Vincent Laforet has gotten very excited about a little gadget from Freelance Audiovisual Services call the Lockit Buddy.  Essentially, it plugs into your camera’s mic input jack, and writes Timecode information to the right channel, and your reference audio to the left.  It handles all the impedance and level conversions for you.  The embedded timecode should work out of the box if you’re editing with Avid, and there’s a tool called FCPauxTC by VideoToolshed that will strip out the TimeCode data and create an auxiliary time code track for you to use in Final Cut Pro.

Chipworks is a company that famously tears apart higher-end consumer goods to have a peek a what makes them tick.  Their Teardown of the Nikon D7000 revealed a Sony Image sensor, a Toshiba processor (well, microcontroller), 1 GB of onboard RAM, and of course the Nikon EXPEED image processor.  For those of you wondering why two processors are necessary, the Toshiba processor is responsible for dislpaying images on the LCD, making the camera do things when all the buttons, knobs, and switches are used, monitoring the battery, etc.  The EXPEED processor would be responsible for controlling the sensor itself, interpreting the raw bits coming off that sensor, and doing something intelligent with them before handing them off to the Toshiba to be written to the memory card.

via Rob Galbraith

P.S.  Sorry about the “#pocketwizard” twitter tag.  My browser thought it knew what I was going to type for tags, and I wasn’t paying enough attention to it :-)

I saw brief mention of this thing quite some time ago, but apparently now it’s been rolled into a real product line.  It’s an inflatable studio-on-the-go.  As little as 40″x15″ when folded up, it blows up in to a room that’s 20 feet long by 15 feet wide and 13 feet tall.  Air is supplied by an industrial fan that is supposedly very quiet.  The maker’s FAQ also mentions that the surfaces are not matte, but not reflective enough to cause issue, just make sure you bring a backdrop with stands as well as your blow-up studio.

I must confess that I’m more than a little skeptical.  I have a hard time seeing any respectable photographer telling his or her client that they’re going to be bringing a studio in the form of a huge blow-up room.   It doesn’t help that most of the photos of the product itself are badly photoshopped and that the only quotes the maker has are from generic tech pundits and not professional photographers.

Then again, I’d love to be wrong.  Here’s to hoping this thing is awesome.

via Rob Galbraith

Phase One has made some waves lately, making bold steps to become a major force in the world of medium format photography.  Today that trend continues as they announce a new 80 Megapixel back, due out in April.  The new back has a dynamic range of 12.5 f-stops, and has a 16 bit color depth.  The LCD on the back is “mutitouch” capable, to help you pan and zoom around an image as well as use the back’s menus, and the back has a new USB 3 connection, as well as firewire 8 for tethering and offloading your data.  It looks like the new back will fit a range of Phase One, Mamiya, and Hasselblad cameras, as well as the Contax 645.  Check out the datasheet for more info.

This Guy.  Seriously. In a shot that looks like it was done with helicopters and/or ziplines or quite possibly done entirely with CG, we get to see the behind the scenes where the Steadicam operator goes full speed on a Segway (with his First AC running beside him, pulling focus the whole way) to ditching the Segway and running onto stage (still pulling focus!) and around the lead singer in one smooth shot. Whoa.  Thank you PetaPixel, for our “Holy Crap!” moment of the day.  The music itself made me chuckle a bit though…  It reminded me of unlaced Reeboks, pants with big holes in the knees, and Levi jackets with a massive patch on the back advertising your favorite hair band.

The UK’s “Guardian” newspaper has a cool little video about one guy’s quest to document photographic darkrooms.  He sees them as giving way to newer technology, and wants to see them given some attention before they’re gone.

After World War II, The United States Atomic Energy Commission contracted with defense contractor Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier to photograph atomic bombs as they exploded. EG&G built a camera with a shutter that had no moving parts called a Rapatronic Camera.  The shutter was actuated using a magnetic field and was based on the Kerr effect. They could get shutter times down to about 3 microseconds, or millionths of a second.  There’s a cool little video on the landing page.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a larger version of the video.

via Hack A Day

PetaPixel has an awesome link to a YouTube video showing photographer Harry Taylor going the process of shooting an Ambrotype. An Ambrotype is like a tintype, but uses glass as the substrate.  Watch Harry take a clean sheet of glass, make it light-sensitive, put it into a century-old view camera, take an 8 second exposure, and develop the positive right there.  Check out more of Harry’s Work here.

There’s been a lot of hype about a popular South Korean director Park Chan-wook shooting a movie entirely on an iPhone 4.  Film School Rejects took a look at the teaser and were, frankly, unimpressed.  I have to say that I agree, it’s sort of anticlimactic.  Repeat after me, kids:  Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Blackmagic Design will be hosting a series of free workshops to attendees of the Final Cut Pro User Group’s annual SuperMeet in San Francisco on January  28th, 2011.  Here’s your chance to learn DaVinci Resolve for Mac, and bolster your knowledge of color grading for motion pictures.

Rob Galbraith is reporting that shipments of the much-waited-upon radio triggers for Nikon from Pocket Wizard are on the way to US Dealers, beginning today.

Sony has introduced the CLM-V55 5″ LCD screen which has a hot-shoe mount for use with HDSLRs. It has an HDMI input so that it will connect to most HDSLRs, and controls to accept various aspect ratios, as you’d expect.  No price yet.  I expect these are intended to be the perfect match for the NEX10 HD Handycam, as they seem a bit underpowered for the rumored RED Killer.

via Engadget, by way of PetaPixel

Zacuto has introduced the “Z-Cage”, which sort of appears to be the Swiss Army knife of DSLR mounts, that will allow you to attach and position virtually everything you might need for a run-and-gun shoot. It’s certainly a bit of a departure from the traditional rails mounts, which may be both a good and bad thing.  Good in that it’s always a good thing to think outside the box and make something that solves problems for people, bad in that I’m not sure this particular problem hasn’t already been solved with the tradition rails mounting systems, of which Zacuto already makes several variants.  What do you think?

via Rob Galbraith

At CES, Polaroid and Chase Jarvis announced a collaboration in which Jarvis will create and curate artistic content, presumably using Polaroid’s just-announced “grey label” product line, which includes an instant mobile printer, digital camera and camera glasses.  Jarvis will also be advising Polaroid on “product endeavors”.

Personally, I would have been much more excited if Chase had announced a collaboration with The Impossible Project.

We’ve all been hearing a lot about the demise of Kodachrome lately.   One New York reporter began thinking about how it’s likely that digital photography helped bring about the end of the line for Kodachrome (and other film stocks, really), and decided to try and find someone that helped usher in the era we find ourselves in now.  She found David Lewis, an electrical engineer that worked at Kodak to develop the digital camera and the CCD sensor, and asked what he thought.