Solar Path Recorded By Pinhole Camera Over Six Months
“Mr. Mallon” was filming the sun’s activities on a single film cell, which lay forgotten in his back garden. This is the beautiful result.
It’s a pretty example of what you can do with pinhole photography, where you simply place a roll of film in a handmade camera (very easy to do, Mr. Mallon followed these instructions here), and leave it outside, ready
to record the path of the sun in the sky.
The film was scanned, and then made negative to illustrate the solar path clearly. Doesn’t it look like vapor trails from a UFO, or some sort of warp field? [Help My Physics]
I’ve seen car camera mounts before, but this one is a whole new breed of cat.
At the day job we have an ancient car camera mount. It’s three big, suction cups with bars that connect them, and a bowl in the middle to hold a tripod head. While it looks pretty beefy, I’ve never felt very comfortable going more than 20 MPH or so with it. Well, the folks at Filmotechnic want to cure that.
The picture may be a bit hard to read, but what you are looking at is a remote-control jib arm mounted on top of a Mini. It’s about 10 feet long, and has a remote pan/tilt mount on the camera end. The details were a bit fuzzy, but with an estimated price is about $100,000, it’s most likely to show up in rental inventories anyway.
Go to Filmotechnic for more details
Kraak & Smaak
This is the video for Kraak & Smaak’s infectious song ‘Squeeze Me’. A Fingerflipping video for K&S. Duo-directed Andre Maat & Superelectric. Nominated: D&AD 2009. In-book honours for Kraak & Smaak “Squeeze me”. 1st price at music video festival in St.Petersburg and the Dutch Music video Competition. museekfestival.ru/en/, shoot-me.nl/16/news. Dop: Eric Lor – Edit/post: Andre Maat & Superelectric
16 Million Color Lamp
Never get bored with your accent lighting with the 16 Million Color Lamp ($200). Powered by four LEDs — two red, one blue, and one green — this angled, translucent lamp is capable of outputting up to 16,277,216 different colors thanks to its 256 different hues, 256 levels of saturation, and 256 levels of brightness. It also includes a nifty color wheel remote control to let you pick just the right shade to suit your mood, which is probably a purplish haze if you’re thinking of spending 200 bones on this guy.
Source: uncreate
World’s First Handheld 4K Camcorder
JVC Professional Products Company, a division of JVC Americas Corp., today announced the GY-HMQ10, the world’s first handheld 4K camcorder, which captures, records, and plays video images at four times the resolution of high definition television. Powered by JVC’s Falconbrid large-scale integration (LSI) chip for high-speed signal processing and a 1/2-inch CMOS imager with 8.3 million active pixels, it delivers real-time 3840×2160 footage at 24p, 50p, or 60p.
“We’re witnessing the birth of what is destined to become a broad market for full 4K end-to-end production,” said Edgar Shane, general manager of engineering. “The GY-HMQ10 is a breakthrough product that opens up 4K imaging to users who previously wouldn’t have considered it.”
High resolution 4K still picture imaging has been around for several years in DSLR cameras. Motion video capture with these cameras has always been done at a lower video resolution because of lack of processing power. Likewise, high end digital motion picture cameras may capture 4K images, but often provide a raw data output to an external storage array for later processing—again due to lack of processing power in the camera. There just hasn’t been the ability to capture, process, display and record full 4K images in real time until now.
JVC’s exclusive Falconbrid LSI processing takes raw image data from the camera’s CMOS device and dematrixes (deBayers) it in real time. Unlike many high end 4K cameras, the GY-HMQ10 is able to output 4K images to a monitor or projection system in real time with virtually no latency. This capability opens up applications in cinematography, medical microscopy, telepresence, specialized observation / surveillance, and live wide-view event coverage.
Using MPEG-4 technology and a variable bit rate H.264 codec operating at up to 144 Mbps, the GY-HMQ10 records up to two hours of 4K video to economical SDHC or SDXC memory cards.
n addition to 4K imaging, the GY-HMQ10 also captures and records astonishing 1080i or 1080/60p full HD, with extraordinary detail provided by its 8.3 megapixel imager and superior lens. HD is recorded on a single memory card in a format compatible with most editing systems. This combination of superb 4K and HD imaging was requested by attendees of JVC’s 4K forums, conducted throughout North America last year, and is unique in the camera industry.
