Cameras

The winners of our Samsung 'Galaxy' competition courtesy of Three mobile have been announced.

In Oklahoma, tornados are a common thing. Every spring they occur and every Oklahoman grows up knowing what they are and the damage they can cause. As a native Oklahoman, I’ve only seen two tornados in person after chasing them down. Most of the time they do little damage and dissipate fairly quickly. People are usually more worried about damage that comes from the gigantic-sized hail than from tornados. On May 20th, 2013, a 2-mile-radius tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma, about 10 miles away from my house. It was on a path heading North East slowly. I was watching the radar closely with my girlfriend, as we always do when the sirens go off. We saw footage of the tornado ripping across the urban terrain. It was May 3rd, 1999 all over again. I decided to travel to the location afterward to photograph the devastation. Only my girlfriend knew. I did not know what to expect. As I was leaving my house, the sirens rang again. I ran back inside one last time to check the radar. As far as I could tell, the tornado was passing Interstate 35 and it was safe for me to head south. I left and arrived 30 minutes later. After passing through hail and flooded roads, I parked my car and walked 45 blocks to where a farm had gotten hit. As I was coming around to the entrance of the farm, I could hear gun shots. It puzzled me at first, but as soon as I got closer I realized the livestock was still alive. The first thing I saw as I passed through the farm entrance was miles of shredded wood and piled up debris, as far as my eye could see. ??As I walked closer, I found the first dead horse. I stepped back to think about whether I should continue further. I then thought, “I’ve come this far, I can’t stop now.” My camera was in my bag, and I figured that I should start shooting to document the scene. In a way, it was a relief. I was able to look at everything as an image, rather than the horror that was directly in front of me. The farm was the most gruesome. Dead livestock were everywhere. Literally piles of them. It was overwhelming for me, but I pushed on. I had an idea that I would try to follow the path of the tornado as much as possible, and that’s what I did. The next hour and a half was nothing but watching my step and shooting what I saw. I tried to remain respectful as best I could, staying on the streets and off people’s property. At one point, I came to a dead end and a boy that lived on the street took me behind his house to show me how to get around the many road blocks. From there I was able to access the most decimated areas of the neighborhood. There were many times I had to keep reminding myself to shoot. There was too much to look at and too much to look out for. I tried to focus on the damage, and the people interacting with it. I was using a prime lens, so there was no way I could get personal with my images with the rules I had set for myself. The families there were in good spirits. I had arrived after people had gotten rushed to hospitals, so I did not see anyone hurt. I asked many times if anyone needed a hand and was turned down every time. I saw people ditching their beers as cops came up to help, elders in folding chairs on the porch in front of their frayed homes, people going through their homes and finding their pets, fire and police officers helping families. I made my way around the neighborhoods, I saw a lot of people helping people. They were even turning away volunteers and only accepting specialists. As strange as I thought that was, I found out later that looting was occurring. As I made my rounds, there were many times I wanted to jump in and start digging for the animals I could hear crying. There were so many. There were so many poor dogs that were wounded and hurt. I thought to myself, “What would I do with them? I’m 3 miles from my car, and all I have is my camera. Where would I take them?” I had no idea. I was not equipped for any

For many user who use Adobe’s Photoshop software, the “Content Aware Fill” tool has been a welcome addition in their arsenals of retouching tools. And while the vast majority of Photoshop users are editing 2D imagery, a partnership between Adobe and Brigham Young University has produced algorithms that’ll do with 3D images what Content Aware Fill does with 2D images. BYU grad student Joel Howard and professor Bryan Morse worked with Adobe’s Scott Cohen and Brian Price to make the algorithm a reality. Adobe also provided funding for the project. 3D pictures are a pair of images of the same subject taken from slightly different angles. It is extremely difficult to edit them in a manner that won’t be distracting in the final version. “If you try to show it stereoscopically and it’s not quite right, it’s very bothersome to the eyes,” says Bryan Morse. “You have to fill the space in a way that preserves the left-right consistency.” Professor Bryan Morse and Grad Student Joel Howard, Courtesy: BYU The team put together a paper with their findings and developments, which went on to win the best research paper at an IEEE 3D imaging expo. The process, simply put, works by generating a “depth map”, which as the name would suggest, maps the depth of each and every pixel and object in the picture. This allows for the replacement of pixels in the “hole” from what has been removed/edited out. This depth map also allows for manipulating light sources, thanks to an extension Morse has developed. While 3D products aren’t exactly the most popular items out on the market, Morse is convinced the market will expand when 3D images can be viewed without glasses on cameras and displays. There haven’t been any sample photos or videos released so far, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled and will update this post when there are. (via BYU) Image credit: 3D cameras by davidyuweb

