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The Hollywood Distagon at f/2: A Single Daffodil and the Contax Zeiss 28mm on the Sony A7RV
April 28, 2026
The MultiPlate
Decades before the late Billy Mays started his pitchman career, Ron Popeil was pioneering the “As Seen on TV” product market. Popeil, born in New York City in 1935, was the son of inventor Samuel Popeil, who created the Chop-O-Matic and it’s ultimately more famous relative, the Veg-O-Matic. Ron started out selling these kitchen wonders and other gadgets invented by his father in live demonstrations at stores in the 1950s. He had a knack for it and sold thousands of units. I actually remember the pleasure as a youngster being taken by my grandmother to see Popeil give his famous demonstration of the “Veg-O-Matic.” For the time, the product
Read moreThis Is Water
Art, Inspiration, Life, People, Places
THIS IS WATER – By David Foster Wallace from The Glossary on Vimeo. In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice I’ve ever come across. Further, I would go so far as to say that perhaps it is also the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of an education, certainly, a “Liberal Arts” education. It is a
Read moreWest of the Moon
West of the Moon from Brent Bonacorso on Vimeo. Written, Directed, & Animated by Brent Bonacorso www.brentbonacorso.com Loosely based on several hundred interviews with children about their dreams, ‘West of the Moon’ is the story of one man’s lost love and his strange path to redemption, aided along the way by a gambling robot, a wayward monkey, and a healthy dose of determination. A truly beautiful film, in so many ways. An inspiration to the rest of us. Staring Jacob Whitkin, Michael Garbe, Amber Noelle, Christopher Tomaselli, and Michael Galvin Produced by Thom Fennessey Cinematography by Tarin Anderson Music
Read moreCanon 6D
Canon 6D video “HollyWood Test” using the Contax Zeiss 28mm f/2 @f2 When you see as many new camera models come to market as I do, you soon realize it would be almost impossible for me to test every single one. I try to pick and choose the products I review carefully. I like to take my time to really dig down into a product before forming an opinion, then work with it long enough to get to know it “up close and personal” in my real world projects. So what do I do to decide which products to
Read moreBabe’s Lair
“Babe’s Lair” – Walt & Vervain from Joseph on Vimeo. A few years back, music videos were one of the primary promotional media used to introduce emerging musical artists to the general public. At that time, MTV was one of the primary distribution media. MTV launched many new artists and extended the careers of many well established artists far beyond what was considered to be a normal career run. The need for “content” to fill a twenty-four hour a day broadcast video channel created an entire sub-culture of devoted millennial generation fans following each new release. For the music industry as a
Read moreCanon 1D-C: High ISO Noise Tests
Canon 1D-C: High ISO Noise Tests from Tyler Stableford on Vimeo. The Canon 1D-C is considered to be the the first Cinema DSLR camera. With the ability to shoot 1D-X caliber stills and shoot video using Canon’s Canon-Log picture style, this camera seems like a perfect mix of the much loved light and fast setup of the 5D Mark III and the cinema look and flexibility of the C300, and with 4K resolution and 60 fps at Full HD on top of all that. Photographer, director Tyler Stableford was ready to be sold and hoped it wasn’t too good to
Read moreFiilex P360 LED Light
One of the harshest mixed lighting environments to shoot in is the lighting department of a professional camera dealer. It is always at least a couple of stops brighter than anyplace else I’ve ever shot indoors. The ambient celling light is supplied by what you find in most retail locations; “daylight” temperature fluorescent four or eight tube fixtures closely spaced to provide enough light to read the product labels. Added onto this background lighting, you have the actual products themselves, each one shining out its proud presentation of light. On this particular fact finding trip, the location in discussion
Read moreBag World
Bag World from Stephen Alvarez on Vimeo. Wednesday, March 20th was the first official day of spring this year. Here in the Los Angeles area, it was not a particularly memorable day. I wasn’t motivated to go out and shoot, and the weather was unusually cold for LA. But it was not too cold to start thinking about Spring cleaning. Once in awhile I undertake to “clean out the closet” and rid myself of any gear I haven’t used in over a year to make space for gear that better reflects today’s needs. The one thing that I never
Read moreLighting for Success
