Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
There’s been a term I’ve been hearing more and more creatives in the spaces we run in use to describe themselves: “content creator”. Even from people who work we admire and have learned from. To us, they’re people who inspire, educate, and entertain us. Both in photography and cosplay.
As I kept seeing that term come up my mind kept coming back to one question: why those words exactly?
YouTube has announced that its short-form video feature, the imaginatively titled Shorts, has been expanded from its initial offering of India and the USA to also cover the UK, Canada and 21 countries in Latin America. Shorts is YouTube’s answer to TikTok, allowing you to upload up-to-60-second videos to your channel in between your regular long-form videos.
The rollout in the UK, Canada and 21 countries in Latin America began a few days ago and is expected to be complete by the end of June. So, some users in those regions will already see the new shorts tab and have the ability to post a short while others will see it pop up over the next few weeks.
YouTube has recently rolled out its Shorts feature across the USA, taking it out of beta. It’s YouTube’s answer to TikTok, allowing you to post videos of up to 60 seconds from your phone. It’s a handy feature for keeping your followers updated in between posting long-form videos. YouTube also pitches it as a way to allow more people to create quality original content.
But along with the rolling out of Shorts, YouTube has enabled a new feature in your video permissions that allows other people to take audio from your content and use it in their shorts. You can, of course, turn this permission off, but it’s been enabled by default on every single video you’ve ever uploaded and it’s on by default on any new ones you upload, too.
For some, the prospect of setting up a bunch of tripods, stands, equipment and wiring it all together is just too much of a pain to want to deal with when you want to shoot a 5-minute video. It’s what puts a lot of people off wanting to even try starting to make YouTube content. Or at least, it stops them posting as often.
But Caleb Pike has the solution. A full YouTube studio-in-a-box. Well, in a Pelican Case. He’s designed and built it to be a fully self-contained solution that you can just stick on your desk, open up and start filming. Or take on your travels and set up anywhere in an instant just by flipping the lid open.
YouTube’s “Shorts” is YouTube’s attempt to take on apps like TikTok. Quick videos designed to help keep your audience updated on what’s going on. Show some behind the scenes, quick tips, dumb viral challenges, whatever. It’s been in beta for a while, but now it’s finally hitting the mainstream as a regular feature in the app – at least in the USA.
There’s no word on when it’ll roll out globally, although the US rollout is expected to have completed by next week. You’ll be allowed to show off your 15-60 second videos to your audience and there’ll be a dedicated tab for viewers to watch them in the YouTube app. YouTube says they’ll be expanding the feature to add stupid AR filters like its competitors.
I noticed something changed on my YouTube account a couple of months ago. It’s a new “Checks” feature, and it seems to have now rolled out on a wider scale. Essentially it’s a new step YouTube takes immediately after you upload your videos to check for any obvious monetisation or copyright issues.
It’s likely the same checks they’ve always done, except they’ve taken the status report from behind the scenes to right in front of the user during the upload process. It happens within a few minutes and means that you can publish your content sooner without waiting for unknown wait times for copyright and monetisation checks.
I thought this was quite an interesting video. It’s an interesting take on how we light for different subject matter. It isn’t saying that one method of lighting is necessarily better or worse than the other, just that the goals of the shoot are very different, the final use for the footage is also very different and so the lighting needs to be different.
In this video, filmmaker Tyler Stalman shows us how we can light both ways using the same equipment. But as well as simply showing us, he also goes into the why of how we light these two things differently and the motivation behind it.
Godox is on a roll with the new gear at the moment, with the recent releases of the AD100Pro strobe and SZ150R & SZ200Bi zoomable Bowens mount LED lights. With this one, though, they’re dialling things down a notch with the new Godox CL10. It’s a multicolour LED light designed specifically for streamers, influencers and webcasting. Think accent lighting, rather than key lighting.
We can argue forever (and we most likely will), but we can also turn this common argument into a great joke. This is exactly what Eric Floberg did with his latest video. It lasts under one minute, and that’s all it took for Eric to show that gear does matter. And to troll YouTubers a bit along the way.
Filmmaker Sam Newton first caught our attention with his tongue-in-cheek song Camera Man. But when it comes to his funny videos, it gets even better. He recently called out PeterMcKinnon in another hilarious music video. And guess what happened: Peter saw it, loved it, and even made his own video about it, which brought Sam over 25,000 subscribers in three days.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
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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