It was a week of lens announcements, sample galleries and updates to our existing content for one of the year’s most notable new cameras – the Canon EOS 5DS R. And if that wasn’t enough, we went and added a second installment of our series exploring the source of noise. Catch up on any photography news you may have missed over the busy week, here and elsewhere. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By Steph in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]
“Why play a game when you can live it?” ask the creators of The Void, the world’s first virtual reality theme park slated to open in Utah in summer 2016. Gamers will soon be able to immerse themselves in 4D environments, with all sorts of eye-popping effects layered onto real spaces. Imagine: first-person shooters meet paintball or laser tag – this is the future of gaming.
The flagship Pleasant Grove location will feature sixteen 60-by-60-foot rooms with different themes for different experiences, and they even plan to change these virtual stages every three months so repeat players never get bored.
Want to find out what it feels like to wander around in the jungle during the Jurassic age, or explore a truly terrifying haunted house? Zoom around skyscrapers in a flying car? The Void basically enables you to star in your own action movie, alone or with a group of friends, in a VR experience that far surpasses anything you could do with a headset on your couch.
Each stage not only has custom architecture and sculptures to make it feel more real – you’ll also feel blasts of air and shifts in temperature, take in scents and strap yourself into motion simulators for activities like flying. Individual rooms hold up to 10 gamers at a time who can work as a team or play against each other. The Void has created a virtual reality headset of its own design, called Rapture HMD.
You won’t necessarily have to fly to Utah to experience it, either – they’re planning on opening other locations around the world.
In this new video, Technical Illusions, the company behind CastAR, a hybrid augmented and virtual reality headset, shows off a series of amazing everyday …
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Virtual reality, like the hovercar, iis taking longer than expected to progress, but we’ve made some very large leaps in the right direction. Here are examples.
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Feel the wind on your face and smell the pine sap of the forest as you gaze down at the scenery far below – without ever leaving the ground. …
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[ By Steph in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]
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I teach very infrequently now, at most just once or twice a year. That said, without fail I attend Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai every March.
It’s a great event, with quality instructors and a fantastic group (family?) of people running it. But Dubai is a long way away, to be sure.
So three years ago, we worked out a sort of “road version” of GPP. It’s a compressed, wall-to-wall weekend that brings a bit of GPP to another city each year. 2013 was in London. 2014 was in Singapore.
And 2015 will be in Seattle, Washington in the US. And I am really happy about this. Yeah, it’s greater Seattle (in Bellevue). The GPP folks wanted a good, but not too big, venue for the weekend.
The Particulars
Date: Sept 19th and 20th
Location: Seattle area
Price: $ 399 (early bird)
The presenters for 2015 are Joe McNally, Zack Arias, Greg Heisler and yours truly. It’s designed to be a firehose weekend, done in that way so people/parents/humans/etc. can efficiently work it to travel/work schedules. If GPP in Dubai is basically a 10-day (minimum) commitment, GPP’s Pop_UP events are something a driving-radius local can do without burning a single vacation day. And someone just about anywhere in the US or Canada can do it with a travel day tacked on at each end.
Having seen the London one, I can tell you this: If I wasn’t speaking, I’d be going. (And ultimately, between you and me, it has always been my goal to make myself redundant for GPP Pop_UPs in various cities around the world and just attend.)
To that end, if you are not in the US/Canada, you can also vote on where the next Pop_UP city will be. For that, and all of the info you need if you are considering going, hit the GPP Pop_UP website.
Tickets are on sale now, and will be absolutely limited by the size of the venue. So if you are juggling air tix, etc. Best to jump on it while the variables are still in your favor.
Olympus Japan has announced the ‘Air’ – a new camera module which clips onto smartphones in much the same way as Sony’s QX-series products. The Air features a 16MP Four Thirds sensor behind a Micro Four Thirds lens mount, a physical shutter release button and tripod mount. Uniquely, the camera will be released with an open-source API, allowing developers to come up with different applications and explore the potential of the new platform. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Introduced at Photokina 2014, the Panasonic Lumix CM1 Android smartphone boasts a 20MP 1-inch type sensor with an f/2.8 lens. Originally only available in France and Germany, it has been announced at CES 2015 that Panasonic’s smartphone creation will be making it to American shores later this year. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Fall is still going strong here in North Eastern Ohio, so I grabbed a couple of my favorite models, the fun and fabulous Brooke, Chloe, Emily, Erica, Kelly, Lexi, Tenley and Zoe, and we Headed to the Hills… oh, right, it’s totally flat here…so we Headed to the Forest of Peninsula, Ohio one early, crisp fall morning. We had everyone Continue Reading
The post Close-knit, Connected and Cohesive: Coming Together in Fall Colors appeared first on Photodoto.
