17-year-old filmmaking student Sacha Powell shot this powerful slow motion film using a $500 Canon 550D/T2i, 50mm f/1.8, 18-55mm kit lens, and Sigma 70-300mm. On the software side he utilized Premiere Pro CS5, After Effects CS5.5, and Twixtor for faux slow motion. Impressive.
We may soon live in a world where the photographs in newspapers and magazines move like they do in Harry Potter — that is, if newspapers and magazines are still around in a few years.
Photographer Jamie Beck has a beautiful series of images that she calls “cinemagraphs“. They’re animated GIFs in which only a small piece each photograph is animated, making them a neat fusion of still and moving images. It’s amazing how much a tiny bit of movement in a still photo can do. They’re almost like the moving pictures you see in Harry Potter! Read more…
When we launched back in 2009, I decided to host PetaPixel on the same hosting plan as my personal website at 1&1. Their plans are cheap (~$7/month) and they offered enormous amounts of storage and unlimited bandwidth, so I decided to try hosting PP with them.
Things have gone pretty well over the past 9 months or so, especially since we were essentially hosting the blog for free. However, we’ve grown to a point where traffic is occasionally causing our site to go down, since 1&1 tries to keep server usage fair among its customers. We’ve learned that though they offered “unlimited” traffic hosting, it’s meant for small, personal websites that don’t hog the server’s resources.
We went down again for a short period of time today, signaling to me that we should probably begin moving to something that will support us better as we continue to grow. This weekend I’m planning on moving the site over to Rackspace Cloud, and the transition has already begun. If everything goes according to plan, by the time we resume posting next Monday we’ll be serving PetaPixel from our new home.
We’ll update this post when we’re at the new location and settled down. Have a great weekend, and see you on the flip side!
Update: If you can see this update then you’re visiting us at our new home. Welcome!