Articles from Wouter du Toit

500px just introduced their RAW app. It uses the new iPhone raw image capabilities to make editing on the go easier and as intuitive as possible. The app gives you the capability to export to your social networks as well as your 500px profile, where you can sell the images and make 60% of the profit. It also has an Assignment section, which I believe will be used to give photographers paid projects depending on their location. Is editing raw images on mobile devices the future of post-production? By the looks of what Lightroom has done with their mobile apps in which you can edit your raw images by using a smaller proxy file, it might be the way the industry is moving. 

I'm guilty in being the one telling myself that if I had the gear I wanted, I would go out and shoot the projects I wanted to shoot. So nothing happens until I actually buy the gear. What you and I know is that it's not the gear, it's the person, the patience and the will to do great work that makes your photography a force to be reckoned with. And I've realized that the photographs I look at most, of my own and photographers I admire, are the candid images of models in the greenroom before they go out on the catwalk, or the model I'm shooting for a test, where the moment between shots appear and capture her walking to my instructed area. 

As photographers and people in the visual media industry, we need to make our work accessible across the platforms we and the people who like photographs (everyone) browse and use on a daily basis. We need to be marketing-orientated to take our careers and what we do to the next level, whether the next level is to shoot more weddings, booking more fashion gigs, or being the go-to person for professional portraits. 

Xavi Bou shoots image-bursts of birds and then compiles them in Photoshop to form the working project called "Ornitographies." It almost looks like frequencies moving across the photograph, and there’s a visible rhythm that is not so obvious when comparing it to what we know as an image of a bird flying. It tells a story, capturing an event in totality. These images show how birds move together as one organism, communicating in some way or form to make their flight time together as productive or joyful as possible.

It's about time for a new approach. There are a few online stores and stock libraries where you can get templates, videos, and music that help you save time when creating professional videos. Some of them can get really tricky when dealing with prices and licensing.  

It's been going on for decades. Film chemicals that coat the film and react with the various colors coming through the lens weren't made to cope with a diverse set of skin tones. 

Ebru Yildiz is a photographer based in New York. She shoots portraits and live music events and has clients like the New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, and Pitchfork to name a few. One of the places she's shot a lot of work at has recently closed their doors. The venue, Death By Audio in Williamsburg, has been one of the most vital underground music venues in the NYC community. It occupied a large warehouse on the waterfront from 2005 until 2014 and hosted bands who due to their performances there later enjoyed international acclaim. Bands like A Place to Bury Strangers, Jeff The Brotherhood, and Lightning Bolt and many more graced the stage in this venue. 

Drive Like Maria just released a music video for their song "Deep Blue." What makes this unique is that every frame has been rendered with the "Dreams" effect using the Prisma App. This app uses AI to create effects that make your images look like paintings of famous artists. It has many effect options, and it really looks as though a lot of time, knowledge, and effort has been put together to create it. It looks like Waking Life, but instead of drawing each frame by hand, Drive Like Maria has taken every frame of their music video and run it through the 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.

Have you ever wanted to go on an adventure with no vehicles, but still be able to carry and use your electronics right through the trip without having to worry about battery life? Soon, we'll be able to use the Rokpak Pioneer Series. It's a waterproof box that uses solar-charged batteries to charge your gear via USB and Micro-USB cables. 

As photographers we often get our visual references from film, and our ideas can originate from a single scene in a movie that blew you away. It's the combination of sounds, the anticipation and fear, and all the emotions that the director gets to capture and convey for the viewer to experience. But, it's also worth noting that most movies and series have visual cues that originate from older, classic movies too. 

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.

Macro photography make the unseen visible. It gives our eyes that extra zoom to get in close and see the detail we usually just take for granted. From the eyes of a fly to the droplet on a leaf, you most likely have seen some great macro photography. These macro lenses are generally of superb glass which gives sharp images that contain a lot of detail. There is a range of lenses for Canon and Nikon camera systems. 

This is a wild claim to make. The camera is one of the most used apps on the iPhone, and most of the photos shared online are taken with one. So, why would this app beat the iPhone’s camera app? According to the video, Microsoft Pix is a smart camera, and looking at the features, it seems like they might’ve developed something quite great. 

One of the places where photography has grown tremendously is in the manufacturing and industrial industry. People need to show how things are made, and they need to do it without actually being there. There is a vast amount of engineering and skill sets found in a factory, and if your photography is in this line of work, you'll find this video by Benedict Redgrove stimulating and inspiring.

There are many tips online. Five step listicles of composition, post-processing, editing, getting the model to smile more, and to capture a story in the best way possible. You can be friendlier to clients, communicate your vision to the team, client or model, use on or off camera flash, and setup your camera in a better way to enable easier ways to capture the shot. You can learn about better workflows and how to increase your productivity in post too. All these tools are available on Fstoppers.com for you to learn and use in your everyday photography career and life. 

I shot and edited a narrative film in the last month. It was a first for me. I had this scene in my mind of a person burying a suitcase or bag in the woods, like it’s something he or she wanted to hide or get away from. I had a second idea about a guy walking down a long passage way and knocking on a door with no one opening for him. I decided these two contrasting visual ideas will be my story. 

Shooting time-lapses can be a good skill to have as a photographer and as a video producer. I like shooting nighttime traffic. It gives me an urban energy, with the lights dragging over the shot to give an indication of motion, power, and electricity.  

Takashi Aizu is based in Japan and makes mouthwatering time-lapses of his baking. He sets up his iPhone 6s, and documents the process and reaction of the specific dough to become breads, croissants, or baguettes. We often take the beauty of the croissant we get at Starbucks for granted, but here we can actually see how much knowledge, patience, and effort goes into baking and what the process looks like when you get it fresh and hot out of the oven. It’s a simple process concept, but he has over 25,000 followers on Instagram, and his baking is obviously rated as very good in Japan.

