Videography

The best photographs and films don’t just bring beautiful visuals to the table. They also place story right at the center of their very make up. “Killing The Rock” (KTR) is a five minute demonstration of this, and reminds us of how commitment to our craft combined with small collaborative like-minded souls can tell stories that go deeper and reach further than we ever could going at it alone.

Interviewing interesting people can be an awesome experience that when done right, will provide impactful insight to your next video project. When done wrong however, you may find yourself asking the client for a do-over or spending hours in the editing room cleaning up mistakes.

Every time I’m on a set or grabbing coffee with another local filmmaker, we always end up talking gear for a bit, and inevitably the question comes up of “What camera would you buy if you had to buy right now, and why?” I decided to research things a bit and put together an article that explains what I’d buy if I absolutely had to right now, and the answer might surprise you.

Earlier this year, the Japanese Experiment Module (KIBO) on the International Space Station (ISS) installed Sony's a7S II mirrorless camera on its exterior. The a7S II is known for its gorgeous 4K video capabilities and wide dynamic range. Sony released video transmitted back from space as the module made its way up the east coast of the United States; The results are truly incredible.

Makeup artists and hairstylists are as much artists as we are as photographers. However, when starting out, they often lack quality content to promote their work. Even later on when well established they sometimes require content to keep their social network feeds regularly updated. While working for free all the time for everyone isn’t sustainable, helping out people we work with may be beneficial for everyone. Here are two simple things you can do while on set to help your team out with their social presence and marketing. Best of all, it may even boost your social engagement and followers base as well as your work.

Does your choice of editing software matter? Are style and substance mutually exclusive? Is film school necessary? Starting out in filmmaking generally predisposes one to having a veritable plethora of questions ranging from what gear to buy to borderline existential crises. This helpful video answers most of them (they can't help you with that existential crisis).

Transitions can be very useful in your video to move between scenes instead of just having the end and inserting the new one. There are several different transitions to use, some are very creative and some involve some great skills behind the computer. There’s a few transitions that can be done all in camera and can help you change them up.

Dancing on treadmills, zero-gravity choreography, laser-beamed toast, and extreme dominoes — this is a list of some of the wonderful and wacky ideas OK Go have turned into music videos. Every one is wonderfully executed, but how do they devise and develop such elaborate and complicated ideas during their creative process?

There’s a quiet 360-degree battle being fought behind the scenes at Apple and Adobe when it comes to your favorite non-linear video editing tools, Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere Pro. Some recent hires hint at an expanding 360-degree video portfolio at both companies.

I'll start with a rather obvious warning: this video and article may contain spoilers for anything that happens up to and including episode 2 of season 7 of "Game of Thrones." With that out of the way, we can look at how the incredible fight scene of that second episode was created.

Flying a drone often enables the possibility of getting some really unique and arresting shots, but it also takes a fair amount of skill or even a second operator on a dedicated camera controller to pull them off. These five simple shots will give you similarly excellent results with minimal effort.

The summer box office is a very complex orchestra of films. Filled with independent dramas, giant cast comedies, and huge blockbuster franchises all vying for a spot at the top to profit big on their investments. Sadly for "Valerian," that did not happen over the weekend even though they spent over 180 million to create it. Here is why it flopped and how you can learn from it as a creative.

Cranes are quickly becoming a staple in the bags of many videographers and for good reason. It has a smaller footprint, lower cost of entry, and has a relatively low learning curve than most gimbals on the market. Even though most users can pick up and go without ever opening the manual. There are still fundamental crane movements that you need to learn to take a good scene and make it a great scene.

I don’t always write about power solutions for video and photography equipment, but when I do, it’s because I see something that is versatile, space-saving, and designed with traveling in mind. I appreciate all three of those things in a product, so the Crank Juice Box might be a product I get behind.

Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve is widely known for its color grading tools. It’s what many would call an industry standard thanks to its powerful features. With the Beta 4 of Resolve 14 that was released a little while ago, the software saw its editing and audio capabilities improving quite a bit as well. However, many forget or don't know about them and stick to working with Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Discover in this video how Resolve editing and audio features work. Perhaps you’ll see they are exactly what you needed.

Fight stunts are not something that I'm into when shooting video, but I'm always curious how the pros do them. In this video the stunt coordinator of the "Atomic Blonde" movie, Sam Hargrave, breaks down how the fight moves were choreographed. Not only that, but being a second unit director, he also gives insight of how they shot and cut the footage from these scenes.

Since it turned high-resolution digital cinema upside-down, RED has been a name synonymous with big Hollywood films. But getting RED gear has remained relatively difficult, often requiring waiting periods and only available directly from RED. Yesterday however, B&H Photo Video began offering RED accessories and the Epic-W Brain with the Helium 8K S35 sensor and Scarlet-W Brain with Dragon 5K sensor.

