Sigma's new lenses are making some real waves in the photo community. They're affordable, beautiful and most importantly perform amazingly. The Sigma 35mm f/1.4 is one of our favorite lenses currently on the market, and it can be yours if you win this month's contest (for the camera mount of your choosing). We want to see your best shallow depth of field image! Enter now!
Because we cover a lot of news, we often get sent a slough of press releases from companies looking to get their product out to the masses. Today I received a release from Fotopro who announced a new line of colorful tripods. Sound familiar? It should, because they look exactly like MeFoto tripods.
Think Tank just announced the release of it's new sling camera bag collection, the TurnStyle. Designed to be lightweight with easy access to your gear, the bags come in three sizes to match specific needs. Think Tank says the new bags are ideal for DSLRs in the larger options to mirrorless and smaller cameras in the more compact sized bags. These hybrid bags can be worn as a shoulder sling bag or as a belt pack for increased versatility and comfort.
A small team based in Melbourne, Australia wants to change how you view your studio lights. They say their new invention, the LED Light cube, offers answers to age-old problems. Their Cube has no recycle time, better control over light output and no external battery packs. Due to The LED Light Cube using an LED model rather than a filament, the Cube can just as easily double as a video light as well as a flash. Sounds cool right?
If you’re an outdoor or adventure photographer, one of the situations likely tangle with regularly is balancing the line between comfort and size when it comes to your backpacks. You usually need a bag to both safely transport your expensive gear as well as your climbing supplies. However, our spines have limits and the bag also needs to be supportive and lightweight. Lowepro’s recent iteration of their popular camera bags is the Photo Sport Pro 30L AW, aimed to give you a light bag option for your adventurous ways.
Yesterday I posted a great aerial video over New York, and today I stumbled on this gorgeous time lapse/environmental piece by videographer Eric Hines. The project, called Expedition Iceland, is a collection of shots from a 17 day adventure around the country during the midnight sun in June 2013. It was all shot on a Canon 5D Mark III, a few different Canon lenses and Kessler equipment (such as the CineDrive).
Despite the information floating around regarding the legality of drones, when you see some beautiful aerial footage taken with them, you can't help but gape in awe. In this video uploaded by Nicolas Doldinger you can watch a GoPro take to the skies. In their own words: "DJI Phantom + Zenmuse H3-SD Gimbal + Gopro Hero 3 = NYC LOVE."
Last night Nikon announced two new products, the Nikon SB-300 AF Speedlight and the Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR Lens. The SB-300 is a smaller strobe designed for on-camera flash with i-TTL support. It has a guide number of 59' at ISO 100 and is compatible with DX and FX sensors with coverage from 27mm-200mm on a FX-format camera. The 18-140mm is a kind of all-in-one zoom lens is compatible with DX format cameras and is aimed at photographers looking for one lens solution.
MeFoto, makers of my most favorite travel tripod, today announced a new addition to their product line: the WalkAbout monopod, which also looks like it could be used as a general walking stick. It comes in a host of colors, similar to the tripod line, and also sports a removable compass for when it's not attached to a camera.
Our last contest had thousands of entries and the two winners have already been notified- Congrats to users macropixel and nathalie86! This time we're giving away two, one year subscriptions to one of the best photo website companies around: Squarespace. All you have to do is submit a photo that has some "pop." I hope you had your camera out this past Fourth of July!
I'm not sure when it happened, but sometime in the last couple weeks my website received one simple update that filled in the single complaint I had with the design: it made right clicking to save my images to your desktop a thing of the past. I received no notice and ran into this update by mistake, but I might be happier with my service more now than ever.
This was a rather unexpected but welcome development: the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera EF and MTF mount bodies just dropped in price by $1000, making them a very tempting $1995 today. Blackmagic has told me that the price has fallen because they have "been able to build Blackmagic Cinema Camera at a lower cost, so they can reduce the price and pass those savings along to their customers."
Most of the time, we leave rumors to the rumors sites. However, in this circumstance we thought it would be worth showing you a "leaked" image of the recently rumored Sigma 24-70mm f/2. If true, this lens would be something truly special. But is it real, or just some guys making a fuzzy-yet-believable fake?
The photography industry is so drastically different today than it was just ten years ago that if you’re going to survive, you absolutely have to be dynamic and ready to adapt to the things quickly. You have to find your niche and go for it full force or risk failure. Hasselblad is doing this with their form-over-function Lunar and Stellar. Yet I’m left thinking… Hasselblad, I’m not certain you thought this latest set of moves through. I’m not certain you know what’s happening to your brand. I’m not certain this is where you need to be.
Are you ready to be star-struck by Stellar? That's the tagline to Hasselblad aforementioned rumored RX100 reskin. Apparently, according to the Hasselblad Chairman and CEO, "The world has never seen a compact camera like this before." Weird, I could swear I saw a camera pretty similar to this last year. It's called the RX100.
Almost two years ago we wrote about an interesting idea for a rolling DSLR rig we found on Kickstarter. The concept was a small, compact and heinously simple design called CineSkates. Fast forward to today, and CineSkates has evolved not only into a whole line of products under the name "Cinetics," but is one step closer to great success. Now distributed by JOBY (owned by Daymen who also distributes Lowepro bags), CineSkates shows that when Kickstarter works, it can really work.
In case you missed it, Google recently rolled out a pretty big change to their Gmail system: tabs. The new layout comes standard with a few, but you can also add your own. One of the standard options is the “Promotions” tab which, as you can imagine, is quite good at catching and segmenting marketing emails. This is great for users, but scary for marketers, especially given the data MailChimp just released.
Sometimes you see videos that just enthrall you in their simple yet beautiful elegance. This timelapse by Daniel Csobot is one such experience. He uses a Canon EF 100mm Macro on a Canon 7D with a Kessler CineSlider to capture the growth of a flower from seed to sprout to full growth.
