The entry period for the 2014 Ocean Views photo contest is coming to a close. The deadline is monday December 15, 2014. Professional photographers, Amateurs, and Youth (18 and under) are welcome to enter. You may submit a total of up to 20 images for one entry fee.
The journal PLoS ONE has published a paper that sets out to quantify the amount of plastic pollution that exists in the world’s seas and oceans. The report is based on 24 worldwide expeditions undertaken between 2007 and 2013 which used surface netting and visual methods to quantify the extent of the pollution. The researchers came up with a statistic that suggests that there are more than 5 trillion plastic particles, weighing over 268,940 tons, floating at sea.
Guillaume Néry & Julie Gautier have released a new freediving short film. Entitled “Ocean Gravity” it explores the weightlessness of being underwater: “Just like in the space, there isn’t anymore a top or a bottom. There isn’t anymore upside down and wrong side out. The ocean becomes cosmos, the man a satellite, and the bottom of the sea an unknown planet. Welcome in the fascinating universe of Ocean Gravity.”
Keldan has announced via their US distributer, Nauticam USA, that they are now shipping their Video 8M light. The “M” stands for modular as there are a variety of light modules and reflectors available for each light. There are two standard models, the Video 8M Flux and Video 8M CRI. The former has an output of 9000 lumen and the latter 8000, but at a higher CRI value, which results in more faithful rendering of colors underwater.
The lager brand Skol has released a new advert filmed entirely underwater. It was shot by Brazilian cinematographer Lucas Gaspar Pupo and features a nightclub scene. The dancers were supplied with oxygen (sic) by divers out of shot. It was filmed on a RED Epic housed in a Gates Deep Epic housing.
Seagate has announced a range of archival hard drives, that will be shipping in January. These are designed for storage and as such have a 150MB/s read/write rates, but are designed for 24/7 operations with 800,000 MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) hours and 18o TB of data transfer/year. Simply, they run cooler, more securely and with less power needed tag any other drive in their class. Seagate will be shipping 5, 6 and 8TB versions. With file sizes increasing in both video and still cameras, they may present good option for storing and backing up the large amounts of data that we are creating.
Instagram has surpassed Twitter with 300 million registered users. Instagram is the image sharing app that has become increasingly popular in the last few years. The company has reported that users share 70 million photos and videos to the app every single day. It has certainly become one of the new places for photographers to interact with one another.
Landscape photographer Peter Lik has sold the most expensive photographic print ever to a private collector for the whopping price of $6.5 million. Previously, the most expensive photograph ever sold went for $4.3 million.
Backscatter Photo and Video have been publishing Lightroom guru Erin Quigley’s tutorials on their site. One of the recent posts features a tutorial dealing with correcting the white balance in an otherwise lovely image of a manta overhead. In the tutorial, Erin also shows a few other tools:
National Geographic has posted an interview with Kenji Yamaguchi in their PROOF feature. Many photographers will not be familiar with his name, but he has played a crucial role in many of the iconic wildlife images of our time. Originally sent 32 years ago by Nikon to National Geographic to train the original technician, Yamaguchi has been repairing, modifying and creating the equipment used by National Geographic shooters in the field. (Image from Shutterstock).