Currently browsing posts by Giles Turnbull.

The bizarre science behind the largest camera in the world

Leica don’t just make great cameras. They also contribute to the building of huge cameras too – including what’s described as “the largest camera in the world”, 1,400 metres below ground level at the CERN lab complex in Switzerland.

A project called Opera (no, not that Opera) has been underway for some years now, with the aim of observing the transformation of muon neutrinos into tau neutrinos. (No, I have no idea.)

These little beasties are so hard to find that they’re practically not there at all. They swish right through our planet at light speed. And the team of 150 physicists involved in the Opera project needed not just to see them, but see them doing their transformation trick. Apparently it’s quite something.

You can get by with a little help from your friends

Sasquatch or Bust from timmatsui.com on Vimeo.

This delightful video tells the story of Liverpudlian Spike Kane, a music obsessive who learned to love being right at the front of every gig he went to – until a cycling accident left him paralysed from the waist down, and confined to a wheelchair.

The film tells how Spike’s friends have got together and helped him; how they clubbed together to buy him a laptop; and how they worked together to take him to the Sasquatch music festival near Seattle. Heart-warming stuff.

Filmmaker Tim Matsui met Spike at the festival and got chatting. He shot some footage on the Canon Powershot G10 that he’d taken with him, but soon realised there was a story to be told here – so he asked Spike if he’d be willing to share it.

The main interview footage was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II, and the whole thing edited together using Final Cut Pro on a MacBook Pro. And nicely done it is, too.

World Cup project trains up new African photojournalists

The World Cup hasn’t just been about the soccer – it’s also brought many opportunities for the people of South Africa, and other nations on the African continent.

One of those opportunities was the Twenty Ten project, designed to train new African journalists from 34 countries, then get some of them covering the event and its impact on the wider community.

Dr DJ Clark, course leader of the MA in International Multimedia journalism run jointly by universities in the UK and China worked with Israeli photographer Jonathan Torgovnik to conduct some workshops with some of the rising stars from Twenty Ten, and has written up his experiences.

There were, of course, obstacles to overcome:

“With equipment costing sometimes two or three times more than in developed countries and agonizingly slow internet speeds it was quite a challenge for us to help the entrants produce work of any quality.”

The multimedia pieces produced by those rising stars can be seen on the Twenty Ten website.

In an interesting move in these days of give-it-all-away-online, the content that’s been produced thus far can be viewed for free on the website, but is also for sale in high res formats.

Press Photographer’s Year winners announced

This year’s Press Photographer’s Year awards have been announced, and as usual are an excellent overview of press photography in the last 12 months.

As you’d expect, there are many images of events like the Port au Prince earthquake and the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

The winner of the Photographer of the Year prize was David Bebber of The Times.

Multimedia didn’t get ignored, though. First prize in that category went to Rebecca Harley for her short slideshow, Memories of a House.

Felix Clay of The Guardian won the Digital Film first prize for The Bridgewater Canal:

Barton’s Britain: The Bridgewater Canal from Felix Clay on Vimeo.

Heathcliff O’Malley from The Daily Telegraph won a commendation for his footage from Helmand province, which is real front-line stuff. It’s a very honest view of what the soldiers there deal with every day; no artificial heroics, no overblown drama. Just the truth.

Don’t let multimedia bury the story

Helen Kaiao Chang has written a thought-provoking piece at About Freelance Writing, on the nature of multimedia and its relationship with the wider story.

In short, during the judging of some journalism awards, Chang looked at online entries with a variety of multimedia elements – and had to stop and do a double-take when she realised she hadn’t necessarily considered what each multimedia element had added to the story.

She’s hit on something I think is very important. Having all these tools available to us, and having the hardware on hand to record everything we want almost simultaneously, means that it’s getting easier to grab as much media as you can imagine.

But journalists of any sort need to remember that the story itself comes first. The multimedia might look or sound amazing, but if they don’t add to or explain the story, is it right to include them at all?

Putting together a package means making choices. Some stuff is going to be worth including, because it advances the story and provides what the audience needs. Like the best wordsmiths, multimedia journalists need to kill their darlings, and cut out the stuff that doesn’t help tell the story. No matter how amazing it looks.

George Lucas joins the DSLR Revolution

Cinematographer Philip Bloom has written a feature for MovieScope magazine, exploring the practicalities of using a low-budget DSLR on big-budget productions.

Proving, perhaps, that the size of the budget is no longer a guarantee of the kind of gear you’re going to see lined up for the shoot.

You can read the opening page or so of the article here. Bloom makes clear that a revolution is underway, saying:

“This affordability is key to this revolution, as that is exactly what it is; a revolution … Of course good lenses are a necessity, as are accessories, which essentially turn the terrible ergonomics of the stills camera body into something totally usable. These do add to the cost, but we are talking under £10,000 for a very capable filmmaking package using 35mm optics and depth of field similar – and in a couple of the cameras even shallower – to what 35mm digital and film cameras can currently offer.”

