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Ambrose at GreenStone Lake

One of the few but significant upsides to our snowless 2012 winter has been perhaps-unprecedented access to the interior Sierra in the dead of winter.

Sierra photographer Michael Ambrose recently made good use of Tioga Pass Road with a visit to Greenstone Lake, where he captured this shot of ice and lenticular clouds (more…)

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Dustin Farrell’s ‘Landscapes’

Dustin Farrell’s ‘Landscapes’ features truly some of the most amazing night sky time-lapse photography I’ve ever seen, much of it done in good old Arizona. Who knew they had such pretty rocks to shoot over there? If I’m reading the info correctly, this was shot as RAW stills, not video frames, and (I hope!) batch-processed in Photoshop. Either way, this was obviously a hugely labor-intensive project. The resulting resolution is nothing less than dazzling—really a tribute to the potential of the 1080p spec and the low-light ability of a Canon 5d full-frame sensor. Stunning!

via Da Goat

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Contour Issues: High Contrast & Snow

If you’ve got a Contour helmet cam, or if you’ve ever watched any of my helmet cam videos, like this or this, you’ve probably noticed that the camera is particularly inept when it comes to dealing with bright, snowy scenes.

Highlight detail tends to wash out, leaving obvious and ugly blank, featureless regions of white. The question is: why? (more…)

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Panasonic TM700

Panasonic’s TM700 hi-def camcorder offers us the technology equivalent of a Faustian bargain: you get something extraordinary, but it comes with an unexpected cost.

The good can be summed up in a word: sharpness. The TM700 shoots 1080-60p video, the first consumer camera to do so with any competence, matched with not one but three 1/4″ CMOS sensors, one each for (more…)

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Sony HDR-CX160

Sony has been one of the worst offenders when it comes to resisting the inexorable shift toward progressive-capture in consumer camcorders. It is therefore no small surprise to find Sony offering 60p capture in its new camcorders (at last!), including the ultracompact HDR-CX160.

In the interlaced versus progressive ‘debate’, there is very little that you need to know. Interlacing is a 1950′s-era technology (more…)

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Nikon P300 Review

Nikon’s 12-megapixel P300 compact is the latest addition to my quiver of field cameras. I’ve learned to carry compacts in addition to or even instead of larger DSLRs and camcorders when I’m climbing and skiing.

Anything you can put in your pocket is (1) much easier to use and (2) much more likely to be used. The new P300 would thus seem to be the ideal compact for those seeking DSLR-level image quality in a much smaller package (more…)

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