Articles written by Lee Morris

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.

Light Camera Crane - Build from Martin Roberts on Vimeo.

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.

Fstoppers Original: Lee Morris Shoots Oak Steakhouse from FStoppers on Vimeo.

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.

First of all I would like to apologize for the delay. We have been in contact with a few other web admins with contest experience and they warned us that cheating could be a big problem. We wanted to create a fair voting system before we jumped into this and we have finally figured it out. To keep the voting fair (and not a popularity contest) the poll will take place on our forums here. To vote you must be a member of the forum and you must have made at least 3 comments on other posts before you are eligible to vote. Commenting 3 times is not hard but it is difficult enough to deter random friends who are not Fstoppers readers from voting and it keeps users from creating multiple accounts. If you are in the running, feel free to tell your friends to sign up and vote for you, but if you make multiple forum accounts you will be disqualified (we CAN see who you are). We were planning on picking our favorite 5 videos for you guys to vote on but we had so many good submissions that we have narrowed it down to 10 videos to vote on. If you didn't make the top 10 please don't be discouraged. Keep making videos and sending them in. After you pick your favorite video in the full post, head over to the forum to vote. Voting will last 5 days starting now.

We have posted Tom's work before. Here is a little behind the scenes of how he actually does it.

Behind the Scenes: Timelapse Crane from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Cris Matthews just sent this video over to me. He did a few tests with the iPhone 4 and a ring light. He also used his iPad to review and edit the images. I have gota say, if I can easily and instantly view my shots on an iPad like they seem to be doing I will buy one tomorrow.

VideoJunkie.co.uk - iPhone Fashion Shoot from Cris Matthews on Vimeo.

I was just introduced to Freddie's youtube channel and I am blown away. Freddie and his friends keep creating fantastic videos with some impressive homemade CGI and then they explain how they did it. Watch this BTS below and the finished product in the full post. <

I know everyone who entered the contest is patiently waiting for the voting to begin and I wanted to give you all a quick update. We are going to take this week to continue to post our favorite contest entries on the front page. Then we plan to create a post that has every video submission in one post so that our readers can easily find and watch all of them. We were then going to pick our favorite 5 videos and allow the community to vote on them. We got a lot of great submissions though so we may choose more than 5 favorites. To combat cheaters, the voting will be taking place on the forums and each member will get 1 vote only. We don't want this contest to be a popularity contest where whoever has the most friends wins. By having the poll on the forum we will be able to track votes and make sure that everything is fair.

I am really enjoying this quality images from low quality gear thing that has been going on around here lately. Check out Studio 54 shooting with just 1 light.

BTS - Entry Level Gear from Photo54 on Vimeo.