I see a lot of cool imaging gadgets in my line of work but the Lily Flying Camera is one of the more intriguing devices I’ve looked at in a while. A remote controlled aerial drone in the vein of the popular Phantom quadcopters from DJI, Lily adds an interesting new twist to UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). It’s fully automated and requires very little to no practice from users to take it for an aerial spin and capture sky-high video footage and still photos.
Noted photographer and online educator Elena Shumilova has a great new video offering four expert tips on how to take the best photos of children. You can watch the child photography how-to video, which was produced by SmugMug, at the bottom of this post.
We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: it’s not nice to buzz wildlife with aerial drones. In the latest incident of “when animals attack drones,” a chimpanzee at the Royal Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands can be seen swatting a pesky drone out of the air with a big stick in the below video.
Meet Rambo, an octopus at a New Zealand aquarium that's trained to take photos of tourists with a Sony camera. It’s an amazing stunt, which you can see in the below video, but not all that surprising if you know a thing or two about octopuses, which are some of the cleverest undersea creatures out there.
DJI launched its new Phantom 3 drone to much fanfare yesterday with potential pilots most jazzed about the surprisingly reasonable price ($1,259 for the Pro model, and $999 for the Advanced) and the new features (4K video and live streaming) of this UAV.
By now, drone assisted cinematography (and photography) is really noting new but the people at the Brain Farm have just taken it to an entirely new and very exciting level. The idea behind this innovative experiment was to move beyond the usual “GoPro-style” set up by equipping a large pro quality drone (an Aerigon UAV model) with a massive Phantom Flex4K slow motion camera, at a total price tag of about a quarter of a million dollars worth of airborne gear.
Unboxing videos are the closest thing the photo industry has to straight-up product pornography. Or, as the great journalist, author and social observer Tom Wolfe once termed this fetishization of luxurious objects: “plutography.”
The Canon Digital Learning Center is now offering free tutorial videos hosted by world-renowned bird photographer Arthur Morris. Arthur demonstrates which techniques, gear and settings he uses to create artistic photos of birds and other wildlife.
Nikon has caught some flak recently for isolated problems with its recent DSLRs but there’s no denying these cameras can still produce fantastic images and videos. For more evidence of this, check out the two below clips featuring Nikon D750s.
Have you ever wondered what a digital SLR’s fast-firing shutter looks like slowed down? Well, "The Slow Mo Guys" have done just that while filming the inside of a Canon DSLR with a high-speed video camera.
As part of Nikon’s “I Am Generation Image” campaign, Nikon sent complete pro quality DSLR camera kits to various people, asking them to document their lifestyle and the things they are most passionate about. The participants included Becky Chicoine and Sam Reece (a comedy due called Girls with Brown Hair), Darren Jefferies (urban cyclist), Rikki Mendias (advocate for the homeless), The Berzins (tiny house homesteaders), Mary Mattern (vegan chef) and Kordale and Kaleb (Dads).
If you haven’t seen this epic drone video yet, it should help you get over the Monday blues. (And even if you’ve already seen it, it’s definitely worth watching again for a few laughs.)
Will people ever get the message that it’s not polite to buzz wildlife with a flying drone? Last week we shared a video of a pride of a male lions chomping and chewing up a crashed Phantom imaging drone. Now’s here’s a similar clip involving a group of seven kangaroos.