Videography

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got hard drives full of footage from personal or other non-commercial projects, that don’t serve much use once the project they were shot for is completed. I’ve considered trying to license it as stock footage, but never really taken the time to do it. After checking out the site Nimia and interviewing one of their staff however, I decided to give it a try.

Last week, we featured an interview with the awesomely talented retoucher and photographer Marina Dean-Francis. This week, she's shared a video with Fstoppers showing her retouching on a hair and beauty image. Although the video has been sped up tremendously, it's not hard to see that there aren't many quick tricks in play here. It's no secret that maybe the greatest skill in retouching is patience.

Pay close enough attention, and there are some very useful tips in this video - my personal favorite comes in around the 2:30 mark and is a great way to add highlights on...

Inspiration spurs creativity and it is often you find a photograph or artist that influences your practice. In this Photoshop tutorial Ben Secret helps you recreate the look and feel of an image by matching contrast, tone and saturation. With these brilliant tips get a handle on colour and tone through imitation, but then have fun adding your own unique style.

The hit TV show on HBO Game of Thrones has some stunning practical and visual effects. Season 4 was no exception, and the team has behind the VFX just released a behind-the-scenes video showing what they did. If you haven't watched the season yet, be aware, it contains SPOILERS.

I don't know about you guys, but I sometimes get some pretty questionable packing from Amazon, but this far exceeds anything I've ever encountered. Youtuber Ottar Gilason works for a camera store and the amount of packaging DHL included on an order for a single camera battery charger is downright hilarious.

Watch this video where Glyn Dewis talks about his method to shoot landscapes, and his use of various techniques to develop the image in Lightroom with some fine tuning in Photoshop.

Michael Bay, the American movie director and producer, is worth millions of dollars. In fact, Forbes has Bay making $66 million in 2014 – and that’s just through the first six months of this year.

How’s he do it? Well, Tony Zhou has created a mashup of Bay’s movies for us to study. Let the Bayhem begin.

Slow motion is, certainly, one of the most beautiful cinematic inventions of all time. It can show us so many things that are not normally visible and can make any "normal" scene look magical and unique. For the past few years the slow motion technologies have continued to improve, and just last year the Phantom Flex4K Digital Cinema Camera was announced introducing some groundbreaking slow motion abilities like shooting at 1,000fps at at 4K resolution. Shortly after its release, Director Brendan Bellomo and cinematographer Greg Wilson got their hands on the camera and took it for a test and created this beautiful video called "Let Me Know When You See Fire."

You can really get yourself into trouble putting your expensive camera gear on a drone, Lee Morris has personally lost two drones and Chase Jarvis famously crashed his DJI Phantom into a lake in Iceland. Now Swiss researchers are looking to change all that, or at least help prevent some minor crashes. Enter GimBall: while it may not be waterproof, this drone concept is looking to change the way we approach UAV-based photography.

His client list reads like a who's-who in iconic businesses: Pearl Vision, American Standard, Shell Oil, Virgin Galactic, AOL, Wells Fargo, Salesforce, Red Bull, Minute Maid, Costco, and Allstate. He has even photographed celebrities like Kevin Spacey, Richard Branson, and Al Gore. No doubt you've seen the remarkable work of Chris Crisman in the past, but photographers want to know how does he do it? What does his studio look like? What equipment does he use?

Friend of the Fstoppers Dave Kai-Piper recently shared this great little tutorial showing you exactly how he creates his beautiful monochrome images in a clever little process that takes only a couple minutes.

One of the many reasons people become attracted to photography is the capability of capturing the world around us in wondrous ways. While choosing large apertures or developing a dramatic style in post processing can completely change a setting, there are also subtle but supportive ways to change a scene. Such a way is through the use of a circular polarizing filter (CPF). In this well presented and thorough video tutorial, nature photographer Steve Perry of Backcountry Gallery will teach you everything there is to know about this must-have lens filter.

Big things are happening in the world of video editing and post-production. If you ever thought you’d like to develop (or improve) your video editing and post production skill set (and get a chance to do so for free) read on.

Sometimes aperture and depth of field can be a little tricky to get your head around, especially when you’re a new photographer. Matt Granger gives a quick run down of appropriate aperture settings to get the shot you are looking for. Granger mentions the possible aperture settings that will help you with focus as well as where your lens might perform at its best

After watching a great film, it is rare that we give conscious credit to the editing (which is actually a silent compliment to the editors). However, how the film was cut creates most of the powerful feelings we get while watching and is a major contributor to our final thoughts on a film. CineFix has put together what they believe to be the top 10 most effective editing moments of all time, and it's certainly worth noting the editing mastery at work.

It's always a small handful of people that begin the process of ruining it for everyone else. On Monday, two drones nearly crashed into a New York Police Department's chopper while it was going over the George Washington Bridge. Luckily, the pilots changed course to avoid the collision.

All this week at the PRO EDU studio in St. Louis, Michael Woloszynowicz has been hard at work showing off his techniques for an upcoming tutorial series on creating fashion and editorial photography. Today at 11am CST, myself along with the rest of the video crew will be streaming his model test look demonstrations live from the studio.