I watched this video this morning thinking it was going to be something weird, and surely enough, it was just weird enough to catch my attention. Day after day, we all live in this crazy world where everything eventually just becomes so common — our commutes to work, our daily routines, the things we see and so much more. Watching this video made me smile and think, "What if we saw things differently for a day?" "Perspective" is a video that, in less than two minutes, really entertains the mind. While we already know none of this is possible, this video still allows us to envision the strange, false reality it creates.

As long as humans have known birds, they have also known that they fly. But apparently, some of them could levitate — or at least that’s what a recent viral video on YouTube seems to suggest. How amazing is it to capture a floating bird? Let’s have a look!

If you're not familiar with Crash Course (and judging by the number of subscribers and viewers they have on YouTube, most of you are), it is an educational YouTube channel started by Hank and John Green. Mixing well thought-out topics and storylines with strong insights and entertainment, and combining it all into easily digestible episodes, the Green brothers have successfully presented and taught myriad subjects ranging from Biology to U.S. History and seemingly everything in between. Their latest venture is Crash Course Film.

The largest single landscape print I have made to date is a ten-foot-wide panorama of the Painted Rock at Fort Irwin. Titled A Thousand Words Fall Short, I donated it to a Veterans' clinic on the 4th of July. Printed on Fuji-crystal archival paper, front-mounted to 1/4" museum acrylic with an anti-glare coating, and backed by a solid sheet of aluminum, it really caught and exalted the light in the humble hallway where I was honored to see it hanging a couple days ago.

When editing videos, especially if you are vlogging, finding creative ways to make your content entertaining isn’t always easy. Quality content is king, but a solid edit goes a long way as well. Implementing new transitions on a regular basis or finding a unique one that can become your signature style could definitely help making your footage more attractive. In this 15-minute long tutorial, Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid shows us how to create a drone-like transition between two shots!

Composition may be one of the most widely discussed artistic aspects in photography. In theory, the idea is simple. Putting it to work, particularly in motion arts, is easier said than done. Composition is one of the most important creative aspects of any filmmaking. Simply put, it is the act of defining the position, arrangement, and view of objects within the frame. The composition is, in effect, representing the point of view of your viewer and it will have a direct impact on how that viewer feels when they see it.

It takes skill and experience to create compelling documentary films, and just one facet of that process is capturing the footage. Traditional films are usually shot on the ground, perhaps on a tripod or some other mount, and there are plenty of challenges inherent to that process. But have you ever tried to capture footage while hanging from a rope and getting swarmed by Himalayan honey bees? And you thought your job was tough.

After Google, Youtube is the second largest search engine, and thus having a video-portfolio of one's photography can be a great addition in so far as getting one's work seen. Any time we get to offer our work in a different format, it allows us to both see and showcase different angles which otherwise may remain hidden or less apparent. Give a client the option to watch your video or scroll through your portfolio, and they might well take you up on the video, which, in being rarer, can also be more memorable.

A huge part of shooting video is audio. No one wants to look at footage with poor sound with distracting background noise. But thanks to Steven Oakley from MiesnerMedia, if you are reading this article, poor audio will be a story of the past in your videos. Oakley gives us a handy trick to eliminate almost any background noise using only Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro.

Telling a story with moving images has been evolving so much through the years. One of the most important milestones in this journey is the progress from monochromatic to color pictures.

Ready to try Sigma's Art optical quality built into a cinema glass? Sigma has made that possible in their new 14mm T2 FF and 135mm T2 FF cine lenses and now have announced their prices and availability.

If you're like many stills shooters who are just getting into video, you're probably finding out it's its own world. If you're wondering how to give your footage a more cinematic and polished, professional look, this great video will give you 10 quick tips to get you up and running.

Finding the perfect soundtrack for a video project or short film can be a laborious and painful process for budget filmmakers, yet it’s a task that requires plenty of care and attention. Music Vine claims to have filled this gap in between by providing affordable, high quality, curated music licensing. We sat down with Co-founder Lewis Foster to speak all things music licensing for video projects.

You’ve bought a brand new 4K video camera with all the bells and whistles and shot your first piece of work. You can’t wait to get home and edit the footage for your client imagining how incredible and crisp the video will be. You open Premiere Pro, import the files, and within seconds your computer takes a crap as it struggles to render the data intensive footage.

While we all might not all be a fan of his on-camera persona or his punchy photography style. I think we can all agree that Jared Polin aka FroKnowsPhoto does a great job of testing out and reviewing the latest and greatest in the Photography industry. In his newly released “Real World Review” Jared takes the newly released Sony a9 and puts it through the paces at a professional soccer event in Philadelphia.

I’ve shot a lot of video. I’ve never been professionally trained, and I get most of the knowledge and how-tos from guys like Brandon Li who share crucial information with regards to shooting, editing, and making great videos. This video shares the importance of choosing the right frame rate for your project. It’s detailed, and if you’re starting out in video, this will give you peace of mind when you tell a client you want to shoot something for them.

