We have all heard about and seen footage from the Phantom camera. This thing can shoot amazing slomo at 1050fps at 1080p. I, however, have never actually seen the camera itself before. Tom takes us through a quick tutorial, because we will probably never get to touch one ourselves. Is anyone else shocked by the terrible navigation on this camera? For the price you would think they could add a D-pad and LCD.
Sometimes videos don’t require a BTS because although they are a unique idea, they don’t necessarily have to be complicated. Danny writes “Everyone has experienced fireworks. It is truly a magical sight. I set out to capture them, not as we know them normally, but in a way that many of you may not have seen them before. For this, I used Bokeh, which originates from the Japanese word “boke”, which means “blur” or “haze”.”
I am proud to announce our first monthly contest winner is Ken Brown. The theme for the photography contest was “technology” and Ken delivered a gorgeous shot of a Lotus sports car.
As promised, Ken now has his own banner on the top of our website and he gets to choose the winner of the September contest. The next theme is “motion”. Please submit your pictures by posting them here.
Ok guys, here is the deal. We did some poking around and I am happy to say that it doesn’t appear that anyone has been cheating. Multiple contestants got many of their friends and family members to sign up and vote for them and although that wasn’t our ideal plan, it is totally fair and within our rules. So, we were about to start the voting again but one of our top contestants asked us to postpone it a little longer because he is leaving the country this week.
I am trying to be as fair as I can to everyone here. Perhaps it was a bad idea to pause the voting but we are doing the best we can. We knew that if there was cheating and we let the contest end it would have been much worse.
I was one of the few people on the planet that actually wasn’t a huge fan of Avatar but I did love the special effects. James and his team had to create new technology to produce the most successful movie of all time. Check out his camera setup below.
I am a huge fan of the technology behind movie special effects. Here is a quick look behind the scenes of the movie John Adams. It’s amazing what is possible these days.
Annie Leibovitz is perhaps the most well known photographer in the world and her work always stands out from the crowded world of photography. While her Louis Vuitton campaign with Sean Connery is a few years old now, there is still a lot of great information to be gained from the beach shoot. Using nothing more than a Photek Softlighter, Annie balances her ambient light well with her soft broad lighting to create a really awesome series of images.
Here is a very simple but totally informative video about splash photography. I cannot figure out who this photographer is, if you happen to know please post it in the comments below.
Martin needed a light weight camera crane that could fit in a backpack, setup in under two minutes, and hold a DSLR. This sounds too good to be true right? Well it was, so I built one by hand.
There has been some shady activity on our forum. Patrick and I are about to head out of the country for 5 days and we will not have internet. We have decided to pause the contest voting so that we can research IPs of the voters on the contest. More info soon.
Paddy, Keith, Sans, and Sean. Please send us an email at contactfstoppers@gmail.com. I would like to start a discussion with all of you.
When we launched Fstoppers back in February we were working hard to create our own original video content to help kick off our website. After shooting this video it got buried in my computer before I had time to edit it because we were also working to complete multiple other videos at the same time. I finally had enough free time to finish up this quick food shoot. View the full post to read the full story.
Remember Travis Harris? He called me out of the blue a few months back and actually flew to Charleston to assist me at a couple of weddings. Since then Travis has had one goal in mind: to do whatever it takes to quit his day job and work as a full time professional photographer. A few weeks ago Travis took the plunge and quit his job and now he is working his ass off to pick up as many photo jobs as humanly possible. Travis was kind enough to shoot a BTSV at his last gig and give us a few of his lighting schematics.
It’s really exciting to be able to watch Travis go from amateur to professional right before our eyes. Please leave him some encouraging words below.
Our big contest is about to end but we thought it would be fun to start up a monthly contest. Obviously we can’t afford to give away a new camera every month but we can offer up our coveted banner space at the top of our site. So far we have only given out banners to big name contributors of our site. We have had other photographers offer to pay us for the clickable space and we turned them down. We have decided to do a monthly photography contest and the winner will get their picture and link to their website in flash banner at the top of our site for the next full month.
This month the theme of your pictures must be “technology”. At the end of August I will chose my favorite image and the photographer will win the banner placement for the next month. The winner will also get to choose next months theme and choose the winner. Please post your “technology” pictures here.
Is this a good idea? Will you participate? Let me know in the comments below.
If you have not seen the Go Pro HD Hero camera before, let me introduce it to you. We have bought a few of these this summer for various projects and they are a lot of fun to play with and the footage is absolutely amazing. We will have some new Fstoppers videos coming out soon with Go Pro HD footage but in the meantime you must check out these videos. Click the Full Post for a few details about the Go Pros and to see two other fun videos.
