You’ve probably heard about the new Canon Cinema EOS C300 by now and you may have even seen Vincent Laforet’s short film, Mobius, which was shot with the new cinema camera but you may want to check out this behind-the-scenes footage of what it was like to make the film.

If you haven’t seen Mobius yet, we’ve embeded it below the behind-the-scenes footage as well.

During a seminar titled “The New World of Online Magazines and Curator Web Sites” this afternoon at PDN PhotoPlus Expo, photographer Sophia Wallace posed a question to photographers who’ve been hesitant to harness the full power of the internet for fear that their work might be stolen: Should you be more afraid of image theft, or of working in obscurity?

This rather direct question, which had resonated with Wallace after she heard it at another talk recently, gets to the heart of the decision that photographers must make in today’s market. You can embrace online publishing on blogs, online magazines, Tumblr pages and the myriad other platforms on which people are looking at imagery these days, or you can keep your work to yourself.

Suffice it to say that nobody in the audience was interested in the latter option. But in case they were, Wallace and fellow photographer Manjari Sharma shared stories about their own experiences that made a strong case for diving headlong into promoting one’s work online.

By getting their work featured by online platforms, such as those run by moderator Stella Kramer (StellaZine) and panelists Julie Grahame (aCurator) and Michael Itkoff (Daylight), each of the photographers had built momentum for bodies of work that eventually led to concrete achievements like exhibitions, advertising commissions and essential project funding.

After having her work circulate one image at a time across various online publications (and in a couple of print magazines), Wallace received what she termed “the email she’d been waiting for.” It was from a curator asking if she would show her work in a three-person show at Colgate University’s Clifford Gallery with photographers Catherine Opie and Jo Ann Santangelo. During her presentation Wallace also showed how, through Google analytics, she could track who was looking at her site and where they came from. It was amazing, she said, to realize that people all over the world were looking at her photographs.

Sharma showed two projects that she’d promoted online. A series of portraits of people taken in the shower in her Brooklyn apartment was discovered by art directors at the ad agency JWT in Delhi, which lead to a commission to replicate that work for ads for a German maker of shower heads that was expanding their business in India. Sharma’s photographs appeared on billboards in 23 cities, she said.

After she created a well-produced Kickstarter video to raise funds for her project Darshan, several photo blogs and other online publications wrote about the work. She ended up raising $26,000 of funding over the course of three months.

Each of the panelists encouraged the audience members to build networks online through Facebook and Twitter, and to help promote other photographers whose work they appreciate. Wallace made the point that opportunities for group exhibitions often come from other artists, and introductions to clients often come from fellow photographers.

Kramer also made another useful point for photographers who might still be hesitant to publish their work online: “The more you are associated with your work, the harder it is to steal it,” she said.

With the help of a grant, 48 interconnected DSLR cameras, and some long hours of editing, Ryan Enn Hughes produced a pair of videos that combine thousands of still photographs into a 360-degree look at ballet and “Krump” dancers. Check out the results and the behind-the-scenes production video below. We corresponded with Hughes via email to find out a bit more about the project, and how and why it was made.

PDN: What interested you in creating these 360-degree videos?

Ryan Enn Hughes: The 360 Project stems from a proposal I wrote and received for a Chalmers Arts Fellowship—a funding body in Canada that supports extraordinary research and creation projects in the Arts. My proposal was to “explore the structural elements of the moving image,” which is in its essence the still photograph. My background is in Film Production/Cinematography —it wasn’t until late in University that I immersed myself in Photography. Over the last few years, more than ever, Motion Pictures and Photography have started to cross-pollinate—digital capture, digital software, and digital presentation methods in both media make the integration of the two fields seamless. Coming from a film background, I’ve always had a desire to push the still image further. The 360 Project is where I ended up.

Working with dancers is something I’ve been doing for a few years now (RGB Move, Ballet!, C-Walk, etc). I’ve always been taken by the concept of capturing a “peak moment of action,” and dance really lends itself to that concept. The way I view the project is like this: it is constructed of still photographs that when assembled like a flip-book create a motion picture, which end up resembling a type of rotating digital statue, which we in turn edited together.

PDN: Can you give me a rundown of the equipment you used?

REH: The gear used was 48 Nikon D700′s, 4 Broncolor Pulso G 3200J Lamp Heads, 4 Scoro A4S Packs.

PDN: How long did you spend editing the project?

REH: Post-production was a very big undertaking. There were several steps necessary to get to the end product. Before we could get into any actual editing, each frame in every 48-frame set had to be Photoshopped—painting out all the cameras that were visible in the original captures was a time consuming process, but enabled us to have greater control over the images. The editing process and sound design (Zelig Sound) was undertaken at the same time—it was a back and forth process exploring various editing techniques and sound design elements. Fortunately this project was not on a hard deadline, and our timeline was designed to allow our team to explore creative options.

PDN: In applying for the grant, what was your pitch in terms of the value of the project as a technical and creative innovation?

REH: I suppose the biggest factor in pitching this project was its interdisciplinary approach—the fact that it combined ideas, tools and methodologies from a variety of media. Another exciting factor was that what I proposed wasn’t a normal method of production—the gear, software, and know-how to create a project like this hasn’t been overly accessible in the past for arts based projects—it has certainly been around, but the availability, particularly the software to handle this type of project, I feel is new to a broader group of creatives.