Another feature requested by forum attendees was the ability to crop an HD image from a 4K frame. This can be accomplished in post production or in real time during camera playback. The “trimming” feature makes HD cropping easy using the camera’s touch panel LCD monitor.
To read more go to the PVC Wab page
For further product information, visit JVC Professional’s Web site at http://pro.jvc.com or call (800)582-5825.
Guillermo del Toro, interview with “The New Yorker”
In 1926, Forrest Ackerman, a nine-year-old misfit in Los Angeles, visited a newsstand and bought a copy of Amazing Stories—a new magazine about aliens, monsters, and other oddities. By the time he reached the final page, he had become America’s first fanboy. He started a group called the Boys’ Scientifiction Club; in 1939, he wore an outer-space outfit to a convention for fantasy aficionados, establishing a costuming ritual still followed by the hordes at Comic-Con. Ackerman founded a cult magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and, more lucratively, became an agent for horror and science-fiction writers. He crammed an eighteen-room house in Los Feliz with genre memorabilia, including a vampire cape worn by Bela Lugosi and a model of the pteranodon that tried to abscond with Fay Wray in “King Kong.” Ackerman eventually sold off his collection to pay medical bills, and in 2008 he died. He had no children.
But he had an heir. In 1971, Guillermo del Toro, the film director, was a seven-year-old misfit in Guadalajara, Mexico. He liked to troll the city sewers and dissolve slugs with salt. One day, in the magazine aisle of a supermarket, he came upon a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He bought it, and was so determined to decode Ackerman’s pun-strewed prose—the letters section was called Fang Mail—that he quickly became bilingual.
Del Toro was a playfully morbid child. One of his first toys, which he still owns, was a plush werewolf that he sewed together with the help of a great-aunt. In a tape recording made when he was five, he can be heard requesting a Christmas present of a mandrake root, for the purpose of black magic. His mother, Guadalupe, an amateur poet who read tarot cards, was charmed; his father, Federico, a businessman whom del Toro describes, fondly, as “the most unimaginative person on earth,” was confounded. Confounding his father became a lifelong project.
Before del Toro started school, his father won the Mexican national lottery. Federico built a Chrysler-dealership empire with the money, and moved the family into a white modernist mansion. Little Guillermo haunted it. He raised a gothic menagerie: hundreds of snakes, a crow, and white rats that he sometimes snuggled with in bed. Del Toro has kept a family photograph of him and his sister, Susana, both under ten and forced into polyester finery. Guillermo, then broomstick-thin, has added to his ensemble plastic vampire fangs, and his chin is goateed with fake blood. Susana’s neck has a dreadful gash, courtesy of makeup applied by her brother. He still remembers his old tricks. “Collodion is material used to make scars,” he told me. “You put a line on your face, and it contracts and pulls the skin. As a kid, I’d buy collodion in theatrical shops, and I’d scar my face and scare the nanny.”
Del Toro filled his bedroom with comic books and figurines, but he was not content to remain a fanboy. He began drawing creatures himself, consulting a graphic medical encyclopedia that his father, an unenthusiastic reader, had bought to fill his gentleman’s library. Del Toro was a good draftsman, but he knew that he would never be a master. (His favorite was Richard Corben, whose drawings, in magazines such as Heavy Metal, helped define underground comics: big fangs, bigger breasts.) So del Toro turned to film. In high school, he made a short about a monster that crawls out of a toilet and, finding humans repugnant, scuttles back to the sewers. He loved working on special effects, and his experiments with makeup grew outlandish. There is a photograph from this period of del Toro, now overweight, transformed into the melting corpse of a fat woman; his eyeballs drip down his cheeks like cracked eggs. (“It’s a gelatine,” he recalled. “It looks messy, but it’s all sculpted.”)
He attended a new film school, the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Cinematográficos, in Guadalajara, and after graduating, in 1983, he published a book-length essay on Alfred Hitchcock. (Discussing “The Birds,” del Toro notes that “in the terror genre, an artist, unbound by ‘reality,’ can create his purest reflection of the world—the cinematic equivalent of poetry.”) In 1985, he launched Necropia, a special-effects company, making low-end bogeymen for films being shot in Mexico City. “Producers would call me on Friday and say, ‘We need a monster on Tuesday,’ ” he said. In 1993, he released his first feature, “Cronos,” about a girl whose tenderness for her grandfather deepens after he becomes a vampire. The girl has her abuelosleep in a toy box, not a coffin, and pads it with stuffed animals. The grandfather doesn’t want to kill, and his predicament is captured with grim humor; at one point, he licks the results of a nosebleed off a bathroom floor.
