May 2010

Michael Zhang

Tactical “Laser” Sight for Wildlife Shooting

Here's an interesting gadget that can help you with wildlife photography, or can simply make you look beastly while doing street photography. This tactical sight can help you lock your camera onto a faraway animal, making finding it much easier to find when you start looking through your massive telephoto lens. With longer focal range lenses, it can be pretty easy to lose sight of where exactly your subject is, and finding it again might require pulling your eyes away from the viewfinder. This sight can help you more accurately lock onto the subject prior to using the viewfinder.

Michael Zhang

A Look Behind the Scenes with Peter Funch

Peter Funch is a New York City-based photographer who we featured a while back in a post titled "4 Creative Projects that Bend the Reality of Street Scenes". Funch photographs scenes for extended periods of time, and then combines people who share something in common. In the photograph above, he chose to include only people who were carrying manila envelopes.

Michael Zhang

Canon 550D Helicam Floats Over Montana

If you need a 2 minute dose of relaxation, check out this video by Jeff Scholl of GravityShots. It was filmed with a Canon 550D/T2i-equipped helicam Whitefish, Montana Scholl used a 14mm lens, filmed at 720p, and rendered at 24fps. This kind of helicam footage reminds me a lot of dreams in which I'm flying, since the helicopter glides so slowly while everything on the ground moves at normal speed.

Michael Zhang

World’s Largest Photo is Now a 45-Gigapixel Panorama of Dubai

Everything big is Dubai. They boast the world's tallest building, the world's largest shopping mall, and now the world's largest photograph. Gerald Donovan recently created the 45-gigapixel panorama of the Dubai skyline as a technical test to explore the limits of hardware and software. At the end of last year, the largest photo in the world was a 26 gigapixel shot of Dresden, Germany.

Michael Zhang

Homemade Wooden DSLR Shoulder Rig

Jonathan Berqvist needed a shoulder rig for stabilizing his Canon 7D when filming, and his father Erik is quite good with woodworking, so they built a do-it-yourself a wooden shoulder rig using a a single tree branch. What's awesome about the shoulder rig is that it has follow focus built into one of the two handles used to hold it.

Michael Zhang

Google Shows Off Chrome’s Speed at 2700 Frames per Second

Google just released the latest beta version of its Chrome browser, and created a pretty amazing video to demonstrate how fast pages load. Using a Phantom v640 high speed camera, they film the browser racing random Rube Goldberg-style contraptions at up to 2700 frames per second. For example, in one test Chrome races a potato gun. Sweet.

Michael Zhang

Uber Flexible Tripod Heads by Induro

There's a video demonstration of a Chinese military shovel that's becoming quite popular on YouTube. Induro's PHQ-Series tripod heads are similar in that they seem to do a little of everything. These are a cross between flexible ball-heads and accurate pan-heads, offer five directions of precise control (quintaxial positioning), and are equipped with five different bubble levels to help you adjust. Want to take 3D photographs? There's a feature for that.

Michael Zhang

Nikon F5 SLR Commercial from 1997

Did you know Nikon SLRs were doing video before things shifted toward digital? This commercial was made back in 1997 by Alastair Thain, and was shot entirely on a Nikon F5 SLR camera, which could shoot up to 8 frames per second. More than 200 rolls of 36-exposure film were developed to create the resulting film.