Good news! You too can capture footage exactly like this. You just need a $100,000 Phantom Flex 4K with a Canon 50-1000mm lens—oh, and you need to be hanging out the side of a Black Hawk helicopter:

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I have to admit, I don’t know Erwitt’s photography nearly as well as I know his name, but this largely humorous new collection makes me want to change that:

Here’s just a beautiful little bit of filmmaking (starting at 2:06, in case the link below fails to cue up the right spot). Let’s go Stratolaunch!

Having really enjoyed shooting the Thunderbirds over the years, I’m eager to check this out:

From a recent show we saw in Salinas:

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Everybody needs a good wingman, and when it comes to celebrating the beauty of aviation, I’ve got a great one in my son Henry. Much as we’ve done the last couple of years, this month we first took in the air show in Salinas, featuring the USAF Thunderbirds…

…followed by the Blue Angels buzzing Alcatraz & the Golden Gate at Fleet Week in San Francisco.

In both cases we were treated to some jaw-dropping performances—from a hovering F-35 to choreographed walls of fire—from some of the best aviators in the world. Check ’em out:

• Thunderbirds gallery
• Blue Angels gallery

And thanks for the nice shootin’, MiniMe!

Austin Mann puts the new gear through its paces in Kenya:

Last week at the Apple keynote event, the iPhone camera features that stood out the most to me were the new Camera Control button, upgraded 48-megapixel Ultra Wide sensor, improved audio recording features (wind reduction and Audio Mix), and Photographic Styles. […]

Over the past week we’ve traveled over a thousand kilometers across Kenya, capturing more than 10,000 photos and logging over 3TB of ProRes footage with the new iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max cameras. Along the way, we’ve gained valuable insights into these camera systems and their features.

Heh: András István Arató—aka Hide The Pain Harold, the wincing king of stock photography—seems like a genuinely good dude. Here he narrates his story in brief:

(And no, I’m not just talking oppressive humidity—though after living in California so long, that was quite a handful.) My 14yo MiniMe Henry & I had a ball over the weekend on our first trip to Louisiana, chasing the Empress steam engine as it made its way from Canada down to Mexico City. I’ll try to share a proper photo album soon, but in the meantime here are some great shots from Henry (enhanced with the now-indispensible Generative Fill), plus a bit of fun drone footage:

Hey gang—I hope you’ve had a safe & festive St. Patrick’s Day. To mark the occasion, I figured I’d reshare a couple of the videos I captured in the old country with my dad back in August.

Here’s Co. Clare’s wild burren (“rocky district,” hence the choice of Chieftains/Stones banger)…

…my dad’s grandparents’ medieval town in Galway…

…and my mom’s mother’s farm in Mayo:

I really enjoyed Dolby’s recent podcast on Greig Fraser and the Cinematography of Dune: Part Two, as well as this deep dive with Denis Villeneuve on how they modified an ARRI Alexa LF IMAX camera to create the Harkonnens’ alienating home world.

I love this idea and I tried, for Giedi Prime, the home world of Harkonnen, there’s less information in the book and it’s a world that is disconnected from nature. It’s a plastic world. So, I thought that it could be interesting if the light, the sunlight could give us some insight on their psyche. What if instead of revealing colors, the sunlight was killing them and creating a very eerie black and white world, that will give us information about how these people perceive reality, about their political system, about how that primitive brutalist culture and it was in the screenplay.

I’m a day late saying it here, but happy birthday to three technologies that changed my life (all our lives, maybe), and to which I’ll be forever grateful to have gotten to contribute. As Jeff Schewe noted:

Happy Birthday Digital Imaging…aka Photoshop, Camera Raw & Lightroom. Photoshop shipped February 19th, 1990. Camera Raw shipped February 19th, 2003 and Lightroom shipped February 19th, 2007. Coincidence? Hum, I wonder…but ya never know when Thomas Knoll is involved…

Check out Jeff’s excellent overview, written for Photoshop’s 30th, as well as his demo of PS 1.0 (which “cost a paltry $895 and could run on home computers like the Macintosh IIfx for under $10,000″—i.e. ~$2,000 & $24,000 today!).

I really enjoyed getting some behind-the-scenes info on The Cinematography of Oppenheimer, courtesy of director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema & Dolby’s Sound + Image Lab podcast. It’s packed with interesting details (e.g. hacking loud & bulky IMAX hardware, dealing with new film emulsions, the impact on color perception of cutting from color to B&W, etc.). I think you’ll dig it.

