It’s a pretty common question: if you had to choose, would you rather have a top-of-the-line DSLR with a cheap lens or an entry-level body with pro glass? Kai of DigitalRev attempts to answer the question through a hands on experiment in this humorous and educational video.
His conclusion is that unless you need to specific high end features of pro bodies (e.g. full frame sensor, high ISO performance, fast focus and burst shooting), then you’re probably better off going with a cheaper camera and more expensive lenses. Lenses hold their value much better than camera bodies, and there isn’t too big of a difference in image quality these days between entry level and pro DSLRs — especially when using high quality glass.
You’ve probably read plenty of articles touting the benefits of Sony’s translucent mirror technology (e.g. high fps, AF for video, quietness, etc…), but what about the cons? One of the main downsides to having a translucent mirror is that the light hitting the sensor passes through an additional layer (the translucent mirror), which reduces the amount of light and the image quality.
Ray over at TheSyberSite attempted to quantify how much the mirror affects the resulting image quality by removing the mirror on his A55 and comparing the resulting photos. He confirmed that about 1/2 stop of light is lost, and estimates that 5% of the detail in each shot is lost due to the mirror. Head on over to the article for some side-by-side comparisons.
Last week we published a post asking whether anyone had made a “print” on their skin by placing a negative on their skin under the sun. After seeing the post, videographer Jeremiah Warren decided to conduct the experiment for the benefit of all mankind. Taping four slides onto his forearm (he didn’t have any suitable negative film), Warren exposed his skin for four hours in 100-degree heat (consuming a gallon of water in the process).
Check out the video above for his results — the “prints” didn’t turn out as awesome as he had hoped. Using negative film might produce better results since slide film prints a negative image onto skin, but it doesn’t seem like sunlight is focused enough to print a sharp image onto skin.
Here’s really random/strange/stupid idea inspired by a comment left yesterday, but have you heard of anyone “printing” a photograph onto their skin using a negative under sunlight? Seems like it would produce a correct positive image of a negative.
Next time you go to the beach, try sticking a negative onto your body and see what shows up at the end of the day!
It took Steven Silton two hours and 150 tries to capture this amazing photograph of a water drop showing an MC Escher painting.
The hardest part was focusing, in the set up picture I posted in the first comment you can see a piece of string above the eye dropper. I would let that hang down off the eye dropper and focus on that, then move it and squeeze the dropper and the shutter at almost the same time. [#]
On June 21, 2011, non-profit organization Shoot Experience sent out six photographers to various parts of London to see the current state of photographers’ rights.
Some used tripods, some went hand held, one set up a 5 x 4.
All were instructed to keep to public land and photograph the area as they would on a normal day. The event aimed to test the policing of public and private space by private security firms and their reaction to photographers.
The result? Every one of the photographers was confronted at least once, and in three cases the police were called.
As we sign off for this 4th of July weekend, we leave you with this neat experiment by videographer Jeremiah Warren. He recently purchased some small keychain cameras off eBay and mounted them to various fireworks, giving us a glimpse into what it’s like to be a 4th of July firework.
When Eadweard Muybridge shot the first motion picture of a galloping horse back in 1878, he used 24 individual cameras placed 27 inches apart, using trip wires to fire off each camera one thousandth of a second after the previous one. With fancy high-speed camera rentals priced at thousands of dollars a day, YouTube member Destin came up with a Muybridge-esque technique for capturing a bullet flying through the air using an ordinary DSLR: he shoots a bullet for each frame and uses a fancy trigger to capture the bullet at increasing distances, combining the resulting images into a neat super slow motion video.
With HD video cameras getting smaller and smaller, people are constantly attaching them to random things to give us bizarre perspectives that weren’t very easy to capture before, whether it’s the end of a broadsword or the tip of an arrow. In the video above, some friends decided to attach a GoPro camera to the end of a stick and throw it back and forth while running around. At 6 minutes, it runs a bit long, but who knew the simple idea could create such awesome results?
DC Watch has a tutorial on how to make your own bellows on which you can use various lenses (toy binoculars, magnifying glass, etc…). Print out the PDF template, then follow the video tutorial above to get started. Here’s a Google Translated version of the tutorial.
