Your phone takes the best pictures, right? That’s why you bought it.
Not so fast, says tech vlogger Marques Brownlee in a YouTube video, where he pits the top five smartphone cameras on the market in a blind test against one another to see which one comes out on top.
The first time I landed in a foreign country at night was when I went to Costa Rica in 2009. I remember being wide awake for the last hour of the flight and looking out the window at the yellow spider webs of city lights as I descended over Central America. Seeing populated places from above at night was new to me; the patterns of the streets, the sprawl of the towns, the promise of life popping up at random amidst the calm of the surrounding darkness all made it one of the most exciting flights I'd ever taken. And that's not even mentioning the stars overhead.
Picture this: you and some friends are on a week-long backpacking trip in Alaska, and it’s a frigid 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside. You really don’t want to get out of your sleeping bag. Luckily, before you got in it, you went out and set up your camera with a incredibly lightweight remote that you can control from your phone so that you can take photos of the aurora without leaving the tent. If you want to be able to do this, and for only $100, you should check out the Pulse camera remote by Alpine Labs.
For us English folk, Spain has been the go-to summer family holiday location for decades. So much so, in fact, that I'm almost repelled by how familiar it is to me. Then, this morning, I received an email from Peter Jablonowski of FilmSpektakel informing me that he and Thomas Pöcksteiner produced a time-lapse of the Spanish island Tenerife and all my preconceived notions melted away.
Microscopes allow us to peer into the tiny worlds hidden from our naked eyes, but tracking slowly evolving movement with them can be a logistical nightmare. Scientists have developed a new technique for automatically tracking movement and locking focus, creating spectacular time-lapses in the process.
When asking people what they hate retouching the most, usually the answer is anything hair related. It requires a tremendous amount of precision and a lot of time. Something retoucher Pratik Naik seems to have, at least according to this video in which he fixes eyelashes to perfection while keeping them natural looking. Have you ever wondered how high-end retouchers achieve such result? Then you should definitely watch this time-lapse.
Even if you hate the cold and snow, spending time in an isolated winter landscape is a truly wonderful experience. "Lost in a Skier's Dream" captures that feeling in all its glory.
Looping videos without any noticeable sign of a start or end adds so much production value to your work. The cool thing is this technique only requires Photoshop and is so simple you'll be kicking yourself for not knowing how.
If you've ever dabbled in time-lapse photography, you know what an incredible amount of effort goes into making a very short video. From the prep work, to setup, shooting, and editing, you're often looking at a couple of hours for a few seconds worth of video. Well, Morten Rustad invests a bit more time than that: roughly 20,000 kms traveled, 200,000 photos on 20 terabytes of hard drives, and two years of time invested. The result is an incredible seven-minute video that puts Norway's beauty on full display.
Jerusalem is an incredibly historic city overflowing with people and culture, and successfully capturing and representing its many facets is not an easy undertaking. This amazing short film certainly pulls it off.
The aurora borealis are hauntingly beautiful, but we're used to seeing images of them shot from the confines of the ground. One photographer looked out his airplane window and saw them, however, leading to this unique and spectacular time-lapse.
Time-lapse photography has quickly become one of the most popular forms of creative expression in the past year. A ton of expensive gear and advanced methods exist to produce cinema quality videos like the opening sequence in "House of Cards," but this shouldn’t deter you from getting out and trying it on your own.
We've all seen impressive time-lapses before, but what really caught my eye with "Destination DC" was its human element. Washington D.C. is undoubtedly a historic city full of sites that are primed for capture, but that in itself means it's a challenge to create something that rises above the countless images and videos we've seen before. "Destination DC" does just that.
Morten Rustad’s a rarity, managing to make time-lapse photography his fulltime gig – and today he’s teamed up with New Zealand based company Syrp to share his expertise and host their latest Filmmaking Guide: “How to Setup a Long-Distance Cable Cam Motion Time-lapse”.
If I'm brutally honest, I felt as if I'd become a bit numb to time-lapses. There's a sense in which the bar has been raised so high of late, that it's difficult to create anything that's likely to capture my attention (not that anyone's trying to). However, if there's one place that can deliver over and over again, it's the frozen tundra that feels as if it has been designed by a landscape photographer: Iceland.
Internationally acclaimed time-lapse film maker and photographer Rob Whitworth brings magical Cappadocia alive in his flow-motion hyperlapse film for Turkish Airways. The visually stunning clip, which highlights the tourist attractions in the region, took six weeks to shoot over the course of two months and two seasons. The effortless blending of multiple photography techniques and precise After Effects work culminates in a breathtaking finished product which pushes boundaries and leaves no doubt as to why Whitworth's videos have over 9 million online views.
