After recently purchasing a Nikon 1 V1, Swedish photographer Sven Hedin decided to work on making the camera work with an external flash. Not just any external flash, mind you, but a vintage flash unit — the kind that uses disposable bulbs.
Read more…
Earlier this year, we shared a crazy example of how you can make water drops look like they’re frozen in midair simply by passing the water over a speaker and using sound vibrations to sync the drops with the frame rate of your camera. Well, Japan’s largest music channel, Space Shower TV, has taken the idea and turned it into clever commercial. What you see above is ordinary footage using this trick — there’s no fancy CGI trickery, reversal during post, or high-speed camera footage involved.
Read more…
Here’s an old-ish video that’s been making the rounds again lately (viral videos are like viruses — they don’t go away very easily). Titled “Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency,” it shows what can happen when your camera is synchronized with the RPM of a helicopter’s rotor blades. The resulting footage makes the helicopter look as though it’s just floating in the air!
Read more…
Announced this morning, Nikon’s new D600 is a powerful little full frame DSLR at an unprecedented price point, and should be quite popular among photographers looking to upgrade from a crop sensor camera. At $2,100, it’s more than a grand cheaper than Canon’s lowest-level full frame: the Canon 5D Mark III. However, the camera isn’t geared towards every kind of photographer. David Hobby of Strobist states that Nikon has completely overlooked one segment: photographers who are serious about off-camera lighting:
The first thing, and given recent history something not unexpected, is the lack of a sync jack. I was pissed off surprised when the D7000 didn’t include it. But a full-frame body without a sync jack? That’s just a little weird.
It has a 1/200th sync. Game over. [...] True, it is only a third of a stop as compared to 1/250th. But with speedlights and daylight, that is a critical third of a stop. To be clear, this camera makes every single flash you own less effective.
Also, the difference between 1/250th and 1/200th sync is deadly when it comes to stopping action when balancing flash and ambient. 1/250th is dicey enough. 1/200th just doesn’t work.
There are currently rumors floating around that Canon may be gearing up to launch a cheaper full frame DSLR as well, possibly to be called the Canon 6D. If it does materialize in the next month or two, it’ll be interesting to see how the price point and feature set stack up against the D600.
Nikon D600: Think Twice Before You Jump [Strobist]
The worlds of digital photography and cloud storage have been colliding as of late, with industry players such as Adobe and Apple coming out with services (Revel and Photo Stream, respectively) that synchronize your photo collections with the cloud.
Mosaic View is one of the newest entries in this increasingly crowded space, offering a product specifically geared for Adobe Lightroom. Launched a couple weeks ago, the desktop and mobile app allows photographers to carry their Lightroom catalogs with them wherever they go.
Read more…
SYNC is a creative short film that tells a love story with a “backward world” twist. It was filmed an original iPhone 4 (not the 4S), a Steadicam Smoothee, and a crew of 4 people.
Do you use a free Dropbox account for storing and backing up your files? If so, get this: the company is currently offering up to 4.5GB of extra free space for anyone willing to help it test out the software’s new auto photo import feature. Your first photo import will land you 500MB of extra space, and every 500MB of photos and videos uploaded afterward will score you an additional 500MB. The new feature helps you automatically backup your photos every time you connect your memory card, phone, or camera to your computer, and can be download here.
Apple’s doing it. Adobe’s doing it. Now Dropbox wants in. An upcoming version of the company’s popular cloud storage client will include a new photo importer feature that will automatically backup your photos whenever you connect a memory card, smartphone, or camera to your computer. You can try it out now by downloading the experimental build from this forum thread. Be sure to read the instructions to make sure you have a system that supports the feature.
Experimental Forum Build – 1.3.4 (via Caschy via Ghacks)
Tired of packing a huge mess of cables every time you go on a trip? The Magic Cable Trio is a 3-in-1 cable designed to cut down on your clutter. It lets you power and sync a wide range of devices ranging from phones, iOS systems (e.g. the iPad), music players, and compact cameras. Just make sure your device uses miniUSB, microUSB, or an iPhone dock connector. The three connections are daisy-chained, making it uber-compact and easy to manage. They cost $20 over at Innergie.
Magic Cable Trio (via Wired)
Even if you know how to operate your SLR camera and external shoe-mount flashes, you might not have any understanding of the complicated, technical mojo going on that limit and affect your photography. This uber-informative lesson by photographer Paul Duncan brings you up to speed on how things like focal plane shutters and “second curtain sync” work.
(via f stoppers)