Adobe has released Premiere Pro CC 2015.3. The new welcomed features are something I haven’t yet seen implemented in any other NLE. If you use Premiere, here is a look at what’s new, and if you’re not a subscriber, this might make you consider switching.

Imagine editing your film and getting to the phase where the production sound needs to be added or perfected. This can be a fun part of editing and getting things together, but it can also be a very time consuming part of the process. If you didn’t have a recording of the live sound, you need to run through the various samples you have available in your library, or get them online, and see which sound works best. If you have the budget, you can add a Foley artist to your team to physically produce the sounds for your video. These sounds must then be edited in for the various sounds you need, be it the footsteps down the alley or the gunshots fired by the assassin that form part of your story. What if this can all be done automatically?

SnapDragon is the name of a processor made by Qualcomm. The company just released a short film titled "Lifeline" and a behind-the-scenes video where the Academy Award-winning director, Armando Bo, runs through the plot and how they used a mobile phone to create the timeline and tell the story.

Adobe has launched their latest update to Lightroom and Photoshop in the 2015.1 update. In the Adobe Camera Raw module and Lightroom, they have developed a new feature that is something photographers in the travel, architecture, and cityscape photography industry will really find useful. It can actually change some of your old previously unusable images into great images.

When you get to a new place you haven’t been to before, or, even if you have been there in the past, you often see something new. It’s what travel does, it lets you see new things in new ways you haven’t seen before. So when you’re walking down the street with phone in hand but you've left the camera at your hotel or apartment and you see something you’d like to shoot, how do you save the location so you can get back to it again?

A gimbal is an important piece of technology that makes for some smooth video. It's the device that stabilizes the camera so you can get that cinematic look in your shot. It removes the vibration and shake. The gimbal's motors keep the camera level as the camera operator moves it. Drones use them, the DJI Ronin is basically a large gimbal, and the DJI Osmo is the latest handheld gimbal that DJI brought to market. 

If you’re interested in drone photography and video, I’ve compiled a list of people and sites you need to go to for inspiration, tips, tutorials, and insight. Aerial photography has changed with the drone. When you put costs aside, the other advantages of flying a drone vs a helicopter are that it can get closer to the subject, it doesn't create the ripples in water as much, it doesn’t cause a wind force blowing out the leaves of trees and plants, and it can make for some great shots through mountain gorges that helicopters simply can’t fit through. 

Apple has just uploaded ads which will most likely also be broadcast nationally. They consists of videos that were shot using iPhones. To use the tool to make the videos that advertises the tool is a great way to convey a message. It all enhances and forms part of their ecosystem that is the Apple brand. I believe it's well-executed, especially due to the fact that the videos were created by the users, making the products friendler to others.  

I’m going to be traveling soon. I’m going to Paris for a project documenting the city, its people and exploring its intangible nuances that emit emotion. Travel photography. I enjoy traveling, and I love photography. Can we put these two together? Yes. There is no other reason but the enjoyment of moving though the city that's got me excited. 

I attended the Canon Roadshow, held once a year, where Canon gets to show off their latest gear. We got to have lunch with the Canon people, and we also had great keynote speakers who told their story and presented their work and how they do what they do. One of the speakers, Laura McCullagh, shoots live music events. She's shot acts like Die Antwoord and Mumford and Sons, to name a few. We were fortunate to get some pointers from her on how to get great shots.

One of the most commercially viable careers as a photographer can be fashion or beauty photography. In fashion photography, you are mostly shooting people, and you have details like clothes, makeup, and mood that you can capture in creative ways. You can create fantasies, capture a personality, and really build a name if your images are unique, and you will get people asking for you if you’re able to portray a certain feeling or mood. How to get started is often most aspirational photographers’ stumbling block. I can tell you that it is the ones who "show up and shoot" who build the careers and names for themselves from it. So, how do you do it?

Just the other day I was thinking about the great footage and images I have that might do well in a stock library. I just didn't know where to go and which site was best. so I closed the folder and let it go. But, here at Fstoppers we get the best news first. Perfect timing for sure. We got a heads-up from Dissolve that they are launching a rights-managed stock library with 50,000 images on June 1st. They also want to open it up to individual photographers to contribute and form part of their premium stock offering.  

I was recently commissioned to photograph fields of Rooibos Tea (a healthy tea with no caffeine and great antioxidants found in South Africa) so the farmer could document his potential yield. He also wanted details, as in what side of the tea field to start planting so he could plan the sowing schedule for the next five years. The idea is to not sow on the same soil, so new rows of tea plants need to be formed in five years. Tea likes fresh, new soil.

The DJI OSMO is a great tool for stabilizing your footage in a cinematic way. It is sure to increase your video’s production value. It can shoot 4K at 30fps, and you can even increase the frame rate to slow it down quite considerably. You can also shoot time-lapses or intervals, and if you move through an area while doing so, you will get the a very smooth, esthetically pleasing footage.

Shooting or being involved in a fashion or beauty shoot is a lot of fun. It’s a day where creative personalities, the photographer, stylist, hair and makeup and assistants as well as the client's creative team get together to produce a story, a body of work that they want to show the world. Everyone is focussed on bringing their best ideas to the party. 

I fell into a canal in Venice with the ThinkTank StreetWalker HardDrive Bag on my back. I was walking too close to the edge while looking at the bridges and architecture, and how the water brushes up against them, when I stepped on a moss-covered section of the canal ledge. I slipped, hit my bum on the ledge, and gently slid into the canal. There was no splash, and my head didn't go below water, but the ledge was so slippery that I couldn’t get out by myself. I was floating in the canal for what was the longest 30 seconds of my life.