PDN: Now that you’ve completed a pair of these projects, how do you imagine using this experience and this style of production in the future?

REH: This has definitely been the most technically challenging project I’ve undertaken to date. It’s definitely set a new bar for me personally in terms of where I want to take my work—both technically and creatively. I’m very interested in pushing the editing style used in “Krump 360″ and “Ballet 360″ further—making edits more complex, faster, and integrated with sound. I’m very interested in taking this style of production and applying it to Music Videos and Commercial Work.

KRUMP 360 (The 360 Project) from Ryan Enn Hughes on Vimeo.

BALLET 360 (The 360 Project) from Ryan Enn Hughes on Vimeo.

The 360 Project – Behind the Scenes from Ryan Enn Hughes on Vimeo.

Well, this is certainly an interesting take on the “first person shooter” type war video game. An Australia-based company called Defiant Development has created a video game called Warco: The News Game where the goal is to capture images and videos of scenes of war and then edit them into a story.

Another unique angle is that the game’s main Warco, i.e. “war correspondent” character, Jesse DeMarco, is a woman. (Pretty unusual for a war-based video game.)

Here’s how the game is described on Defiant’s site.

WARCO lets players shoot and record what they see ‘through the lens’ – framing shots, panning and zooming, grabbing powerful images of combatants and civilians caught up in war. They’ve got AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades – you’ve got a flak jacket, a video camera, and a burning desire to get the story. Every game space is embedded with multiple objectives and story leads for journalist Jesse DeMarco to find – a scoop if she’s smart, mortal danger if she drops her guard. Record dramatic images of war, save them in-game, then edit the results into a compelling frontline TV news story. Beam the results to global audiences on the web.

From the screen shots and trailer for Warco (see below) it seems the correspondent is a video journalist, not a still photographer.

We’re wondering though what PDN readers think of the concept of making a photojournalist the focus of a war-based video game. Good idea? Bad idea? Can’t wait to get your hands on the game?

(via Laughing Squid)

Photo by Amber Terranova/PDN

Commuters and shoppers passing through New York’s Union Square on Tuesday were presented with information on the fight against malnutrition in an unusual way: At an outdoor exhibit of photographs displayed around a field hospital set up by Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).  The photos, as wells as videos shown on monitors inside the hospital tents, were created by photographers with VII Photo Agency as part of Starved for Attention, the global multimedia and online campaign created in association with MSF.

MSF doctors and nurses gave tours of the hospital and describe their work in the field; VII photographers Jessica Dimmock and Ron Haviv were on hand to answer questions about their photo projects.   Union Square was the first stop on an exhibition tour that includes Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.

None of the photos in the exhibit, taken in Burkina Faso, India, Bangladesh, Congo and elsewhere, show the now familiar images of starving children with bloated bellies, Haviv notes.
(more…)

This video clip titled “Jump Rope” kicked off Week 20 of the photo series “CC52: A Year of Personal Work by Craig Cutler.” The video features Open Class amateur boxer and two-time Golden Gloves champion Chordale Booker. (We previously featured Week 4: Marshmallows, which can be viewed again at http://bit.ly/lkFg3c.
Format: RED ONE Mysterium-X Camera; 100mm-300mm zoom lens. Shot at f5.6 & f8, 2K resolution, 100 fps.

Fine-art photographer Michael Levin says he first came across filmmaker Brad Kremer’s video work in late 2010 and was immediately engaged. “His video “Hayaku” is like a poem told through time-lapse photography. I felt moved along by the kinetic energy in the piece and he had me hooked,” says Levin, who needed some video footage shot in Japan for a separate project. He contacted Kremer with a basic pitch. The resulting video shown here reveals Levin’s personal experience of witnessing Japan as he worked in different locations. “I wanted to show the process, the journey, the adventure in a way that would give the viewer an emotional connection to Michael and his photography,” Kremer explains.

Video-sharing site Vimeo announced this morning it has added a professional version of its service aimed at photographers and other small businesses.

Called Vimeo PRO, the service costs $199 for the year and will allow photographers to create galleries of their videos using templates and themes.

The video galleries will be hosted by Vimeo but photographers can post them directly to their own websites and use their own branding and logos. Vimeo PRO will be entirely separate from the general Vimeo.com community.

The $199 annual flate fee gives you 50GB of storage and 250,000 video plays. You can also buy more storage in 50GB increments for $199 and additional plays in increments of 100,000 for $199.

Vimeo PRO will be available on Vimeo’s site today, starting at 1pm EST.

Photographer and director Jason Lindsey, along with photographer jon holloway, shot “Pray For The Soul Of Thomas Gage” in Ireland as a way of exploring, says Lindsey, “the storytelling aspects of filmmaking.” It was a selection at the Freaky Creak Film Festival in Fairmont, Illinois, late last year. Lindsey and holloway recently shot a music video on location in New Mexico and Colorado for the Austin-based band “The Trishas” who hired them after viewing this clip.

Photographer Brian Kuhlmann directed this video, Geneva, (shot by Ryan Van Ert using a Canon 5D Mark II) while shooting the cover of Chicago Magazine’s June Special Travel Issue. Kuhlmann says the jump cuts in the video follow the music line (music by Vincent Gallo). “We thought it was a great time to shoot a video because of the talent, props and location that we already had access to,” Kuhlmann says. “I rented an underwater housing and we just played.”

Geneva from Brian Kuhlmann on Vimeo.