Everybody's favorite rocket engineer and slow-motion video enthusiast, Destin Sandlin, is back with a pair of videos that you'll find interesting if you've ever noticed the effects of a rolling shutter while filming video. Like many of us, Sandlin noticed the weird effect that happens when trying to film engine propellers with his iPhone. He decided to use a high-speed camera and science to figure out exactly what was happening. Then for fun, he worked with a friend and figured out a way to use After Effects to create a simulation of the rolling shutter effect.

Getting into video is often thought to be expensive. Buying new cameras, new lenses and specific gear such as stabilizers or fluid head tripods. But what if you could save some money and film with your iPhone, while still getting an amazing quality out of it? In a recent video, Matti Haapoja from TravelFeels gives us a few ideas on how to create cinematic looking footage with our smartphone.

I don’t know about you, but I'm not personally acquainted with anybody who could afford, or even want, to buy a RED Scarlet before their twenties. That’s a serious commitment to your career, and it’s exactly what Kansas teenager Thad Swift did.

There’s a lot of things to consider while filming to get smooth footage for your project. There are several tools to help out as well, but are ND filters in your arsenal? They usually don’t come to mind when you are thinking about how to get smooth footage but they can help when the scene is too bright.

Simon Baxter makes an unplanned visit to a verdant misty forest in North Yorkshire, UK. As Baxter talks us through the thought process behind one of his images, it becomes clear that the gushing waterfall in the background isn’t his area of interest. A couple of trees above the waterfall that are steeped in the rolling mist look very intriguing.

There’s no denying that LED panels are a stellar option for lighting your scene. However, if you’re willing to sacrifice some of the portability benefits, then you might be better off keeping your softboxes around and getting the best of both worlds. Caleb Pike shows us exactly what kinds of bulbs we can use with our existing softboxes for an affordable entry into high-quality LED lighting.

Electronics company MGCOOL has recently put out several new sports action cameras in the style of GoPro targeting the 4K and affordable market. The Explorer 1s both feature rich and capable of 4k at 24FPS packs a lot in for the low price of $70.

A filmmaker favorite, the Canon C300 Mark II has always been a little more expensive than other cameras with similar specs. Last year around this time, Canon dropped the cost from $16,000 to $12,000, and lowered prices on a few lenses. Now they have dropped it again, bringing it down so that for only $9,999 you can get a shiny-new, internal 4K video camera.

Even though many photographers like to think they can move to video whenever they want, the truth is both medias are totally different. Shooting films is an entirely different story than capturing stills. One example is stabilization. While many photographers can safely rely on their lens or body stabilization, videographers must use much more complex systems. One issue when starting out in the cinematography world is knowing what stabilization to buy. YCImaging created a video comparing three of the most popular options out there, giving us his advice on what to use according to our work.

We've all seen those inspiring commercials which claim to have been shot entirely on a smartphone. While technically they were captured with the device they are trying to sell to you, it is often with some heavy equipment adaptation which has always felt a little fraudulent to me, even if they do mention it in the small print which no one reads.

No matter how small I am in the business I always try to watch how the big ones do it. Probably I won't be able to do most of the work those big budget movies do, but I still want to know the principles. Who knows what may come up my way that may need key knowledge I get from videos like these. In that segment the stunt coordinator Darrin Prescott describes how they shot the opening scene from "John Wick 2."

The box-set revolution of the last fifteen years has pressed huge demands of screenwriters to flesh out narratives into 10-20 hours of television. Over the last few years, there has been a go-to technique that has helped writers add meat to the bones of complex narratives, whilst filling up the content needed to air modern TV shows. We’re talking about the flashback.

I'm a sucker for simple videos like this and can really appreciate what goes into making them. As I strive to jump more into video, it is interesting to stay tuned and watch what other people create to help give me ideas for future work. The coolest thing to me about a video or even a photo is the mood or feel it can convey. A lot of the video work I do, I focus on sharp focus, straight lines, clean shots, accurate color, cutting to music and a few other little things. I mainly shoot real estate videos, but it is nice to have the freedom to shoot whatever I want, however I want rather than following my standard rules for shooting real estate. I have been messing around more with video and hope to come out with something to show from it soon enough!

Large-scale film productions take an incredible amount of work by a veritable plethora of talented people fulfilling numerous roles to pull off. It's easy to overlook just how much goes on behind the scenes as the credits roll past, but this great video explains who does what and just how much goes into making a successful film.

Kendrick Lamar's newest music video, "ELEMENT," was released this week. The video is directed by Jonas Lindstroem and The Little Homies (aka Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free) and takes Photographer Gordon Parks' iconic imagery and breathes new life via video. I'm not sure how many of our readers listen to Kendrick Lamar, but you should. He's brilliant, in both lyric and music video direction.

When I first watched "Past" part one in a three part art film series, I got goosebumps. Actor and movement-specialist Anthony Nikolchev and co-choreographer Gema Galiana directed and performed in these beautiful and moving short films. The films are very evocative, and made me see a clear connection and bridge between conceptual photography and video.

Trends come and go; some become mainstays, some become clichés. Video is certainly no stranger to trendy effects that become overused or outstay their welcome. Here are five such effects to consider before you drop them in your next video.