Bjarke Hvorslev and Kristian Kettner shot the above film entirely with a Sony a7r ii camera mounted to a DJI Phantom 4 drone during a 6 day trip to Iceland. The film really does an amazing job depicting the raw beauty and power that Iceland has become so famous for. Turn down the lights, crank up the sound and be sure to watch this in HD.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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An abandoned supermarket in Fukushima. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
Much of the area around Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station has been closed to the public following the disaster that struck the region over five years ago. The earthquake and subsequent tsunami of March 11, 2011 caused a meltdown at the plant, and some 170,000 people were evacuated immediately from the Prefecture. The area closest to the plant has remained closed since then as the lingering radiation contamination continues to pose a health risk, but one curious photographer would not be deterred.
Keow Wee Loong, a Malaysian photographer currently based in Thailand, snuck into the zone with his fianceé to document the current state of Fukushima’s abandoned towns – and what was left behind. From a supermarket picked over by wild animals, forgotten laundry at a laundromat and a wall calendar forever frozen on March 2011, his photos show the eerie remains of daily life brought to an abrupt halt.
You can see more of his Fukushima photos and his photography on his Facebook page.
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Structure collapse resulting from the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
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Abandoned video rental store. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
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CDs and videos still on the shelves. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
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Merchandise litters the floor of an abandoned bookstore. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
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Overgrown parking lot of an abandoned convenience store. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
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Residents left laundry and 100 yen coins behind in this Fukushima laundromat. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
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A calendar page showing the month of the disaster. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
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A mall in the town of Tomioka. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
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An abandoned supermarket that has likely been visited by wild animals in the area. Photo by Keow Wee Loong
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Mike Olbinski recently spent 18 days and drove some 20,000 miles to capture one of nature’s most powerful forces on camera, and in doing so has created one of the most compelling time-lapse videos we’ve seen in a long time. He shot some 60,000 time-lapse frames between April 15th and June 15th, 2016 and compiled them into a six minute long epic that concludes with the holy grail of storm chasing: capturing a tornado on camera. Definitely view this one in full screen mode and enjoy!
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Australian adventure photographer and Canon Master Krystle Wright is the subject of a new video from Canon in which she details photographing kayakers with the EOS-1D X Mark II. Wright captures the kayakers dropping down a 60ft waterfall in near darkness with help from a drone rigged with two 600-EX Speedlites.
‘With the way the world is these days, there’s so many images being produced,’ she explains, ‘you really have to push hard to create something that is unique.’ We’d say the unique approach definitely paid off with some memorable shots.
Canon catching up? Canon EOS-1D X II tested in our studio
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Time-lapse and tilt-shift specialist Keith Loutit’s latest project has been years in the making. The Lion City II – Majulah is a follow-up to another impressive feature, documenting the rise and fall (but mostly rise) of skyscrapers on Singapore’s skyline over the course of three years.
Channel NewsAsia reports that the four-minute video is the culmination of 500 hours of shooting from June 2013 to June 2016. The soundtrack was composed for the project by Michael Adler Miltersen in collaboration with Loutit.
The Lion City II tells a compelling story about daily life in the shadow of urban growth. And as someone who played way too much Sim City as a kid, I’m pretty sure I could watch this on repeat all morning. Are you inspired to start a time-lapse project of your own? Let us know in the comments.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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After a 10-hour wedding shoot most photographers are ready to head home and put their feet up, but Mike Olbinski isn’t your average wedding photographer. In between portrait and wedding shoots, he drives from his home in Phoenix, Arizona to photograph the powerful tornados that rip through the Great Plains states every summer. So after a recent wedding gig with the threat of severe weather brewing, Olbinski hopped in his car and drove 15 hours to Oklahoma.
You can see some of the photos from that trip here and read his account of tracking down a dangerous storm over at Resource Travel.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]
Artist Jeremy Mann works in early in the day or evening, and it shows in the dark, smudged and ultimately riveting way in which he captures streetscapes of major cities from New York to San Francisco.
Wiping, smoothing and layering oil paints with rollers, sponges and brushes, his works, like urban environments, are executions of complex and chaotic addition, evocative yet forever incomplete pictures of a place. He often applies broad marks with an ink brayer and wipes sections away with solvents. Getting increasingly experimental, he has even tried applying and moving paints with doorstops, window wipers and liquor bottles.
“Even that banana which turned out to actually be a good blending tool, painting with lettuce, though, I can tell you might be useless,” said the artist in an interview. “In this process of experimenting with tools, an artist inevitably discovers new techniques as a result of accidents and learning how to recognize those accidents as worthy or not, and then harness them or bury them.”