About a year ago I started working again with video in a serious way. With cameras and a fluid video head purchased, the next thing up was lighting. In my particular case, I had shot a mix of strobe and fluorescent continual lighting for my still photography work. The daylight temperature fluorescents work very well for video, but my strobes had little to no use. It was time to add more continual lighting and resign myself to selling my strobes. I’ve found that Fluorescent continual lighting makes great fill light; nice and soft, and even reasonable hair or rim
Read moreCanon DSLR Simulator
Cameras today are so smart, why should a photographer need to know how to use a camera in manual mode? Good question, and one with a several part answer. First, to use technology to its fullest you have to know what is going on behind the scenes. How to adjust your camera manually also gives you much better creative control. And finally, keeping your mind involved with the creative process actually stimulates your creativity by opening up new ideas and new avenues to explore. Learning to shoot a camera in fully manual mode can certainly be a daunting
Read moreLightroom 5 Public Beta
As with previous versions of Lightroom Adobe, we’re launching a public beta of the new Lightroom 5 in order to get some final user feedback. Listed below are the main new features of Lightroom 5: Library Smart Previews The basic idea is to allow smaller previews and still be able to allow full editing capabilities. Why? Because on your notebook computers you may not have the disk capacity to store all your full sized raw images. Smart Previews reside in the same folder as the catalog and are contained in a “lrdata” file folder structure. This is similar to
Read moreWordPress Attacked!
Sources from several Web hosting services this week raised an all-out alert: WordPress was under attack with at least 90,000 IP addresses involved to brute-force crack credentials of WordPress sites. The attacks, they said, are worrying in that they are on an unusually large scale, being described as “superbotnet” level. Among hosting providers detecting such attacks were CloudFlare and HostGator. “The attacker is brute force attacking the WordPress administrative portals, using the username ‘admin’ and trying thousands of passwords,” Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, said in an April 11 blog posting. Matt Mullenweg, one of the creators of WordPress
Read morePhantom Drone
(Click Photo Above To Play Video) Guangdong, China, headquartered DJI Innovations is one of the global leaders in developing and manufacturing high performance, reliable, and easy-to-use small unmanned aerial systems (UAS as they call them, Drones as the rest of the world know them), for commercial and recreational use. Their company size, over 500 employees, ranks them among the largest companies in the Drone market dedicated to making aerial photography and videography accessible to professional photographers, cinematographers, and hobbyists anytime, anywhere. Their global operations span North America, Europe, and Asia. DJI is founded and run by people with a passion
Read moreTraveling To Strange Places
One of the strangest, most desolate places I’ve ever been is in the weathered volcano crater called La Morada del Diablo (the place where the devil dwells) in the Pali Aike national park in Chilean Patagonia. People lived here once. They must have had a very hard life. A few weeks ago, our group visited this windy, lonely place, and I took a series of vertical photos with my digital camera, moving from left to right and overlapping each photo with the next. Our South American trip is over now, and today, Karen and I rode back from Mexico
Read moreThe “MōVI”
MōVI BTS from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo. One of these days, you will own one of these devices in one form or another. Many of you may wonder just what this “MōV” thing is, what it is for, and why should you take any of your valuable time to read one more word of this article. Here’s a surprising answer. One day, I predict that this technology will be incorporated into every video camera made. As standard equipment. That is how important I feel this technology is, and it is advancing at a very fast rate. When you can
Read moreCanon 1DC Drone
Anthony Jacobs, the founder and chief pilot for Perspective Aerials (perspectiveaerials.com), became the first person I know of to fly a Canon 1DC with a drone rig. The 1DC is a camera I have some very mixed feelings about, as I have already stated in other articles on the subject. Then when I see the way someone like Mr. Jacobs can set it to work making magic, I can only imagine what the 1DC’s ability to capture self-contained 4K could make possible for him in the future. In the above video you can see some of Mr. Jacob’s first test
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