Not so surprisingly faster than the FAA, apparently, AIG sprung into action to allow drone operators and owners to purchase insurance that covers not only their drone and camera equipment, but also a number of other terrible things that can happen while you're piloting a UAV.
It didn't take long for artists to realize they could literally paint with light once photography came around... but light painting was certainly popularized by Picasso. While you might find some painting specific subjects by hand, others have found endless variation in more geometric creations. Spirographs, even if you don't know them by name, are everywhere (but are mostly used as designs on wedding invitations). While people have been light painting them into their images for quite some time now, the process isn't always clear. Thankfully, Jason D. Page gives some great tips on how to set up a spirograph shot through his Light Painting Photography Vimeo channel.
We’ve long passed the beginning of the end and are now certainly in middle-of-the-end territory with respect to the freedom to fly drones. The latest high-profile drone incident further ensures that drone piloting will remain a privilege and not a right, though rightly so, as some people apparently can’t exercise enough common sense to stay away from populated areas (i.e. Los Angeles) and critical city infrastructure (i.e. power lines).
You, me, and the rest of them, we've all wondered why people are so infatuated with lightning-fast memory cards. Sure, it's great to bump up the speed so your camera can shoot relatively quickly and to enable fast transfers to the computer or backup drives. But at the end of the day, most of us have settled our minds on the idea that we really don't need more than 90MB/s cards. 100MB/s is that sweet spot that seems to be the limit of necessity (and reasonable prices). But a new video shows us why new formats, like the XQD card, and the faster speeds that come with it are actually useful in a real-world scenario (for some people).
Resource Magazine has a big issue out this quarter: Bill Nye is telling the world why photography will save it. Want to know the answer? You're going to have to grab this fall's issue of Resource. But a behind-the-scenes video of the photo shoot for this feature's spread shows just how much compositing there is in modern-day photography. Composited or not, the video is a quick, interesting look into a neat shoot with science's most famed personality.
One of the first things I heard when I sat down at a large white table with Light CTO and Co-Founder Dr. Rajiv Laroia and VP of Marketing Bradley Lautenbach was that, when it comes to lenses, plastic is better than glass. Scratching my head for a bit, while searching for some logic, but keeping an open mind (I did ask for a meeting with the guy who decided to put 16 lenses in a small box and call it the future of photography), the meeting proceeded to somewhat blow my mind… if it’s all true.
From photos of Pluto and its moons to constantly expanding catalogs of images of our planet, NASA's releases seem to be never-ending lately. The latest epic space image, however, comes from German astronomers from Ruhr University Bochum. At a massive 46 billion pixels and a unwieldy 194 gigabytes, the image unseats the previous record holder for the largest photograph of space: NASA's 1.5 billion-pixel Hubble photograph of Andromeda.
I find myself saying this a lot these days, but that's not a typo. In fact, the listed ISO range for the new KONO! Donau film is actually ISO 3-6. With such a low sensitivity, photographers can capture longer exposures in daylight. The film's extremely blue tones serve as a reminder that it's still in the experimental range, but there's an entirely new limit to what you could do with a hand-rolled ISO 3-6 film.
With a slightly more enterprise-solution twist, Amazon has announced a new 50-terabyte "Snowball" drive that ships itself to your address, gives you ten days to load it with as much data as you can, and then gets picked up by UPS to transfer the data back to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage — all for $200 per job. The process works in reverse, too; so, you can import or export a job between any AWS product more quickly and at less cost than alternatives.
The ME20F-SH is Canon's latest, crazy-high ISO camera, able to record clean video at over ISO 4 million (not a typo). Early footage was lackluster in content, and early media stated the natural security-field uses for such a camera. But the latest video suggests the ME20F-SH could be used to shoot incredibly beautiful footage of our world that wouldn't have been able to be captured the same way in the past.
According to NBC News, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is getting close to announcing new rules for recreational drone use, beginning with the requirement to register every drone a person buys. Registration itself, however, is not a large obstacle to drone ownership and operation, as registration will only be able to help the FAA keep track of just how many there are and, hopefully, identify aircraft that break rules or cause collisions. But just how effective will this be? And what other laws will come in the way of recreational drone flight?
A man with a camera and a smartphone was questioned for twenty minutes in his own neighborhood after a woman called the cops, fearing he was taking photographs of children in the park across the street. It turned out he was just a guy who lives nearby and has been photographing his neighborhood for three decades. Was this a little embarrassing for the woman? She might feel that way, but there are two sides to this story.
I can't honestly say I know where the XQD format is going. So few cameras have adopted the new format, but as bit rates will need to continue to increase to match the continuing rise of megapixels and video resolution, perhaps the format will begin to take hold out of necessity. Either way, for those with cameras like the Nikon D4 or D4S, Lexar just released their fastest XQD cards yet, the XQD 2.0 cards, supporting up to 440 MB/s transfer rates (or in other, less useful, but impressive-sounding terms, speeds up to 2933x). Meanwhile, the CFast cards are even 20 percent faster.
YouTuber Michael Delaney found a pit full of rattlesnakes and, despite anyone's best suggestions, didn't turn back. Instead, armed with a GoPro on the end of a stick, Delaney recorded the scene, most of during which the only audible audio was the collective rattling of the bunch. Eventually, repeated strikes from multiple snakes knock the GoPro off of its mount and into the middle of the pit (good luck getting that one back). Put it some headphones, put the video on full screen... I dare you not to flinch at the first good strike...
Cinema5D founder Sebastian Wöber's latest three-part tutorial on drone shooting starts off with quite the introduction in Part I. Wöber could honestly be saying anything to accompany his to-die-for footage, but what makes it so fantastic is how great the information in this video is. From safety to beginner tips on getting started and how to get that cinematic shot you have in your head (don't worry, Wöber has plenty examples if you don't), Part I has you covered. And there's more to come...very soon.
The Pakpod is Kickstarter's latest small-camera tripod to hit the market. It's not made of carbon fiber or even metal. It won't stand much higher than a couple feet. And it looks a little funny - let's be honest. But it does one thing better than any other tripod I've ever seen: it attaches to anything (even under water).
Canon's latest cameras are compact, but pack a punch (maybe). While some might be compelled to ask themselves about the reasons behind releasing the lackluster EOS M10 at all, the G5 X and G9 X both fit well into Canon's high-end compact lineup with interesting features that might draw the casual shooter looking for something a bit more spectacular than le quotidien.
Without a huge media hoopla, today Apple announced updates to some of its entire all-in-one desktop lineup. The 21.5-inch iMac now offers a 4K retina display, the 27-inch iMac now comes standard with the 5K retina display, the Mac sees its first Skylake debut, and Apple's Magic keyboard and mouse accessories see great updates (at a price). With even more under-the-hood changes, these are the iMac's you wanted all year, but may not have known about. (UPDATED)
They say that the ability to still be surprised is the key to happiness. It's growing knowledge of the world around us that informs our expectations of behaviors of all kinds of entities that in turn ruins the surprise in our lives. It's the reason that we're not interested in our boring childhood toys. And it's the reason that it's so easy to stay glued to shorts like the Vimeo Staff Pick, "INPUT/OUTPUT," which juices our bored minds with just enough excitement and surprise to, at the very least, smile on the inside.
So outrageous are the looks of the L16 camera, you might find yourself checking today's date to make sure we haven't entered into April. But no, this is completely real. Light, the company behind the L16 camera, took a compact body and crammed 16 cameras, each with its own plastic-covered lens, into it. The idea is to create an all-in-one camera with multiple focal lengths, allowing the L16 to use computational photography to combine resulting images for higher quality photos from an aggregation of photos taken with small sensors.
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