If you're a wedding photographer then you're all to familiar with Uncle Bob photographers: people with a camera getting in your way, breathing down your neck asking about settings and gear, and otherwise making your life dificult. This parody instructional video teaches Uncle Bob how to get the best pictures he can at a wedding while also being a huge annoyance to the wedding guests and photographer.

It's hard to imagine someone not describing what Sergeant Larry Reid Jr. does as a dream job. Once you see what he does, the images he captures and the joy on his face as he explains his process, part of you (no matter who you are) kind of wishes you were him. With two cameras strapped around his neck firing shots off while his pilot banks at seven G's, Sergeant Reid is living the dream.

ESPN's Body Issue 2014 is out -- and the results are stunning. Every one of the 59 images in the "Bodies We Want" piece is a beautiful portrait of the pinnacle of the human form. There is no doubt these are professional atheletes with perfect, sculpted bodies. No puffed-up editing, no extraneous fluff. This is the real deal: clean, sharp, and on point. Oh, and did I mention there's a BTS video? No, wait. There are 13 BTS videos featuring the likes of Jamie Anderson, Michael Phelps, Venus Williams and many others.

I've personally covered the Sony a7S a lot here at Fstoppers, full disclosure: I'm in love with the idea of this camera. As a diehard D700 user (though I've since retired it) I love the idea of a high-ISO somewhat low-res monster. All the reviews and sample images / video I've seen of this camera have absolutley blown me away, this video is no different. Check out Philip Bloom pushing the a7S to its limits in this video.

It's extremely easy to produce mundane timelapses, which is why amazing work like "Barcelona GO!" produced by filmmaker Rob Whitworth gets me so jazzed. This timelapse/hyperlapse done in "flow-motion" (what Rob calls his fast-moving short films) is simply stunning.

Stop motion is one of the oldest and historically most popular tricks in the industry. It was used in many great films, music videos, advertisements and children's TV shows for many years. Recently Lexus decided to take the stop motion idea and combine it with some cool practical effects to create their new TV advertising spot. In order to execute their idea, they hired 40 engineers and many stuntpeople to help them with that complex task.

Every once in a while I come across a photographer or project that blows me away in terms of content, just in time for Independence Day weekend, B&H released this video of Stacy Pearsall, US Airforce Veteran and combat photojournalist, telling the story behind one of her latest and largest project, photographing veterans. Take a look.

Ah July 4th. For us in the United States, this national holiday calls for hot dogs, beer and most importantly fireworks. YouTuber Jos Stinglingh may have published this video of a DJI Phantom 2 and a GoPro a couple months ago in West Palm Beach, Florida, but there are few dates more apt to view it than today.

If you've been following the world's favorite sports championship as closely as they do everywhere except in the U.S., you've undoubtedly noticed snippets of Beats' beautifully filmed World Cup commercial, "The Game Before the Game." Featuring Serena Williams, Lil Wayne, and numerous soccer stars, the cinematic ad shows the world's greatest talents' pre-game/pre-show preparations from patriotic nail polish to prayers and phone calls to home.

Last month we shared a really impressive project of an underwater shoot in Bali done by my friend and conceptual photographer Benjamin Von Wong. He stated then that was only part one and that part two would be coming soon. Well, soon is here and he's sharing more technical aspects of how he made the project come to life.

Phoenix based model and photographer Shantia Veney took some time to make a quick three and a half minute video demonstrating how a constant, fluid, motion of dance-like movement looked in front of the camera. She explained on Facebook that the video was to simply show how to move gracefully from one pose to another and reminded her followers that different photographers may require different actions and pauses between poses.

Gillette, founded in 1901, has been around for just over 100 years now. To celebrate, they recently put together a genius stop-motion video showing the evolution of men's hair during that time. This video takes us behind the scenes of the four-day production and shows the painstaking level of attention-to-detail involved in creating an animation of this magnitude.

Stijn Verlinde is boarding a flight home to Belgium from a shoot in Las Vegas. “The one piece of advice I would give to anyone starting out is 'be dedicated'.” Stijn, who started out a few years ago with some basic gear has lived by that advice. He is constantly working and is revolutionizing dance music festival videos across the globe. His success is not elusive or down to luck – it’s the result of three very clear factors we can all apply.

The combination of two visually striking methods resulted in this surreal video by Vincent Brady. After checking the video, read on for some more information on the rig Vincent used to shoot with, and some insight on the programs he used to painstakingly stitch his images together for the final timelapse video.

Hiking season is in full swing and in the last few years I've incorporated a lot of video and photography while on week long trips in the backcountry. When every pound of weight counts, you have to choose your gear carefully. In this post I’ll share my tricks and tips for making a useful kit without weighing you down.

Those that know me know that Los Angeles is one of my favourite cities in the world. The city just feels like home for a number of reasons and this timelapse from Chris Pritchard absolutely embodies everything I love about it. The ever changing conditions and light, the mixture of urban and landscape and the way the city just feels alive.

