Articles from Oliver Kmia

A video recently surfaced on YouTube showing a police officer pulling and pointing his gun at a man filming his activity. As a photographer, it would be easy to side with the cameraman but let’s try to see what happened and check both sides of the story.

Let’s not lie to ourselves and try to sugarcoat the issue -- in many circumstances, gear matters. There is no shame in admitting that despite all your talent, some shoots can’t be done without the appropriate hardware. Here is why.

DJI just released a new Phantom V2.0 that adds a new model to the already crowded Phantom family. This V2.0 variant brings evolutions to the table. So, what’s new?

Drones with stabilized cameras are nice, but capturing serious action shots at close range requires a different type of aircraft with serious piloting skills.

The cost was 107 billion dollars for a giant leap for mankind but a trashy subject and framing for the first picture taken on the surface of the moon.

There are a lot of good time-lapse videos out there, but here is a personal selection of the finest ones that racked up millions of views and dozens of awards.

Nano-drones are usually designed as indoor toys but this short video shows how they can be used to create some very unique shots.

Five years after the original Pocket Camera release, Blackmagic Design just unveiled a long awaited successor with insane specifications such as internal 4K 60 raw recording. Here is what we know.

Well known in the drone world for its accessories, PolarPro announced a new series of filters called QuartzLine for photography and video applications. Here is a quick preview and unboxing of these filters.

It seems that Sony is taking the lazy route on its new professional camcorder. The FS5 II comes with the same S35 sensor as the Mark I version and only offers improved color rendition.

The Mavic Air is tiny and films in 4K, but does it deliver? What is the image quality like? Can it handle wind? What about the battery life and range? After a month of intensive use, here is a detailed review of this new drone.

NVMe drives are the new generation of SSD based on the NVMe interface. The classic 2.5” SATA SSD is limited by the SATA standard to 550 MB/s. On the other end, the best NVMe SSD are reaching up to 3,500 MB/s (read) and 2,100 MB/s (write) speed, and they offer much better latency. In short, they are much faster, smaller, and pricier than regular SSDs.

A Russian drone pilot managed to fly his little 2.3 lbs drone close to the cruising altitude of most airliners. As surprising as it sounds, the technology used for this flight is very common.

The French website Mizuwari published a series of captivating interviews with the CEO of Sigma, Kazuto Yamaki. Among other things, the Japanese executive mentions the challenges of implementing curved sensor technology in digital cameras.

Disappointment only comes with expectations. Fortunately, the leaked specifications of the Canon M50 published a few days ago on the internet prepared us for the worst. It’s beyond that.

Film Director Franzty Moreau won an award at the Miami Filmgate film festival with his miniseries "What’s More Important." The first episodes are now available on YouTube and they are worth watching.

The most famous drone festival is coming next month in New York City. But it’s more than a simple film festival.

The highly-anticipated Mavic Air finally landed at Fstoppers a few days ago. This tiny quadcopter comes with an impressive set of features but everything is not perfect. Here is short preview of what I like and dislike about this drone.

LRTimelapse is without a doubt the best piece of software to manage extreme day-to-night and night-to-day transition when capturing a time-lapse sequence. This flicker remover program changed the industry for good and a new version with many improvements has just been announced. Here is what you need to know about it.

French photographer Yannick Cerrutti recently released a breath taking hyper-lapse produced over the Alps with his drone. It required two years of work and the capture of 13,000 DNG images to finish this project. His video has been selected for the 2018 New-York City Drone Film Festival.

A few days ago, I published a copycat video on my Vimeo account. After the video was first shared by DPReview, the file became viral and got shared hundreds of thousands of times all over Internet. How did I produce this little funny video? How does having 250,000 views per day affect your visibility and social network accounts? And finally, what does this video really mean?

In less than a year, DJI released four entry-level drones, from the cheap Tello to the more advanced Mavic Platinum. The mid-range segment is now occupied by the Spark and the newly announced Mavic Air. In some aspects, the latest DJI drone outperforms the pricier models, which can be confusing. Is the Mavic Air better than the Mavic Pro? Which one should you buy and why? The answer: it depends of your needs. Up next, we provide a complete comparison to help you navigate through the main differences of each drone, including their strengths and weaknesses.

