Category: Technical Discussions
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Starship Flight 9: Photographing History, Triumph, and Turbulence
When have you felt most locked-in behind a camera? Was it on the sidelines, framing a game’s do-or-die play? Or perhaps glimpsing a rare animal after days of patiently waiting in harsh conditions? For me, it’s the instant all 33 Raptor engines ignite beneath SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle, the…
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Breaking Down One-Shots in Cinematography
The Oner – A cinematographer’s boss fight that really tests one’s ability to choreograph a scene from front to back and expertly flex their skills with a camera. While the Oner (or commonly called a one-shot) was certainly always a novelty, with recent technological advances and current trends in…
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A Technical Review of the Fujifilm GF 30mm Tilt Shift
I’ve had a Fujifilm 30mm GF f/5.6 tilt/shift lens on loan from Lensrentals for about three weeks, and I’ve done the basic testing. I had hoped to get some time using the lens the way it was intended, but testing this complex lens turned out to take all the time I’d allotted to the task. I will…
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A Deep Dive Into Manually Focusing MILCs
This post is of interest to any user of a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera (MILC). I’ve illustrated it with images from the Fujifilm GFX 100. Here’s the Cliff Notes version: 1. Use as much magnification as you can subject to 2, below 2. Use a low peaking sensitivity to produce visible peaking…
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A Technical Review of the Nikon 58mm f/.95 Noct
This is an outstanding lens. I’ve worked with f/0.95 lenses before, and they’ve all been severely optically compromised. You can’t say that about the Nikon 58mm f/.95 Noct. It’s sharp across the frame wide open, and amazingly so stopped down to f/1.4. It has few aberrations by any standard, and…
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Your Guide to Backing Up Your Files
Many years ago, I wrote an article on backing up photographic images. Quite a few bytes have flowed under the figurative bridge since then, and the original article is sufficiently obsolete as to be nearly useless. So, I’m going to take another crack at it, with liberal self-plagiarization from the…
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A Basic Understanding of Color Theory
If you’ve been a frequent reader of this blog, you’ve probably heard me tiptoe around color theory, and say that I’m not going to go into it further; as a post on color theory deserves a book or several college courses and not something a few paragraphs can do justice. However, it is a frequent…
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A Brief History of Chromakeying
Chromakey has become a staple in all video productions, from big-budget Marvel films down to your local weather report – but the history of chromakeying and masking is a long and storied one, that dates back over 100 years, well before the digital tools that make it easy today. Being that it’s a…
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The Ten Biggest Announcements at NAB 2024
The National Association of Broadcasters show (commonly called NAB) is a bit like an annual Christmas for cinematographers and videographers. As one of the largest trade shows in the world, NAB is where all the major manufacturers meet and show off their latest products and technological…
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How Technology Brings the NFL Super Bowl to Life
The NFL has come a long way since its first national broadcast on NBC in 1939. What began as a simple presentation of a football game has evolved into a spectacular combination of sport, entertainment, and storytelling. Each Super Bowl pushes the boundaries of technology as we find new ways to…
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Finding the Best Action Camera for 2023
Buying an action camera a few years ago was a fairly easy process – find out which GoPro is the latest version, compare that to the years prior version, and click purchase. However, in recent years, GoPro has finally been met with some competition in the market, and the selection process has been…
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Previsualization in Photography
I live near Carmel, California. The photographic history of this place is freighted with an approach to image-making called _previsualization_. Ansel Adams wrote about visualization, which he defined as “the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure”. Minor White later…