“Cronos” won an award at Cannes, and del Toro began working in Hollywood, where monster design was in a torpid state. The last major period of innovation dated back to 1979, when the Swiss artist H. R. Giger unveiled his iconic designs for Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” The titular beast’s head resembles a giant dripping phallus, and for years afterward monster designers emulated Giger’s lurid sliminess. In 1982, the effects technicians Stan Winston and Rob Bottin slathered the spastic creatures of “The Thing” with Carbopol, a polymer used in personal lubricants; four years later, in “The Fly,” Jeff Goldblum’s skin sloughs off, revealing the gelatinous insect within.
To read more go to the original post @ The New Yorker
Timescapes: “Death is the Road to Awe”
Production footage from my debut film “TimeScapes” -timescapes.org/blog
Film’s website: timescapes.org
Follow the production at: twitter.com/timescapes and Facebook: facebook.com/pages/TimeScapes/203801612992538
Thank you to our sponsors – Canon USA, Kessler, and camBLOCK. And to my intern Dustin Kukuk (twitter.com/drkanab) who helped me shoot all of this. 
Music by Clint Mansell, from The Fountain: bit.ly/ij8FIi
Dancer is Tomas Isaac Hunt.
ZEISS Lightweight Zoom LWZ.2 with interchangeable mount
The new Lightweight Zoom LWZ.2 is the first on the market to combine outstanding optical image quality with an interchangeable mount.
The LWZ.2 is a cine lens designed for use with HDSLR as well as traditional cine cameras. The interchangeable mount guarantees high flexibility for present and future use in any situation and for a wide range of camera platforms.
- Three different mounts available (PL, EF and Micro 4/3 (MFT))
- Compact, lightweight zoom ideal for Steadicam, handheld and remote work
- Super color matched with all ZEISS cine lenses
- Highest optical performance despite compact build
- T* XP coating ensures flare resistance
- The Lightweight Zoom LWZ.2 is the ideal lens for shooting in confined spaces like airplanes, car interiors or elevators. It is also great when a lightweight camera is needed for action sequences, and for applications where size and weight are at a premium, including Steadicam, handheld, remote heads, car rigs, motorcycle rigs, bicycle mounts, body mounts and underwater shoots. In addition, small size and light weight afford a more efficient shooting pace.
Source: Zeiss Cine
Time Freeze
Behind the scenes
press here To download: Voodoo Camera tracker
Use flour instead of smoke
Photographer – Benjamin Von Wong
vonwong.com
facebook.com/vonwongphotography
Videographer:
Eva Jinn Productions -eva.vonwong.com
facebook.com/evajinnproductions
Models:
Alexandra Viau -facebook.com/profile.php?id=509307313
Michael Demski -modelmayhem.com/1495877
Assistants:
Anick Morel -facebook.com/anickmorelphotographe
Holy Decay
Linda Zheng
Shawn Noone
Daniel Jacques
Makeup: Alizee Moore - facebook.com/alizee.moore
Special thanks to Karine Robitaille for lending me her trampoline and l’AMETAC for sponsoring this shoot!
facebook.com/group.php?gid=118437227347
Have Lenses Passed Cameras in Quality?
Simplified illustration of how lateral chromatic aberration causes different magnifacations of the three RGB optical images that results in color fringing on the final Luma video.
SEATTLE—When high-end video people describe the major factors in image quality, you hear camera and lens, camera and lens. There’s an argument to be made, however, that the order should be reversed, and we should be talking about the lens and the camera.
That’s because the very top-of-the-line lenses have more than kept up with the very-top-of-the-line video cameras being employed for motion picture and television series production.
“Today the lens-camera landscape is completely different than even five years ago with the development and availability of large format HD cameras,” said Eva Paryzka, sales manager for Cinema Products at Thales Angenieux.
IMPERFECT FILM
Video lenses for general purpose cameras were designed to match the image capture capabilities of earlier cameras, and to be affordable, she said. “Today’s camera manufacturers are merging film and video production by offering PL mount, large format digital cameras with larger and more sensitive sensors, further closing the quality gap between the film and video worlds.”
It would seem that if the new single sensor cameras use a 35mm film frame-size sensor, at the same backspace, with the same PL lens mount, you could just put a high quality film lens on one of these new cameras, and get shooting.