DJI will announce a new product on Tuesday. Based on the short teaser published a few days ago, we know that this product will be a foldable drone. Everything beyond that is unknown. However, we can analyze DJI's past strategy and actual technological development to estimate the possible specifications and features that this new drone may offer.

Weird skin tone, strange green tint, fake sky; these are a few things that come to mind when describing the colors in video coming from Sony cameras. They wouldn't look as “natural” as Fuji, Canon, and Nikon colors. But did Sony fix it? According to Dave Dugdale from Learning Video and Andrew Reid from EOSHD, something happened.

Sex sells. This basic advertising trick could be the number one rule of any marketing textbook. Unfortunately, as uninspiring as it seems, associating brands with provocative half-naked bodies draws people’s attention. Pushing this logic to the extreme, French Musician Hiérophante created a short stop-motion video showing naked women’s bodies being covered by brand logos. The result leaves you with an uncomfortable feeling of watching some sort of livestock branding.

It's the time of the year in which rankings appear all around the Internet spotlighting the best performers of the past 12 months. But what about the worst? As the French writer Beaumarchais once said, “Without Freedom to blame, there is no flatterer's praise.” Here is my take at the worst 2017 camera, the Canon 6D Mark II.

Super telephoto prime lenses are not very common except in the world of professional nature and sport photography. Today, Australian photographer Blake Parry talks about his experience with the Sigma 500mm f/4 lens.

Amazon is not the only company planning on using drones for shipping. Following the trend, Santa Claus enrolled the professional drone pilots from Team BlackSheep to expedite the massive gift delivery operation. Here is an inside look at the Christmas mission operated directly from Finland.

I’ve always been skeptical about the 10-bit mode on the GH5. Panasonic designed an incredible camera, but squeezing high color depth footage in a highly-compressed h.264 codec seems contradictory. Dave Dugdale from Learning Video did a quick comparison between the 10-bit mode of the GH5 and the Sony a6500 8-bit video.

Recently, Micael Widell was lucky enough to catch the northern lights over his hometown Stockholm. The experience of seeing and photographing aurora borealis inspired him to compile a video of the best tips to capture the northern lights with a camera.

Hyperlapse is a variant of time-lapse where the camera moves between each shot in order to bring motion to the video sequence. The result is visually impressive, but this technique requires a high degree of precision and concentration. Furthermore, the entire process is tedious and time consuming. But thanks to the recent progress of gimbal stabilization, anyone can now produce decent hyperlapse with an entry-level gimbal. Photographer Matthew Vandeputte from Sydney shows us how to create an easy hyperlapse with a $550 gimbal.

The rumor has been floating around for a few days, but new information appears to confirm that Panasonic is about to announce a low light variant of the GH5 camera on December 15. This new camera, potentially called GH5s, would feature a lower resolution sensor in order to improve the low light performance. Here is what we know.

In the previous article, we analyzed processor and motherboard options along with power supply and computer cases. Next, let’s talk about graphic cards, memory, and heat management issues. On the storage front, the introduction of affordable NMVe drives allows one to go past the bandwidth limitation of the SATA interface found on traditional SSD. Here is a short guide to help you navigate through the current offerings and avoid the marketing traps in order to build the perfect machine based on your budget.

Despite an early report from photographer Drew Geraci last week, it seems that the Sony a7R III may still be affected by the so called “Star Eater” effect. What is really going on?

Photographers and filmmakers probably spend more time on their computers that behind a camera. We own thousands of dollars in gears, yet some of us waste a considerable amount of time struggling on a sluggish PC. However, for the price of a good lens you could dramatically improve your productivity by speeding up the entire post-shooting phase. Here is a short guide to help you navigate through the current offerings and avoid the marketing traps in order to build the perfect machine based on your budget.