Articles from Jaron Schneider

Update:  Aaron Hernandez has now been found guilty of 1st degree murder.  If you're a sports fan, you probably know the huge scandal unfolding right now surrounding Aaron Hernandez, the former NFL star who was recently released from the New England Patriots. He is now under arrest for a murder that happened on June 14, but last February he allegedly shot a man in the face, a man who survived and is now suing him for it. Thing is, the EXIF data on images recently released by Fstoppers contributor Blair Bunting show the photo shoot took place only a few hours after that alleged shooting. Freaky.

At the Photo Plus Expo a couple months ago in New York, a new photo management software solution was introduced to much fanfare: Mylio. Mylio aims to solve a lot of problems that other companies seemed to be floundering around. It would give us complete access to our images no matter what platform we were on, and would regularly back them up across platforms and in the cloud or through whatever system you were currently working. It also brought something else to the table that immediately caught my interest: an in-house, custom built raw editor that worked on iPad, iPhone and desktop computers.

The Syrp Genie is a great, though imperfect, timelapse machine that has recently added another trick to its arsenal: repeatable motion. Originally, the first couple bits of firmware to the Syrp weren't perfect at the repeatable motion tasks, but the most recent update has fixed all the issues, giving us the ability to fine-tune motions and get them time and again, exactly as they were the first time. With the addition of the new Magic Carpet, there is a lot we can now do with the Syrp.

Our gear is a major investment, and what we use to carry and protect it – our bags and cases – say a lot about us as photographers. I have collected quite a few bags over the years, but I find myself returning to the same one when getting ready for a shoot. My mainstay organizes all of my usual suspects, from my camera to my lenses and memory cards, in just the right way. My equipment, including my bag, has joined me on all of my exploits. My bag of choice isn’t just protection and security for my gear; it’s practically a partner in crime. So we wondered... what about your bag makes it your partner?

In the years I've been in this industry, one of the more pervasive problems I have seen talented people deal with is personal fear: Fear of failure, fear of uncertainty, even fear of success. I think a misconception is that successful people do not experience these fears. They certainly do, but they have learned to overcome them, harness them, and succeed in spite of them. 

Adobe is having a bit of fun with Halloween this year and are hosting something a bit unusual... a murder mystery hidden in a Photoshop Document. The murder scene is a multi-layered PSD file for fans to explore and sort through using Photoshop. Can you solve the mystery?

LG Electronics has launched its new Digital Cinema 4K Monitor in the US, a professional-grade desktop display that delivers the intense detail and color accuracy for the photo, video and graphic design markets. The monitor is strikingly affordable, as the 31-inch screen is set to sell for $1399.

Albums are a big seller for wedding photographers, and for good reason. Brides want a physical memory of their day they can pull down off the shelf for years to come. But Storytag founder Nikki McKenna believes there is room for improvement when it comes to albums. She thinks that adding a written story element can really change the power of an album.

I have to say, it's been a blast seeing where Carli Davidson's passion for dogs has taken her, starting way back in 2012 when I first featured her on Fstoppers, and again last year with the release of her book Shake. Today marks the official release of her new book, Shake Puppies, and she somehow managed to create a book of cute that surpasses that of her original printed piece. 

The Nikon D610 is currently $300 off on instant rebate, bringing the brand new version to $1696. You can get one from the refurb department for even less, though, at just shy of $1500. Fuji is offering $200 off many of their lenses as well. The biggest deal though, in my opinon, is the $800 off the Panasonic GH4, my new favorite camera, when you get it with the interface unit. You can get $300 off with the 12-35mm lens bundle. 

We're bringing you great contests hosted by our pals at Viewbug weekly, and this week you can have a chance to win a wall of metal prints valued at $500 and have your photo featured at Miller's booth at Imaging USA 2015. Just show us your best outdoor portrait! 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is, rather quickly, becoming very involved with our industry. If you were at Adobe MAX a couple weeks ago, you would have seen him moderating the "Sneaks" panel. Today, he keep that train rolling with a partnership with Samsung and his open collaborative production company, hitRECord. Titled, “In a City”, the campaign will see the actor and filmmaker direct a short film inspired by cities across the globe shot entirely on the NX1 in 4K.

About two years ago, Blackmagic made enormous waves in the cinema industry with their original cinema camera. A year later, they packed that camera into a preposterously small package, giving filmmakers the ability to take high quality video with them virtually anywhere. With numerous highly desired firmware updates since then, we wanted to see how the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera has handled the test of time. 

We're bringing you great contests hosted by our pals at Viewbug weekly, and this week you can have a chance to win a new tripod and camera bag from Vanguard. Just show us a photo that would have been impossible to take without a tripod... Drag that shutter!

If you haven't heard about eMotimo, then you probably aren't much into timelapsing. eMotimo is one of the leaders, next to Dynamic Perception, Kessler and Syrp, in timelapse devices, and the eMotimo TB3 is the only device that allows for three axis movement with one machine. Now they're really pushing the device beyond timelapse with this new add-on accessory for repeatable product shots called the Turntable.  

Thomas Dagg loves Star Wars. Each and every Star Wars figure and ship he owns, he can recall the name, where/how he got it, and their roll in his burgeoning imagination. His childhood wouldn't be the same without the galactic adventures, and as an adult he has paid tribute to the galaxy far, far away in photographs.

Eric Crosland is the director of Sherpa Cinema, a collective of artists who produce some pretty amazing stuff. Crosland recently went to some rather remote parts of Iceland with Dave Mossop and John Trapman working on capturing some landscapes, something for which Iceland is a mecca. While there, the Icelandic eruption occurred and Crosland was ready with a Phase One.