If you’ve ever wondered how the heck to photograph, much less create, a time-lapse of the Milky Way; this video by Rhino Camera Gear explains the process in great detail.
Improving night photography is an ever closing gap riddled with tech-tips, tricks, and expensive gear. The Star Adventurer by Sky Watcher-USA seeks to be the reasonably, all-in-one option to improve your starscape photography. The built-in tracking head and accompanying accessories are the perfect companion to viewing and photographing the night’s sky.
What do you get when you combine over two years of shooting, extensive location-scouting, two Canon 5D Mark III cameras, and a very ambitious time-lapse photographer? You get just over six minutes of breathtaking panoramic time-lapse footage coming in at a remarkable 10K by 4K resolution. If this amazing time-lapse video from Photographer Joe Capra doesn't take your mind off of the election for a few minutes, nothing will.
I always enjoy a good time-lapse. Making them is a hobby of mine, as I love getting to relax and work at the same time. Leaving your camera stuck on a tripod or Gorillapod doesn't always give you the most dynamic shot I've found. Fortunately, there are ways to add some depth to your time-lapse film without having to lug around several backpacks worth of gear. One such device would be the Syrp Pan/Tilt Bracket.
A transportive time-lapse is something that never gets old, particularly when it looks and sounds as elegant as a waking dream. Forcibly poetic diction to describe lengthy slider moves and dramatically shifting clouds, perhaps. However, it’s hard to ignore the feeling you’ll get when you take this trip to Døvrefjell, a mountain in Norway that never looked more serene.
When it comes to time-lapse photography, there are a great number of items available for you to do just that. In fact you can head over to B&H Photo to really see just how many options there are. Most are fairly simple to use and come with some sort of remote allowing you to set the path and duration of your pass. Some are intuitive, others aren't as simple between setting keyframes, setting durations, or in some extreme examples, using a different module for each axis and having to program each independently in order to achieve a multi-dimensional movement. How much simpler would it be though if you could draw your intended path for your time-lapse and have it up and running in a matter of a minute or two?
Lately, I've found myself watching lots of stop motion films. It's something I've always wanted to try (I've tried very simple things thanks to Vine), but never really dove into. Now, after watching "Infinitude," my head is spinning at the possibilities of what you can create with stop motion.
Stop motion animation is by far one of the most forgotten mediums for filmmaking, yet it holds high respect for what it is and how it's done in large motion pictures today. Those pushing the envelope in 2016 are the geniuses behind Laika Studios where they blended hand crafted puppets, CGI, and 3D printing to build a world filled with imagination and story.
Most of us are familiar with Drew Geraci’s work even if we don't recognize his name. Geraci is the owner of District 7 Media and is the man behind the time-lapse material seen in the opening sequences of Netflix’s House of Cards, PBS's Frontline, and three NFL's Superbowls. As one of the most talented and influential time-lapse producers in the industry, Geraci again pushes boundaries with “China: A Prisma Tale,” a motion time-lapse processed within the Prisma App.
Photographer Greg Florent has made images that capture Budapest in a new light. The images are made by taking them at the transition of daylight into sunset and then nighttime until the lights come on and the city's evening starts. He spends around four hours at a location taking one shot, making sure he gets the whole transition and changes of light to produce the images in post.
This Cinemagraph time-lapse was made using only 12 JPEG images. The software allows photographers to create motion within a static photograph. You need to upload each image to the website, and then you design the movement within each image. Once you get a moving image "flowing" you can render it out and import it into Adobe Premiere Pro to create the final time-lapse.
NASA's aptly named EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) camera sits about one million miles from our planet, where it uses an array of sensors to monitor and provide observations of cloud heights, aerosols, vegetation growth, and the state of ozone in the atmosphere. It also provides some pretty neat images of Earth, which NASA has assembled into a year-long time-lapse.
Documentary videos have always been there to grab my attention. These short, yet powerful videos can really pull you in, making you want to know more about what you're watching. I have made a few videos like this myself but none that I have really liked until now. I don’t usually like to share my work or go into depth about it, but here I will go over a few things to do when shooting a documentary like this.
In the latest installment of the “More Than Just Parks” series, filmmakers Will Pattiz and Jim Pattiz journey through Grand Teton National Park and capture breathtaking visuals of the natural vistas and wildlife. Their video series aims to document all 59 national parks through beautiful imagery in order to promote the protection and enjoyment of these lands. After you check out the new video (it does not disappoint), the Pattiz brothers share with Fstoppers some of their experiences and challenges working on “Grand Teton” and the video series altogether.
