I’ve spent days getting to know the MTO-1000, both its limits and its strengths and have enjoyed using it. The MTO-1000 is by a considerable margin the largest, heaviest, longest, slowest most intimidating and difficult lens I have ever used. This is how Superman would see the world. A lens with this reach provides a spotlight of distant detail that a human eye can’t see own its own. It’s a microscope on the world…
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I’ve been eyeing out motorised sliders for some time but I’ve always been put off by the price or complexity. Having built my own 3D printer and getting to know the ins and outs of stepper motors, drivers and the Arduino platform, I started to wonder if I could just build my own…
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I’m certainly impressed with the new sensor and quality coming out of the iPhone 6S. Having spent some time shooting extensively with an iPhone 5S at the beginning of the summer, the differences are immediately apparent. Besides the beautifully sharp, pinch-and-zoomable 4K resolution, the image quality itself has a more natural almost film like look. This is most noticeable in the flares which seem quite a bit more prominent. I love the look…
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It’s been a while since I went on a trip like this and I wasn’t really in the mood to lug around lots of heavy camera gear so I set a goal this time to shoot with nothing but an iPhone. There’s something to be said about spending a few days getting to know a remote place; observing the tide cycles, foraging for food and water. It certainly was refreshing not having to worry about thousands of pounds of camera gear and the weight reduction was a real joy…
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I had the rare opportunity to hang out with my teenage daughter the other day and we headed out to Hyde Park with the GoPro Gimbal…
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While most GoPro gimbals on the market are made for drone use, there are a number of hand held units. While researching I came across the Z1-Rider which separates the controller board from the motors and provides a cabled power/controller. This turned out to be perfect for my intended application which was to mount the GoPro at the end of a long boom pole – sort of a selfie-stick on steroids.
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Here’s a very short film shot on a Canon 550D with 18-55 kit lens. What makes this one significant is that it was shot by my 6 year old son. While we may have used slightly more sophisticated gear to put this together, I see kids now producing films all the time thanks to the iPad revolution. Learning film techniques, once the domain of a high school class or club, is now the mainstay of integrated, lower school learning. Students as young as 6 are becoming the curators of their own learning by using the iPad to capture audio, video and stills. This is unprecedented.
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I’ve been meaning to do a post about this for a while. Over the summer I picked up one of these gimbals for use with my 5D3. It’s a seriously fun bit of kit. I’ve longed for a decent camera stabiliser for some time and have had limited success with a couple of different manual (counter balanced) steadicams. The manual variety require a lot of patience to balance and a good amount of practice to master (something I’m a long ways off achieving)…
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Video is there but the specs are no better than the 5D3 and the quality may be worse due to the super high mega pixel sensor. Some features have even been removed such as a headphone jack for monitoring audio and clean HDMI output for use with external recorders. Canon clearly have a defined market for these new cameras and unfortunately, that’s not me for a number of reasons…
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Last year I was approached by a group of high school students interested in starting up an after school tech club. How could I refuse? Just over 25 years ago my own interest in technology was sparked at the very same school, ACS Hillingdon, London. Back in my day, it was a tech savvy music teacher, Mr Hein, who became my Apple mentor. He showed me the marvel that was (is) the Macintosh and sent me home with back issues of MacUser magazine. He went above and beyond to share his passion for technology and it opened up a new world for me which ultimately led to a career…
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