It almost felt like the autumn of 1989, when the totalitarian communist regime in what was then Czechoslovakia was collapsing. Back then, Letná Plain—the largest open space in Prague—was filled with 800,000 people. This Saturday, “only” around 250,000 showed up, but the goal was similar: to send a clear message to the current government about disagreement with the direction in which the country is heading. Nothing we don’t see in news reports from around the world every week.
Photography Life
When we think of a duck, most of us probably imagine a stocky bird with a flat beak, cruising across calm, mirror-like water. And indeed, of the 165 species of ducks known today, the vast majority fit this description. But there are four species that have chosen a very different path of making fast-flowing rivers their home. And among them, the undisputed extremist is the South American Torrent Duck, a bird whose entire existence is bound to the raging rivers cascading down the steep slopes of the high Andes.
Photography Life
Today I’m excited to announce the release of our newest Online Workshop: Secrets of Professional Photographers with Libor Vaicenbacher! This 2 hour, 41 minute course takes you behind the scenes with two eminent Czech photographers, Ondře Prosický and Magdaléna Straková, revealing their secrets in two in-depth interviews.
Photography Life
If you like shooting video, you might be wondering how to make your footage more stable. The in-body image stabilization of modern cameras is great, but it’s really tuned for photography rather than videography. To go beyond IBIS when you’re filming videos, the two main options for enthusiasts are video gimbal stabilizers and the video heads for tripods. These have important differences. Which one is right for you?
Photography Life
Why should a tiny bird like a Thorntail—barely two grams in weight—take up such an enormous amount of space on my hard drive? It seems the folks at DxO may have heard my quiet complaint. Instead of the usual gigantic 150MB DNG files, the recently introduced DxO PureRAW 6 can now shrink its DNG outputs to just 24MB. That’s roughly half the size of the original RAW! I’ll soon take a closer look at how such massive compression affects image quality. For now, the first results look very promising. But let’s move on to the photography news of the past week.
Photography Life