His paintings are as much about capturing the spirit of a place as its details. Rather than appearing as normal paintings, the pieces start to blend and blur, looking more like photographs shot on a rainy day with all the reflections of puddles, drips, and reflections enhanced. If anything, his recent works also seem to be growing more obscured and abstract over time, perhaps in part as his pallete of artistic tools expands.
As art writer Christopher Jobson explains: “Mann applies and wipes away areas of the canvas to recreate these hazy environments, adding layers of paint back on top of the slightly smeared works with more detailed strokes. This layered effects makes the works appear like double exposed images, two scenes gently blurring into one. The resulting paintings are dark and atmospheric, urban streets seemingly drenched in rain and mystery.”
Mann’s work goes beyond just urban landscapes, and some of his pieces can be seen come June in the John Pence Gallery (you can also see more of his work on Instagram and Facebook).
[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]
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Facebook has introduced the Surround 360, which captures 3D, 360 degree video using a total of 17 cameras and can output resolutions of up to 8K per eye. Unusually, Facebook will be making both the camera and processing software open source to give developers the opportunity to improve both.
The Surround 360 itself features 17 synchronized cameras: 14 horizontal, a fisheye on top and two more on the bottom. Each camera has a global shutter (which eliminates rolling shutter) and has been designed for long periods of operation without overheating. Raw Bayer data is captured, which is later processed in the stitching software. All 17 cameras are bolted onto an aluminum chassis so everything stays in place.
Facebook says it has used Point Grey industrial cameras in the Surround 360, which hints at the use of Sony 2nd generation Pregius CMOS sensors with global shutters. The lenses used are 7mm F2.4 lenses designed for up to 1″-type sensors, which could even mean the use of the latest Sony IMX253 or IMX255 chips. If that’s the case, then these lenses are roughly equivalent to 19mm.
With incredible amounts of data coming from all of those cameras Facebook uses a Linux-based PC with a RAID 5 SSD array that shares the writing out across eight drives simultaneously. The company has made controlling the camera rig easy, via a web-based interface that allows users to adjust shutter speed, exposure, frame rate and gain.
The stitching software uses the concept of optical flow to resolve disparities between what pairs of cameras can see. The company says this method is ‘mathematically trickier’ than traditional systems, but yields better results. The end results are 3D/360 videos which can be output at 4K, 6K or 8K per eye. Videos can be viewed on Oculus Rift and Gear VR headsets using Facebook’s Dynamic Streaming codec. Videos can also be output and shared on Facebook and other websites.
A big part of the Surround 360’s story is that Facebook is opening up both the camera blueprints and processing software to developers, stating that ‘we know there are ideas we haven’t explored’ and ‘we know from experience that a broader community can move things forward faster than we can.’ The company says that the design and code will be on GitHub this summer.
More technical information can be found on Facebook’s developer site, while consumer-friendly info about the camera can be found here.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]
The second-tallest building in the world seems to appear out of nowhere, shooting into the sky as if of its own accord, in this stunning time-lapse video of the skyline in Lujiazui, China taken over a four-year period by filmmaker Joe Nafis. The 2,073-foot Shanghai Tower is surpassed only by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and features a double-decker elevator offering the longest single elevator journey in the world at an amazing 1900 feet in under a minute. Its construction has made the skyline even more iconic, dwarfing all of the other buildings in the city.
Every single shot taken by Nafis is a work of art – razor sharp, beautifully composed, dynamic – and seeing them all put together in the final video is breathtaking. The filmmaker spent 1,000 work hours taking and editing 350,000 photos to capture the process as each of the 128 floors is built.
“Construction had already begun when I arrived in the city in 2009,” says Nafis. “The site was a large hole in the ground with construction crews milling around pouring concrete for the base. I began exploring the city looking for views and locations that would serve as groundwork for this video. In 2011, I secured a location with unobstructed views of Lujiazui where I could just glimpse the tower peeking behind the 185m (607 feet) Aurora Plaza.”
“I maintained a camera there for the next 4 years until the tower was completed. In the meantime I took hundreds of thousands of photos from various viewpoints around the city filling up around 8TB in the process. In all, over 1000 hours were dedicated to this project in exploring, shooting and post-processing.”
No monitor in the world can fully do justice to the amazing level of detail in this sequence, but be sure to go full screen when watching in this video, …
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Riding to the top observation deck of 1 World Trade Center opening next month, visitors will be treated to a dizzying view of the city below, but not the one …
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At nearly 600 feet (180 meters) tall, this structure was narrowly granted permission to be the first skyscraper to grace the Parisian skyline in nearly half a …
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[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]
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