The answer, in a nutshell, is no. I’ve written about this before… when Digital Railroad failed a couple years ago and gave photographers 24 hours to download their photos, it should have been a big… Can you trust the cloud with your photos?
I recently finished up shooting a side project DVD on Humpback Whale Photography… watching them and photographing them (facebook: Exploring Maui). A little different from my usual gig of wrangling Photoshop plugins! ;-) For the most part it was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II. The 5D is great when it’s locked down on a tripod and you’re shooting interviews or talking about a topic.
The DVD has a lot of amazing photos of the Humpbacks, but very little actual video. This is due to the fact that the 5D doesn’t work well for wildlife videography. Now, some of you might have expected that, knowing about rolling shutter, aliasing, and some of the other issues that DSLRs have. However, when I started the project, I was blissfully unaware of most of those issues. Even though we shot with the 5D on a Stedicam Merlin most of the footage was unusable. Between the motion of the boat, the rolling shutter, and fast moving wildlife the 5D proved not to be the camera we hoped it was. (it was everything we expected for the tripod shots, so that came out well. But when we were actually on the boat… not so much.) There are some Final Cut Pro plugins to help out with these problems, but when dealing with a boat and wildlife it was just too much for the camera.
So the DVD was made with a little video footage of the whales and a lot of great photos. It came out fine, but looking to the future we want to shoot videos of the whales. What to do?
From time to time, our customers are gracious enough to send us their amazing work in which they have been using our plugins. Pete Saunders is one of those customers.
Earlier this week Peter offered up his work for us to use in our 3D Invigorator gallery section. He is the Company Director for After Hours Creative, a small design studio in England that specializes in high impact graphics.
(Above) “Created for an individual looking for a totally unique card design. We decided to create a romantic feel to the word “Love” with just colours, textures and a small selection of well placed images. The combination of 3D text created in 3D Invigorator, textures in Texture Anarchy and images of small roses achieved the look and feel perfectly.” -Saunders
It’s really nice to get some recognition for putting out good After Effects and FCP plugins that really solve problems that people are having.
I’ve ranted about design schools before, but it’s come up again. I was chatting with a friend of a friend who’s going to one of the big design schools in LA. Kind of typical situation… Design schools. Meh.
We were excited to receive an email from Aaron Brenner, of the LA Kings hockey team, letting us know that they had used Beauty Box Video on a high profile piece they were doing.
An interesting aspect to Beauty Box Video is that it’s difficult to get people to admit they are using it. A LOT of production companies have bought and loved the software but they’re a little shy about singing its praises publicly. Their actor and actress clients aren’t too keen about wanting fans to know they used software to make them (more) beautiful.
This wasn’t a problem for the subjects of Aaron’s production for the Kings. It’s a behind the scenes video of the photo shoot of the LA King’s Ice Girls calendar! Some very beautiful girls who you wouldn’t think would need much retouching.
(Click on the image above to be taken to the King’s site and see the video.)
However, no situation is perfect.
I went to the NewTeeVee conference on Wednesday. There was much ado about how the internet will work on the largest screen. With so much video on the web now (YouTube gets 50,000 hours of content uploaded every DAY) folks are looking for ways to get it on their 52″ screens. Will it be Google TV, Apple TV, or just plugging an Ethernet cable into your flat screen? Will people want to use their TV as just another computer screen? Will they use apps or use it as a social networking device? Big things in store for that big screen.
I read a report earlier this year that pointed out that TV is still a very social screen.
The CUDA/OpenGL speed update for Beauty Box Video is now available. This dramatically speeds up Beauty Box Video and improves the workflow in Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro. You should see between a 3-6x… Beauty Box Video 1.2 Released
Many of you may be familiar with Photoshop’s Photomerge, but this artist is in a panorama class of his own. Jook Leung has been recognized worldwide as a master of panoramic photography.
Some if his most captivating work comes from a project titled, “Times Square New Year’s Eve at Midnight.” For the past decade, Jook Leung has been capturing the ‘famous’ moment in 360VR. View his most recent 2010 image here.
Jook on his work, “I’m quite passionate about crafting the kind of panoramic images that reveal a unique perspective while conveying a strong sense of intimacy with the subject. Here the viewer becomes fully immersed in the same moment in time the photogapher is trying to capture. This is what masterful photography is all about. New technologies like Apple Computer’s QuickTime VR and Helmut Dersch’s Panorama Tools have made it possible to construct, publish and view full 360° x 180° spherical images. For me, this is the ultimate panorama and is what I specialize in doing well.”
Recently, one image of mine was selected to be a part of Photomedia Center’s 2010 Open Juried Exhibition. As an emerging photographer, I am very thrilled and honored to be included in such a fine body of work. Organization like this gives us, emerging photographers, a chance to fulfill one of the most exciting aspects of being an artist… Having your work displayed and seen by others.
“Cabo in the Summer” by Maggie Percell, www.maggiemaephoto.com
I recently came across an article about a photography vest that’s cut for the female figure. The vest is by Foto Fashionista and “offers female photographers a more fashionable choice for carrying necessities while shooting”. The article is on a great industry blog, Picture Soup, and written by Diane Berkenfeld, the blog hostess and writer/photographer extraordinaire. Read the article.
Catering to female fashion is ages old but seems to be a new trend in photography. I did a little googling and didn’t any resources for female-specific clothing though there’s lots of material about how to dress your female models (hint: in very little).
I was recently running a test in ToonIt and rendered out about half of the 70 presets that ship with ToonIt. For something that’s _just_ supposed to produce cartoon’d images, you can get a surprising number of different illustrated and painterly looks. Anyways, judge for yourself… here are 35 or so of the presets (not all of them are exactly flattering on this photo, but they can produce interesting results on other images):
