Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
TV isn’t only for spending countless hours in front of it when you don’t feel like doing anything. Instead, you can turn it into a creative prop, and a pretty awesome one.
Caleb Pike of DSLR Video Shooter will show you how to turn a TV, a monitor, or even a projector into a fantastic background for all sorts of product shots. He guides you through the process step by step, helping you build a setup for some neat stills and videos.
I’m a fan of crime series, and I always try to figure out which camera the forensic photographers use in them. So it made me chuckle to realize that those in Trigger Point use a 1990 Zenit, even though the plot is set in the present day.
Twitter account One Perfect Shot is all about the iconic frames from movies and TV series. But here’s an interesting twist: the account itself is soon to be adapted into a TV show. In collaboration with HBO Max, One Perfect Shot is about to become a documentary series.
How would you like to have an infinite number of different backgrounds for your portraits? What if I told you that you can? In fact, it’s very likely that you already have this “infinite background machine” at home? Any ideas what it might be?
If you thought of a TV, you were right. In this video, Joe Edelman will tell you all the benefits of using a TV screen as your backdrop, and he’ll also teach you how to use it to make the most of it.
Modern display technology is pretty amazing. It’s come such a long way since its early days of black & white. And since shifting from the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TVs of the 90s to flat panel Plasma, LCD and OLED technology, they’ve come even further. But how do they actually draw that image on the screen and make it look like things are moving across the screen?
Obviously, pixels themselves do not move. It’s all an illusion. Still images played back rapidly, and our brain’s persistence of vision takes care of the rest. But you don’t really see exactly what’s going on until it’s filmed at over 380,000 frames per second and slowed down. Which is exactly what Gavin and Dan at the Slow Mo Guys have done.
Photographers can learn about composition from movies and TV shows, and a Twitter account Comp Cam: Geometric is a wonderful example of this. They have recently released Geometric Shots: a searchable database of composition breakdowns from movies and TV shows. You’ll love it if you like exploring composition, no matter if you are a photographer, videographer, or just a fan of movies and TV series.
If you’re not dealing with broadcast, and you’re simply uploading to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc. then I’ll save you some time. You don’t have to stick with 29.97 framerate. It’s old, it’s obsolete, it’s no longer technically relevant, shoot and play back at whatever framerate you like.
If you want to delve a little deeper into why 29.97fps is even a thing, check out this video from Matt Parker at Standup Maths. In it, he talks about how 30fps became 29.97fps in the first place. It basically boils down to a combination of the frequency of the electrical supply (60Hz) and the amount of broadcast “bandwidth” that was available to the first colour analogue TV signals.
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