Then he reveals that, since last December, he has been researching the use of Canon DSLR cameras for the forthcoming LucasFilm production Red Tails.

What you read here is just a taster, but it does its job well: after reading this, you’ll be wanting to go out and buy a dead-trees copy of MovieScope to read the rest.

If you can’t do that, though, there’s loads more detail about the shoot – including a bunch of photographs – on Bloom’s personal website.

And something else the magazine can’t give you is this great behind-the-scenes video, with lots of silly Bloomisms and close-ups of shiny DSLR kit:

Adventures in stillmotion with Andrew Kornylak

Andrew Kornylak is doing some amazing things in the great outdoors, putting still photos together in sequence to make multimedia in a style he calls “stillmotion”.

In this Digital Photo Pro article, Kornylak explains the idea. It’s photography meets stop motion animation, meets pop video meets slideshow.

Rapid burst shots are edited together so tight they almost look like video – but not so tight that you can’t see the difference. It’s clear that you’re watching a different kind of visual art.

Kornylak’s homepage has original Stillmotions in higher-def Quicktime, as well as plenty more visual delights. It’s video, Jim, but not as we know it.

Thom Hogan on modular, programmable cameras of the future

In a recent essay, writer, photographer and Nikon hardware expert Thom Hogan wrote about the current state of camera design.

Since it was first published the essay has generated a lot of feedback and comment, which Thom has used to update the original article. If you’ve not read it yet, it’s well worth 30 minutes of your time.

Hogan’s premise is that cameras are fast becoming computers, at least as far as their internal components are concerned. Yet the external design is still tied to the design choices made in the days of film cameras, and to an extent the days when digital cameras were young and were not yet very computerized.

That’s changed now, completely, and forever. The modern camera is CPU, memory and communication ports, all of them tied to the sensor that does the work of taking pictures. But it has too many limitations, and making it communicate with any other device (or with the web) is much too difficult. It’s time, Hogan argues, for the camera to properly address the hidden computer side of its persona.

That means making cameras more modular, more programmable, and better at communicating with other devices.

“Workflow starts at the camera, and we need to be able to control it right there, not downstream when we finally get an image over to a computer. Unfortunately, we have almost no workflow control on our current over-featured cameras. None.”

He also has much to say on the subject of video in DSLRs, and argues in favour of a greater variety of devices, each optimized for a task (but still capable of other tasks):

“Nikon should have made a large sensor, F-mount endowed, dedicated video camera, which in my most recent commentaries I’ve dubbed the Nikon V1. Such a video camera should share as much as possible with the still cameras: same batteries, chargers, lenses, cards, you name it. But it should also be optimized for video, which means different ergonomics, consistent but video-centric UI, and quite a few specialized features. Should it be able to take stills? Yes, but it should be optimized for video. Should the still camera (D3s) be able to do video? Yes, but it should be optimized for stills.”

Hogan says camera manufacturers should decentralize and “make a camera that puts the user in control of everything”. That sounds like the last thing many of them would want to do – but Hogan says it’s “an ocean of opportunity” and seems to suggest at the start of his piece that long-term survival, in an era where sales of big, complicated cameras are declining, might depend on it.

Superb multimedia essay by Paolo Pellegrin: Iranian Memoir

I love Paolo Pellegrin’s slideshow Iranian Memoir, which you can see over at Magnum Photos.

The story is simple, but compellingly told. Pellegrin’s powerful images of modern Iran and Iranians are shown alongside audio interviews with Iranian-Americans whose parents fled the country during the 1979 revolution.

These youngsters have a totally different view of the Iran their parents left. The cleverest thing about this photo essay is the way the audio and photography are linked, but contrasting. As you watch the images flow by, you realise that many of them will be just as alien to the speakers in voiceover as they are to you.

This interview with Pellegrin gives an excellent overview of the way he works. He typically shoots black-and-wide, often with wide lenses. He prefers smaller, less intrusive cameras. He takes time to totally absorb a situation, to become accustomed to the people involved in it, before pressing the shutter switch.

Celebrating Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

Today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Time to celebrate with some really really small apertures.

If you want to quickly throw together a pinhole camera from a beer can and some gaffer tape, look no further than these instructions.

Justin Quinnell used this technique to take this fantastic six-month exposures of the sun in transit across the sky in and around Bristol, UK.

He’s also the genius behind the infamous SmileyCam, a pinhole camera compact enough to fit inside your mouth and take pictures of bemused dental practitioners.

If the beer can technique isn’t your, um, cup of beer, there are plenty of other pinhole-making methods listed.