Canon India has posted a teaser on its Facebook page showing a 1-series DSLR alongside the words ‘Get your camera ready, something BIG is coming’. Being a teaser rather than a leak, the meaning of the post is open to interpretation, although ‘get your camera ready’ suggests that the new product might be a lens. With Photokina just around the corner, the time is right for new product announcements. Click through for a look at the teaser.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
A flying flash rig that tracks the position of both photographer and subject to maintain consistent lighting angles has been developed by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University. In a project designed to test co-ordination between aerial robots and ground-based targets, researchers programmed a flash-carrying drone to light people in the studio as the subjects and the photographer changed positions. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
‘Condensation’ By Gavin Hardcastle – Location, Gastown, Vancouver, BC
Adapt or die. It’s the way of the world, and with the ever changing rhythms of the digital age, you’ve got to be light on your feet in order to survive. I’m no oracle, but I direct these words of warning to all software companies that have a vested interest in HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing for photography.
If you’ve seen any of my work, you’ll know that I rely on HDR photography techniques to handle the huge dynamic range in the scenes that I shoot. The thing is, ever since I started shooting with the Sony A7R, I’ve been using HDR less and less.
The new wave of digital sensors is upon us and the Bayer sensor in the Sony A7R is by no means the best out there. If you’ve got deep pockets, you’ll get the best dynamic range out of digital camera backs from Phase One, MamiyaLeaf and Hasselblad, but it’s only a matter of time until the prosumer market catches up, like it always does.
Below, you’ll see some recent examples of high dynamic range images (not tone mapped) that I made from just one exposure with my Sony A7R. With my old Canon 5D MkII, I would have had no choice but to bracket 3 different exposures and then blend them in my HDR app of choice. These days, I only need to do that in extreme cases , such as sun star shots where there can be major lens flare. These images were processed mostly in Adobe Camera Raw with some additional colour correction on Photoshop.
‘Cold & Steamy’ By Gavin Hardcastle – Location, Gastown, Vancouver, BC
‘Stumpcicle’ By Gavin Hardcastle – Ladysmith, BC
‘Stocking Freeze’ By Gavin Hardcastle – Ladysmith, BC
‘Steam Powered’ By Gavin Hardcastle – Gastown, Vancouver, BC
With the images above I basically exposed for the highlights and pulled the shadow detail back up in Adobe Camera Raw to create even dynamic range. Had I tried this with something like the 5D MkII, the noise and lack of image clarity would have made this unusable. Now I’m not comparing older camera sensors to newer ones, that’s pointless, my purpose here is to highlight how awesomely powerful the new wave of image sensors can be when it comes to dynamic range and how that’s going to affect the HDR software companies.
Imagine the freedom of knowing that you’ve nailed that epic sunset shot with just one exposure. It gives you more time to move around and try different compositions. With no need to bracket you’ll save time during a shoot, allowing you more creativity. You’ll also save on hard disk space and processing time which will speed up your workflow.
If you’re new to HDR and are not familiar with terms like ‘bracketing’, head over to my HDR Tutorial to learn how it’s done or these dPS articles:
I don’t have a crystal ball, but my advice to companies like SNS-HDR, Oloneo and Photomatix is to gear their software more towards creating RAW file presets that give HDR results from a single exposure. As sensors get better and capture more dynamic range, it’s going to become the norm for us to capture all of the dynamic range we need in just one RAW file. The magic will come from being able to process those RAW files in a beautiful way with just one click of the mouse. After all, those RAW files don’t come out of the memory card looking their best. You need to do a little tweaking to pull out those details and crank up the eye candy. That’s where I see a gap for the software companies.
‘BBQ Corner’ By Gavin Hardcastle – Fototripper
I’ve come to love my HDR apps and accepted them as an integral part of my workflow, but what it all boils down to is that HDR processing is simply a means of overcoming the technical limitations of a digital camera sensor. When those limitations are no longer an issue, what’s the need for HDR processing?
I have great respect for the software companies that make these awesome HDR apps and I’ve happily paid for their software because they deliver great results. I’d hate for them to fall on hard times because they didn’t heed this message, so I invite them to post their comments on where they see HDR in the next few years.
The new wave of camera sensors are coming, will they be ready? Are you ready? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
The post Is the Death of HDR Photography Coming? by Gavin Hardcastle appeared first on Digital Photography School.
We’re very excited to announce a day of live video coverage on Monday December 2nd in partnership with CreativeLIVE. The live stream, which will be broadcast on our homepage will cover product highlights from the past year, as well as live shooting demonstrations and panels discussing the current state of the photography market, and predictions for the future. Click through for more details.
News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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