle, and as though that wasn’t cool enough, Drewett and Nancollis made it even better by developing their V-CON camera mount system to pair with a Freefly Movi M15 stabilizer ($11,995), which means you can use it to get professional quality photos and smooth video.
It also means it’s sturdy enough to carry professional grade photography and cinematography equipment. In fact, in the two clips below, you can see the guys using it to tote around a RED while shooting on location in a forest and also capturing some great footage of a peregrine in flight.[Read More…]
One of the reasons Steven Spielberg is considered a sage in the art of filmmaking is because of how successful he is at keeping the audience emotionally connected to the movie. Even from simply seeing the helicopter approach Isla Nublar in Jurassic Park, we’ve got that rush of excitement; we didn’t see anything at all yet, but we knew it was coming. We knew because John Hammond’s eyes started gleaming with childlike joy as he pointed at the island and said, “There it is.”
Here’s a badly-mathed-out breakdown of a good movie: while one half of the work goes into making the magic a reality through set design, visual effects, and sound editing, another half goes into making the characters of the film believable and enjoyable. Though dinosaurs may only have been in the movie for about fifteen full minutes of its screen time, we enjoyed the movie that much more because of how believable the reactions of the characters were.
Back in the days when blogs were just starting out, there were probably two DIY centric blogs for the creative industry. Your truly ran a small site called DIYP for stills-DIY and cheesycam ran a similarly oriented video site.
If was great to see that they are back at their origins today sharing a Doorway Dolly build. The idea behind a doorway dolly is that an operator can push and pull the dolly while a tripod or a photographer is standing on it. The nice thing about it is that you can operate it without tracks and still get tracking shots. The down side is that you need a super smooth floor (like a PVC floor) to get good shots.[Read More…]
You can find out more about John on his website or follow him on Facebook and YouTube.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
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