Insta360 takes us down & not so dirty around Hamburg’s Miniatur Wunderland in this fun 2-minute tour:

(Cue Metallica’s Trapped Under Ice!)

Russell Brown & some of my old Photoshop teammates recently ventured into -40º (!!) weather in Canada, pushing themselves & their gear to the limits to witness & capture the Northern Lights:

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Perhaps on future trips they can team up with these folks:

To film an ice hockey match from this new angle of action, Axis Communications used a discrete modular camera — commonly seen in ATM machines, onboard vehicles, and other small spaces where a tiny camera needs to fit — and froze it inside the ice.

Check out the results:

Behind—and under—the scenes:

On the off chance you missed me over the last week or so, it’s due to my being off in Illinois with the fam, having fun making silliness like this:

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Just me, my dad, our Irish cousins, and 900 of their closest sheep. ☘️😌☘️

I’ve been flying a bunch here in Ireland this week & can’t wait to share some good stuff soon. (Weren’t transatlantic plane rides meant for video editing?) In the meantime, I’m only now learning of a really promising-looking way to have the drone focus on a subject of interest, leaving the operator free to vary other aspects of flight (height, rotation, etc.). Check it out:

Check out this fun Photoshop-enabled project from Dutch artist Ard Gelinck.

Having really enjoyed my Insta360 One X, X2, and X3 cams over the years, I’ve bought—and been burned by—the tiny GO & GO2:

• In 2019 I wrote The tiny Insta360 GO looks clever. Sadly I found it far more glitchy than clever.
• In 2021 I wrote Insta360 GO 2: Finally a wearable cam that doesn’t suck? It was better, but I still can’t count on it to actually record. Thus it’s largely gathered dust.

And yet… I still believe that having an unobtrusive, AI-powered “wearable photographer” (as Google Clips sought to be) is a worthy and potentially game-changing north star. (See the second link above for some interesting history & perspective). So, damn if I’m not looking at the new GO 3 and thinking, “Maybe this time Lucy won’t pull away the football…”

Here’s Casey Neistat’s perspective:

Check out some eye-popping commitment to gathering & sequencing just the right frames:

[Via]

It’s been quiet here for a few days as my 13-year-old budding photographer son Henry & I were off at the Nevada Northern Railway’s Winter Steam Photo Weekend Spectacular. We had a staggeringly good time, and now my poor MacBook is liquefying under the weight of processing our visual haul. 🤪 I plan to share more images & observations soon from the experience (which was somehow the first photo workshop, or even proper photo class, I’ve taken!). Meanwhile, here’s a little Insta gallery of Lego Henry in action:

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For a taste of how the workshop works, check out this overview from past events:

Check out this eye-popping capture of the World Cup celebration in Buenos Aires, and see pilot Ale Petra’s Instagram feed for lots more FPV goodness:

The ongoing California storms have beaten the hell out of beloved little communities like Capitola, where the pier & cute seaside bungalows have gotten trashed. I found this effort by local artist Brighton Denevan rather moving:

@brighton.denevan

PERSEVERE 💙 • 1-6-2023 • 3-5:30 • 8 Miles

♬ original sound – brightondenevan

The Santa Cruz Sentinel writes,

In the wake of the recent devastating storm damage to businesses in Capitola Village, local artist Brighton Denevan spent a few hours Friday on Capitola Beach sculpting the word “persevere” repeatedly in the sand to highlight a message of resilience and toughness that is a hallmark of our community. “The idea came spontaneously a few hours before low tide,” Denevan said. “After seeing all the destruction, it seemed like the right message for the moment.” Denevan has been drawing on paper since the age of 5 and picked up the rake and went out to the beach canvas in 2020 and each year I’ve done more projects. Last year, he created more than 200 works in the sand locally and across the globe.

Obsessive (in a good way) photographer & animator Brett Foxwell has gathered & sequenced thousands of individual leaves into a mesmerizing sequence:

This is the complete leaf sequence used in the accompanying short film LeafPresser. While collecting leaves, I conceived that the leaf shape every single plant type I could find would fit somewhere into a continuous animated sequence of leaves if that sequence were expansive enough. If I didn’t have the perfect shape, it meant I just had to collect more leaves.

[Via]

Happy Friday. 🫧