Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
When it comes to product photography, there are a lot of brands out there who keep a very consistent look and feel to their promotional material. Whether it’s a truck or a toaster, you can immediately tell by the way it’s lit and shot that it belongs to a certain brand.
One such brand is Apple. And while many of their product photos and videos are actually CG, the guys at Syrp have broken down Apple’s techniques to show you how you can shoot it for real.
Motion control is one of the most fascinating topics of photography and filmmaking for me. It combines several of my favourite subjects. Photography, electronics, engineering and programming. Motion control allows us to create some amazing imagery that just wouldn’t be possible in any other way. It also allows us to do it over and over again consistently.
That’s what drew YouTube channel Media Division to motion control and The Marmalade production house to record their new video intro. Consistency and repeatability. Their goal was to create a composite clip, shot with a moving camera, blending four different speeds of footage from real-time to 25% speed seamlessly.
We’ve all seen those fancy slow-motion food videos with ingredients slamming into each other in midair. Such videos often require expensive rigs involving multiple motion control robots that cost more than your house. But you don’t necessarily need to spend quite that much to start having a go at this kind of thing yourself.
After watching some of Steve Giralt’s work, the guys from Syrp were inspired to try it with a couple of their Magic Carpet sliders and Genie Mini heads to see if they could pull off a food video that had a similar look. I think they managed to do it quite well, and they were able to control the whole setup from just an iPad.
Steve Giralt is pretty well known for pushing things to the extreme when it comes to super slow-motion video. This time, though, he’s gone way overboard, by making a rig that spins a Phantom VEO 4K high-speed camera around a platform at 150 revolutions per minute.
The rig was made to film Jack Daniel’s Honey. They wanted to show a piece of lime spinning as it was falling into the drink as the whole thing was rotating around in front of the camera. Naturally, they couldn’t easily spin the lime as it fell, and they couldn’t really spin the drink, so the solution was obvious. Spin the camera.
The original Syrp Genie Mini quickly became a leader in motion control for timelapse photographers and filmmakers. The small form factor made it easy to slip into your camera bag or even a pocket, and take with you just about anywhere. It also offered a lot of control and consistency.
Syrp has today announced its successor, the Syrp Genie Mini II, offering everything the original has but adding WiFi, Bluetooth 4.2, Type-C USB and future-proofing it for new features within the Syrp mobile app.
The SYRP Genie is a motor/wire driven motorized slider. This means that it uses a cable to push it forward. You can choose the length of the cable which makes it virtually endless in length. (You can even use hockey sticks to build a sling-cam)
DIYP reviewed the first Genie way back and the next iteration is nicer, more versatile and now runs on 3 Axis
We are taking a look at the Genie II 3-Axis Epic Kit which includes the: Magic Carpet carbon Slider, Genie II Linear, and Genie II Pan Tilt head.
We are a small crew, this is why it’s handy to have one moving camera that needs no attention when we shoot. It means one less crew person while getting top notch B cam footage. And our slider package of choice for that is the Rhino Ultimate Slider (Amazon | B&H).
Having an automated motorized slider is a powerful tool to have in your box. It allows the same camera moves that your typical slider will allow. But it also adds an array of abilities to the team that a normal slider does not:
3D data creation is part of a growing trend in the use of computational imaging techniques within cultural heritage digitization shops. In particular, operational adoption of photogrammetry has been witnessed at such institutions as the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), the Smithsonian, and the University of Virginia Library.
MIOPS has seen some measure of success with its rather popular MIOPS Mobile camera trigger. Well, now they’re getting into motion control with the launch of the new Capsule360. It’s a modular motion control system that offers up to 3 axes of movement. Paired with your Android or iOS device, it also offers real-time facial and object tracking.
As with some of the previous MIOPS projects, the Capsule360 is being funded through Kickstarter. Units start at only $179 for the early bird single pack unit up to $879 for the full “premium pack” (also early bird price) which includes 3 Capsule360 units, L bracket, slider, dolly, turntable kit and a mobile dongle.
“Gigapixel” and “Timelapse” aren’t phrases one often hears together. Both, individually, require massive amounts of storage to do well. When combined, things start to get a bit ridiculous. It’s been done before, though, at least as early as 2010, when Carnegie Mellon University’s CreateLAB made this.
Now, UK contact lens retailer Lens Store has teamed up with Nikon, Canary Wharf Group and photographer Henry Stuart to produce 24 Hour London, a 7.3 Gigapixel “timelapse” covering a 24 hour period over the city of London. The use of the word timelapse is a bit debatable here, but it’s definitely pretty cool.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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