Tian Lu (left) and Yuri Shadrin are both accomplished pianists in their own right. But when they play as a duet (on the same piano) they produce an intuitive mix of music and banter that could only come from the married couple that they are. He is Russian, she is Chinese. Which made them the perfect choice to perform in China later this month in commemoration of an upcoming regional trade partnership between China and Russia. So I shot their publicity portraits in one of my favorite little environmental portrait nooks in Howard County—under the fountain downtown at the lakefront. I have shot here before, but every time I come back I see the place a little differently. Read more »

You can now pre-order Panasonic’s brand new mirrorless micro four thirds digital camera ‘Lumix DMC-G6KK’ in the US via B&H Photo. The camera retails for $749 and comes bundled with a Lumix G Vario 14-42mm II f/3.5-5.6 lens. In case you didn’t know, the Lumix DMC-G6KK sports a 16MP Live MOS sensor, a 3.0-inch 1,036K-dot tilting touchscreen LCD, a 1,440K-dot OLED Live view finder, a Venus Engine image processor, built-in WiFi and NFC connectivity, and can capture 1080p Full HD video at 60fps. [Product Page]

Jive Software has eliminated the limit on the number of people who can use its social task management application Producteev for free within a company.It also added new features to the application, including the capability of assigning tasks to everyone in the company, not just to narrower sets of employees involved in a specific project."Now you can scale Producteev across large companies and have your entire network [of employees] all taking advantage of it," said Nathan Rawlins, Jive's vice president of product marketing.Producteev strikes a balance between to-do applications aimed at individuals and heavy-duty, complex project management software designed for project leaders, according to Rawlins.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CrossFit “delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive.” There are thousands of CrossFit boxes around the world with everyday athletes numbering in the millions. One of the major components of CrossFit is regularly engaging in Olympic weightlifting. A large percentage of workouts contain some form of Oly lifting, as it’s called. While strength is a component of progressing as an Oly lifter, technique is critical. Without solid technique, you are robbing yourself of your full potential. With that in mind, check out the above slow motion video of two-time Olympian Chad Vaughn (shot on the Sony FS700) as he performs a clean and jerk lift of 315lbs. Producer, director and editor Heber Cannon of the CrossFit Media Team was kind enough to give us the rundown on the slow motion shoot with Chad Vaughn. Dig in for the full scoop from Heber below. Below is a list of gear we used: Camera: FS700 Lens: Zeiss CP.2 21mm Zeiss 2 x KinoFlo ParaBeam on the wall screen left. 3 x KinoFlo 4 Banks hung from the ceiling, (one above Chad and then 2 others lighting the gym floor.) 2 Flo Lights on the side and 1 in the floor used as fill on Chad. We used all the Kino’s for this shoot, and you can see many of them in the background of the shots of the following video: The idea for the shoot with Chad was to test the capabilities of Sony’s new FS700 camera. I wanted to test the slow motion on the FS700 and compare it to the Canon C300, 5D, 7D, or an AF100 all shooting at 60FPS and then taking that into a program like twixtor and slowing it down. You can get incredible results if you light well and keep the background simple with software for a slow motion effect. CrossFit is always looking to test new ways to film movements, exploring new technology, this shoot was a perfect example of that. I planned on shooting at 960fps initially, but with the loss in bit-rate and resolution, it looked pretty bad, and we couldn’t get far enough away from Chad to see him head to toe. CrossFit is all about seeing the whole movement, it was important to use to see everything that was going on. The camera has its limitations, as it will only shoot at an extreme rate for a limited amount of time. At 480fps the shot will only last for 9 seconds real time. When we played back that 9 seconds and saw the results, we were really happy with how the lift looked. The 9 seconds is stretched out for 3 minutes and that’s all we really needed, much slower you’d lose interest. As you can see from the final video, you really get a sense of the little nuances of the lift. To get a 480FPS we had to have a shutter speed of 1/480. Even with all the lights we had in there we had to bump up the gain and we had some grain in the darker areas of the footage. We cleaned a lot of that up in post production but you still see it when it’s played back on a big screen. After we shot the clean and jerk and snatch, we did some other shots and brought in an extra light, an Altman 650 tungsten fresnel and put a daylight gel over it, to match the other lights. This proved to be what we needed to get a cleaner shot without having to bump up the db’s in the gain on the camera. We brought Chad out for two days of shooting. After each shot, the camera would play back the footage as it captured the burst. This allowed Chad and I to watch the footage in slow motion to critique the lift until we found a shot we were happy with. The way an elite Olympic lifter moves is really incredible, much like a ballet dancer, there is precision in the movement. Chad was super willing to keep lifting until we got something that displayed that. We spent about 60-90 minutes on each lift and took a break to film some coaching tips in between. We had an awesome crew of 9 people. Most of whom are all professional and creative individuals who work with CrossFit in producing video and photo content. CrossFit tends to attract top notch peopl

Adorama has begun selling the new Flashpoint 180 Monolight Kit. Read more and comment »

The sixth issue of VIEW Magazine is now available for free on Apple’s Newsstand for iPad/iPhone. Read more and comment »

Kingston Digital Europe has released MobileLite Wireless for Android and iOS devices. Read more and comment »