Apparently all the bad press surrounding the Lunar hasn't deterred Hasselblad from their present course of skinning current Sony cameras with the expensive "H" logo and wood accents. PhotoRumors is reporting that Hasselblad will be releasing a compact camera called the "Stellar" that will just be the RX100 with some fancy aesthetic additions. Well, at least they aren't toting megapixels, right?
Not too long ago we featured a tutorial that showed you how to make a fantasy desert kingdom out of tourist images, and thought I would share with you another amazing project by a talented artist. Alexander Koshelkov has quite an impressive resume of outrageous Photoshop compositions that excellently use real world items to create fantastical scenes. He just released this time lapse where you can watch his latest composition which took him just over 7 hours and uses 284 Photoshop CC layers.
Researchers from Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany have proposed quite an awesome attachment for the standard DSLR that would bring the power of a Lytro and more to the cameras already in the marketplace. Their design proposes a configurable, removable camera add-on for high dynamic range, multispectral, polarization, and light-field imaging called the KaleidoCam. And it works.
Peak Design, who launched a successful Kickstarter Project back in 2011, wants to improve on their original camera clip design by making it stronger and more versatile. Their solution? The Capture system. What they're planning looks to be a beefed-up version of the popular Spider Holsters. It clips to belts, bags, backpack straps and the like and allows for easy and secure access to your camera with a tripod-like quick release system.
This is highly unusual, and super unlucky for both the golfer and the camera guy. Today in the first round of the British Open, Pro Thomas Bjorn chipped a ball out of the "rough" on the first hole and struck a very expensive camera. An estimated $80,000 camera to be exact. There isn't much else to say other than watch this, then check out how crazy the damage looks. Yikes.
Just a quick note that we've noticed you can grab a refurbished Nikon D600 for a little over $400 off the new price at B&H. This is Nikon factory refurbished to original like-new specs, and likely were used as a quick loaner or as a review copy. That said, I'm willing to bet they're in great shape. Get one for $1584, which is a slick deal for a full frame sensor.
Photographers are artists. That is one fact that the original photographers spent years convincing others to be truth. But how often do we consider the models to be artists? I would wager rarely, if ever. Model Jen Brook challenges that mentality by acting as the creative director on a group of images she calls her “Dreamcatcher Project.” She works with a group of photographers to capture her vision, and the results show that she has the “eye” as well as the unusual ability to create through others.
Just because we are photographers for a living doesn’t mean all our equipment has to be 100% utilitarian. Sometimes a little bit of style and fashion is appreciated, and ONA looks to deliver in that department. The ONA Leather Brixton, now available in “dark truffle” color, is a sling bag that looks like a businessman’s briefcase sling, but is designed with a photographer in mind.
So a few months ago I wrote about how much I love my Squarespace account, and you would not believe the overwhelming chorus of "Me too!" I experienced in the comments, on Facebook and on Twitter. I'm happy to see that I wasn't alone in my adoration for the website company. As easy as it is to set up my photo site on Squarespace, it might be even easier to add eCommerce to it. If you want to sell product, including prints, you can manage it all from Squarespace extremely easily.
This week, Ben Von Wong shows us a set of great conceptual photographs he shot with model Jen Brook that feature a great shallow depth of field and dark, moody atmosphere despite being photographed in bright daylight. Ben was able to do this using PocketWizard hypersync and was kind enough to document the shoot to show us exactly how he did it.
So the story about something happening to liveBooks is true... except it isn't as bad as many feared. It appears they were just absorbed by WeddingWire. We have all the details, but you can rest easy: if you are a liveBooks user, you won't be losing your site.
UPDATED: LIVEBOOKS ACQUIRED. ORIGINAL STORY: While we don't like to lean heavily on rumors, our own investigations are pointing to some validity with regards to Vincent Laforet's recent article regarding liveBooks. liveBooks is one of the staples of the industry, providing seriously high end, powerful and great websites to photographers worldwide. However, Vincent's sleuthing (backed up by some emails I just sent to liveBooks) hints that all might not be well in the kingdom.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you have never heard of Nations Photo Lab. They certainly aren’t as big as some of the other print house powerhouses in the industry, but in a way I’m glad they aren’t that huge. I can appreciate them, and while working with them I got the feeling I was appreciated. What really matters, though, is price and quality of the product. Nations didn’t let me down.
About two years ago, Chimera showed us the first collapsible beauty dish at WPPI, something that promised to make traveling with the bulky, often heavy modifier a lot easier. However, with a price point of $230, it was a bit pricey for many. In the past few days, Phottix has released their version of the collapsable beauty dish. It has several distinctly different features that separate it from the Chimera version, but there is one thing that will stand out: the price is only $75.
LED has come a long way in the last three years. It was not too long ago that serious photographers and videographers were having a hard time with the idea of LED. They tended to be under powered and cast unattractive shadows. But there was potential, and that potential is beginning to blossom. Fotodiox’s LED100WA monobloc-style heads are one such shining example of how far LED has come and what can be done with it.
Remember the huge brouhaha surrounding Olympus back in late 2011? The former presidents of the company Masatoshi Kishimoto and Toshiro Shimoyama as well as the chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa and a few other execs were found to be lying about massive losses the company sustained, about $1.7 billion in discrepancies. They were finally ruled against, but no one is serving any jail time. Weak.
If you've been on the fence regarding the EOS M, now might be the time to jump off. Canon has discounted the bejeezus out of it, dropping the price by 50%. Since Canon has recently updated the firmware to help with the slow auto focus, this camera is even more of a bargain today. You might not want to think about this one too long, as B&H is surely to run out of stock any time now. EOS M is $299