Turns out it’s not all that easy. Film is not as perfect nor as exacting as a video sensor.
Film is less perfect?
How can that be so?
Jeff Cree, vice president of Technical Services at Band Pro Film & Digital (Zeiss and Leica lenses) noted you can start with the fact that the red, green and blue color sensitive layers of film are applied at different depths on the cellulous film backing. “You can only do a compromise focus on it,” he said, focusing crisply on one layer but not the other two.
Pixels on a video imager are at a prescribed depth. “On the Sony F35, it’s a thousandth of a micron,” he said. “So if you happen to be off, it shows. It’s minute, but we’re getting to resolutions where things like that are beginning to show.”
Because digital cinematography began with 2/3-inch sensors, additional challenges were placed on lens makers. “With the 2/3-inch, where we’ve got a very small format, all of us have had to elevate the capability of the glass to give us more line curves per millimeter, because [compared to the 35mm frame] we’ve only got fewer millimeters,” said Larry Thorpe, national marketing executive, Broadcast and Communications division, Canon U.S.A.
Lens technology developed to bring premium quality images to the 2/3-inch imagers has now trickled up to larger imager video cameras, according to Thorpe. “Some of the new 35mm PL mount lenses are claiming to have benefitted from the new designs and materials, and that they are much better than the traditional 35mm film lens.”
CHROMATIC ABERRATION
Chromatic aberration is another problem that has reared its head with the new, higher resolution video cameras. Chromatic (color) aberration (error), in simple terms, occurs because of the unequal refraction of light rays of different wavelengths. Lens designers go to great lengths to correct for this, so that all colors that make up a particular piece of detail in the viewed image converge at the same point on the sensor.
A chromatic aberration error might be seen as a slight bleeding of red, for example, on the edge of a thin line.
Fujinon National Sales Manager Thom Calabro explained that this might not really be a problem with a a lower resolution camera.
“If you have an error because you have a little bit of red bleeding, even though it’s separate from the green and the blue elements of the edge, because the red, green and blue all fall within one pixel, you won’t see it, said Calabro. “Now take that same error and put it on a camera that has a lot more pixels; you’ll have the green and the blue part of the image on one pixel, and you’ll have the red on an adjacent pixel.”
Differences between film and a high-end video sensor require video lensmakers to pay more attention to chromatic aberration. First, a 35mm sensor has smaller, more densely packed pixels, which are less than half the size of 12-micron film grain. Film can therefore hide small chromatic errors, the same as they are hidden on lower resolution video cameras. A second reason film can hide such an error is that where the pixels on a sensor remain in exactly the same position as frame after frame is imaged, film grain is randomly placed on frame after frame of film. A minor chromatic shift may be visible in one film frame, hidden a 24th of a second later in the next.
Fujinon’s Calabro noted that if chasing down a single pixel color shift seems like picking nits, remember that in a motion picture theater the image error will be seen on a 50-foot—not a 50-inch home screen.
One more difference between a video sensor and film is that the angle at which light rays enter a pixel must be more perpendicular to the sensor than is necessary when light rays strike the light-sensitive grain on film. “You’re actually looking at shooting light into little tunnels on a sensor, and the straighter you can do that, the more illumination you will have,” said Band Pro’s Cree. Special elements at the back of the lens are required to achieve this.
Though a number of digital cinematography cameras are touted as 4K (4-million pixel) imaging, there’s a lot of argument over whether we’ve actually seen a 4K camera. However, several lens makers have 4K-capable lenses ready. At NAB, we may or may not see a consensus 4K camera introduction. The lens makers are waiting for such a camera more anxiously than most. A true 4K camera will drive sales for their very best lenses.
Illustrating how the separation of the three RGB optical images might not be seen by an SDTV sensor array, but could readily be seen by and HDTV sensor array.
Source: TV TECHNOLOGY, by Craig Johnston
JR Pastes His Photographs On Buildings Around The World
JR talks about his incredible art project that entailed traveling around the world, photographing locals with power stories, and then pasting their images on the sides and tops of buildings.
The video is long, and starts off a bit slow, but really is worth finishing. At the end of the video JR gives us all a call to action by taking part in his new project “Inside Out“. Art is a powerful thing, and can easily change the world.
AMC Home Page
AMC Magazine
AMC (Mexican Society of Cinematographers)
crdiazmunoz
Fito Pardo, AMC
Federico Lepe, AMC
Erwin Jaquez
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