GoPro is getting ready to release their official IPO (Initial Public Offering) and join the stock market within the next 2 weeks. I received an email from GoPro yesterday asking if I wanted to participate and reserve the power to buy some of their IPO's and I instantly signed up and transferred funds.

In a rather raw video posted to Youtube earlier today, a man jumps off some rocks and into the water only to find his friends screaming, "Shark!" behind him. Captured from a GoPro he attached before jumping in, this video gives us get a pretty good POV glimpse of what that would feel like. What would you do in that situation?

Have a creative urge to create something but have no time to execute it? Or maybe you feel you don't have the right location and atmosphere? I think you should consider getting stuck at the airport. Richard Dunn did just that. The Georgia man got stuck overnight at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport, alone, and decided to use do something useful with his time. By useful, I mean create a Celine Dion music video.

My friend Chris Lavigne is what I like to call the "master of media" over at Wistia, which means he gets to make all their product videos and also spends a lot of time sharing tips and tricks he uses as a cinematographer. He recently released this video which explains how he records audio to his 5D Mark III in a somewhat unconventional, yet still effective, way.

The LitePanels 1x1 has arguably been the industry standard for LED lighting in many news and documentary productions. At the recent CineGear show, LitePanels demoed their latest product, an update to the award winning 1x1. The new "Astra" light claims to have an output 4x greater than the original 1x1. Nate Weber from Newsshooter.com shares the first look in this video.

In a short film created by media group Blue Chalk, photographer Cory Richards discusses his growth as a photographer and his experiences shooting in some of the most beautiful-and dangerous-places on earth. Essentially homeless after dropping out of high school at 14, Richards credits the observance of the "richness that comes with struggle" for his initial education as a visual storyteller.

Michael Schmidt of Chemnitz, Germany, shares a video review of Canon's new and quite affordable EF-S 10-18mm IS STM lens. The lens features silent focusing thanks to its stepping motor (STM) and even throws in built-in image stabilization (IS). While the lens exhibits some minor issues (some expected distortion seems quite controlled for this focal length), overall image quality seems fantastic and the lens' focusing motor is truly silent and smooth.

Earlier this year Lukas Renlund, a 30-year old professional photographer from Scandinavia, sat down and tried to imagine what the photography industry might look like in 5 or 10 years. That imagination-session lead him to quickly start a new photography/media company named 'Not So Fast | Media'. Instead of offering still photographs to their clients, the new company focuses only on creating motion photographs- Beautiful moving images.

Thirty years after their original collaboration for Koyaanisqatsi, filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass are at it again with documentary where the audience is placed in an unusual situation: watching the varied expressions of others interacting with technology. This video, an Fstoppers exclusive, gives you a look into the mind of Godfrey Reggio while making the film.

If you watched the Fstoppers "How To Become a Professional Commercial Wedding Photographer" DVD, you might remember a scene where Lee Is shooting by the water. He later told us he was too concerned for the structural integrity of a dock to put a wedding party on it, stating he didn't want to be "that photographer." Well, Lee might have avoided it, but this group sure didn't.

This little DIY "hack" from MrCheesyCam on YouTube shows you how to add a 3 stop ND filter to lenses that you might otherwise not be able to (such as the MFT Rokinon Fisheye as shown in the video). All the components needed for this nifty little mod cost well under $10.

When it comes to camera memory cards, most of us gravitate towards Sandisk and Lexar. Maybe PNY or Sony too. Samsung has been making memory cards for other companies for quite some time, but only recently have they decided to branch out and brand them as Samsung. So how do they perform? Surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, quite well.

I've always been a Lowepro fan. I own pelicans, Think Tank, ONA, swag backpacks... the works. But for some reason I keep gravitating back to Lowepro. I currently own both the old and new versions of the Pro Roller bags. In an attempt to show how well protected your gear is inside the new Lowepro Pro Roller X-Series, Lowepro decided to do the ridiculous.

Let me preface this by saying I hate calling anything the "ultimate." Odds are, I've missed something in the market that might be better. It's nearly impossible for me to keep a pulse on everything in this massive and expanding industry. But if anything comes as close to "ultimate" in the video tripod world, it would be the Benro S8 Video Tripod.

The RagLite LED systems are a product seeking backing on Kickstarter to do a production run of what appear to be LED strips on fabric that can be rolled up, powered by battery, are waterproof, and claim a CRI of 95. With several rewards being offered, including various sizes of their light, they seek to raise about $25,000. Read on for their video and more information on these unique lights.

I was recently introduced to a new business, TogTools.com, from a photographer friend of mine and co-founder, Jess Robertson. TogTools is a free online resource for new or emerging photographers to gain knowledge through various podcast interviews from notable creatives in our industry. The focus of their interviews are all things related to running a successful business.

Last month, Lytro announced their second generation light field camera they call Illum. The Illum system is clearly geared at serious amateur and professional photographers interested in experimenting with variable focus photography. This new mini-documentary features photographers using the Illum system, the technology behind it, and their creative process.