Making a timelapse stand out is getting more and more difficult. I love that making them has become much easier and more approachable, but with hundreds being produced every day it can be hard to filter through to find the really great ones. This "layer timelapse" by Julian Tryba goes in a totally different direction than most lapses, ignoring the general perception of time.

Toby Harriman, founder of the creative collective Planet Unicorn and good friend of mine, just finished a beautiful aerial video featuring my hometown, San Francisco. In just two, one hour flights, Toby was able to masterfully capture the beautiful pink sunrise and signature San Francisco fog out the door of a helicopter. It reminds me how much I love this city.

We're happy to say that our weekly contests are back, thanks to our friends at Viewbug! Need a new website? Make sure you enter this week's contest to be eligible to win a new website from Squarespace (who I use for my site and love it). All you have to do is impress judge Fefo Bouvier with your best rural scenery photo.

After the wildly successful Ditch the DSLR event in Times Square, Samsung has taken their event out west to Los Angeles, giving attendees the opportunity to trade in their DSLR, lens and battery for a new NX30 or NXMini Smart Camera. Not only that, they're also planning to set a world record hosted by Nick Cannon and Julianne Hough that afternoon.

If you aren't using some sort of software to sync audio, you're sitting in your edit bay manually matching audio to video queues, be that sounds, video hints or timecodes. But what if you could just dump all your camera footage from an interview and all the audio from your recorder into one program and hit one button to sync them all quickly and accurately? You can with Red Giant Pluraleyes, and it's nearly perfect.

Ah, gifs. The internet's favorite way to share emotions and short clips. They've seen a considerable boost in popularity in recent years, especially on Reddit. Imgur, the major Reddit image sharing choice, hosts a majority of those gifs. Apparently they've been working on a way to make the experience better, because today they unveiled Project GIFV, an initiative to bring the iconic looping video of the GIF into the modern web and dramatically improving their quality.

Blackmagic Camera 1.9.7 update is available now free of charge from the Blackmagic Design website. The biggest feature? The long-awaited format disk option! The new disk formatting feature allows you to format SSD’s and SD cards in camera so they don’t need to use a computer to prepare disks for recording. This new disk formatting feature is unique because unlike computers that format disks for general storage use, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and Pocket Cinema Camera can format disks optimized for high performance video use.

Last night we were treated to an annual event where Adobe encourages their developers to think differently and solve problems they perceive and present them to the world. This event takes place every year at Adobe MAX and is called "Sneaks." Sneaks has led to innovations like Content Aware Fill and Shake Reduction, but not everything revlealed at Sneaks is guaranteed to make it to a final consumer release. But what we saw looked pretty amazing.

Though it’s easy to think Adobe, being the giant company that they are, doesn’t pay attention to the opinions of the average layperson, it has been my experience that the opposite is true. At the very least, the developers and project managers at Adobe indeed read Fstoppers, so this is your chance to tell them: is their direction the right one for photographers and filmmakers?

We got a fleeting glance of all the updates being made available to creatives today during the Adobe MAX keynote, but Adobe spent a majority of their time talking about mobile and connectivity. We managed to get a complete list of software updates that are coming to your desktop apps too and have it here in one place for easy perusal. 

Adobe Max is a creative conference where artists from around the world the chance to interact with beta designs, see great speakers and learn from professionals and of course, see what new software and hardware advancements Adobe is adding to the fold. This year, Microsoft made a surprise appearance, and at the end of the keynote they gave everyone attending MAX a Surface Pro 3. This is a big deal, and not just because it's a free 2-in-1. 

Adobe MAX is Adobe's major creative conference show that takes place annually in Los Angeles. We got a bit of a peek into what they would be announcing, which we shared with you already, but they held back all their information when it came to the desktop applications. Updating live, here is what they have revealed.

Originally, the idea of a “creative cloud” was difficult for many to grapple when it was first announced. When I spoke to him about a year ago, Photoshop mastermind Jeff Chien understood how we felt: Adobe couldn’t just put the software in the cloud and actually expect it to be an improvement. It had to mean more. Since then, Adobe has been trying to get to the point where the public would be on the same page as them in this regard. They might be getting there with today’s announcements, which are expanding the connectivity of your accounts in CC in ways that finally make the CC model begin to make sense.

To make handoffs and a more ergonomic experience, Freefly, makers of the popular MoVI, have announced the MoVI Ring Accessory for the M5, M10 and M15 handheld 3-axis stabilizers. The MōVI Ring is a rigid carbon fiber, hoop-shaped frame designed to enhance ergonomic handling of MōVI stabilizers.

Fotodiox just announced some very flat, very compact AC/battery powered LED edge lights for use in video productions. My experience with Fotodiox LEDs has been relatively positive, with strong power and excellent color consistency. The new lights, called FlapJacks look to be an excellent addition to your lighting arsenal. 

Last week at Photokina, Phottix announced their battery powered TTL strobe the Indra500 to much accolades and this week they released a video on scet with acclaimed Hong Kong Photographer CM Leung and Hong Kong Arnold Classic Winner Brenda Lo. Though there isn't any talking or additional information on how the strobe handled here, you can get a feel for what it looks like in a real world use situation.

Lowepro announced new hard cases last week (which we reviewed), and to build up some more hype around how secure they keep your gear, they released this fun-filled action video that shows how much punishment the new cases can handle. 

Earlier this year at WPPI in Las Vegas, I stopped by the Benro/MeFoto booth to tell the team how much I loved the MeFoto tripod... but it was lacking in just a few places for a traveling videographer. Yes, the MeFoto was really compact, light weight and quick to set up, but I wanted clip locks and a smooth video pan head without sacrificing the size and weight the MeFoto offered. It seemed like an impossible request, until seven months later they delivered me the Benro Aero.