29 August 2012

How to make your own panning time-lapse iPhone movies -- on the cheap

Stephen Sande at The Unofficial Apple Weblog explains:
So, you've always wanted to be able to take one of those cool time-lapse iPhone movies that slowly pans from one direction to another? Now you can do it easily and inexpensively with the Camalapse, a US$25 accessory that works with a Glif ($20) or other iPhone tripod mount to give your iPhone a spin as it's taking a movie.

28 August 2012

New ebook on iPhone photography by mobile photographer Misho Baranovic

New from Darren Rowse's Digital Photography School:
We hunted down a world renowned Mobile Photographer – Misho Baranovic – and convinced him (not that it took too much arm twisting) to write the ultimate guide to iPhone Photography. To help people like my wife… and me… to lift our iPhone snapshots up to be the kind of shots that not help us to truly remember the those important moments in our lives.
Misho has created an information packed yet highly practical eBook that we guarantee will help you improve your iPhone Photography (and if it doesn’t – we’ll refund your money).
Inside you’ll discover:
  • How the iPhone Camera works and how to use it to take great photos
  • How to take more Control of your iPhone using Camera Replacement Apps (with a rundown of the best ones)
  • Advanced Shooting Techniques with the ProCamera App to gain maximum control over focusing and exposure
  • How to find compelling subjects to shoot on the street, with the family, in nature, travelling and at night
  • How to develop your own editing style
  • A rundown of native iPhone editing functions
  • An overview of the best editing apps including one touch apps, filter based editing apps and professional editing apps and techniques.
  • How to add text and graphic elements to your photos
  • How to share your images with family, friends and the wider mobile photography community
  • How to Get Your images ready to print

27 August 2012

An Instagram for the real world?

PetaPixel reports that Instagram is developing a Wi-Fi enabled camera that will allow you to share instant photos in both the virtual and physical worlds -- nearly simultaneously. So why didn't Polaroid think of this?

23 August 2012

The right way to focus a DSLR camera (times five)

A digital camera can give you fits during the focusing process, especially if you leave it in autofocus mode. This brief video by Phil Steele gives a good introduction to five different focusing techniques.

22 August 2012

How to build a room for recording voicovers and other audio

Until you try to record voiceover for one of your videos, you have no idea how noisy even an ordinary room can get. Plus a room's acoustics can wreak havoc with the ambient sound your microphone picks up. Here's a guide from the folks at the magazine Videomaker:

21 August 2012

A time-lapse device for mobile phones for $25

The Phoblographer writes:
The Camalapse is a device that is made for smaller point and shoot cameras as well as mobile phones. Smartphones are loaded with great timelapse apps so there’s no need for complicated electronics inside of the Camalapse.

20 August 2012

A new approach to the online broadcast

A new mobile app from Ustream called BFF (which stands for Broadcast for Friends) lets you broadcast live straight into your friends' Facebook news feeds: www.creativeplanetnetwork.com\

17 August 2012

How to build a perfect Facebook post

Katy Ryan Schamberger at Ragan's writes:
If you manage a Facebook page (or several), experimentation is fun—but you need a more consistent content strategy. The perfect Facebook post includes a number of elements, including:
  • A call to action that points to another Facebook element, a website, or a blog.
  • Targeting to a specific country, language, or other parameters.
  • An image.
  • Mobile-friendly language and visuals (photos or video).
Be sure to check out her cheat sheet: The perfect Facebook post: A blueprint.

16 August 2012

Looks like Android is losing to IOS among apps developers

Jill Asher explains:
First, there's the growing strength of iOS in the enterprise, which is not accidental. Not surprisingly, the massive popularity of the iPad (which outsells all Android tablets 3 to 1) has given Apple a boost in the business app space. But the company has made a concerted effort as well. Once known primarily as a maker of machines for consumers and schools, Apple has focused heavily on the enterprise of late: with its website focused on marketing to enterprises and case studies to support those efforts.
Let's not forget to mention the enterprise-oriented sales reps and how-to staff focusing on iPhones and iPads for business in each Apple Store (they are the reps wearing black polo shirts).

Conversely, the case for Android has suffered from frequent reports of malware and from widespread Android fragmentation. In addition, Android support for mobile device management (MDM) has been very spotty, resulting in bad publicity for the platform and very low adoption among enterprises.

Video: What the next iPhone looks like

Anthony Wing Kosner at Forbes.com has posted a video that presents a side-by-side comparison between the next iPhone and the current one. The new one is taller with a much bigger screen. I'd post the video here, but Forbes offers no embed. But you can view it here:
Take a good look. If you are a mobile journalist, this will become your primary tool. (Until the next one, anyway.)

15 August 2012

At last! A Yahoo CEO who opens a Flickr account

Yahoo! bought Flickr in 2005, but has never embraced the site nor realized its full potential. In this post, photo blogger and Flickr champion Thomas Hawk welcomes Yahoo's new CEO to the fold:
Pretty much ever since the day Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo as CEO I’ve been doing a search for her name as a member of Flickr. I’ve been heavily invested both in terms of personal energy and emotion in Flickr as a place to showcase my photography on the web and have been critical over the years of how Yahoo executive leadership has handled the site.

More recently I watched as Mayer posted her personal photography on Instagram as Yahoo’s new CEO and felt that as the new leader of Flickr that she should post her work to Flickr instead. It’s not that you shouldn’t be trying outside products as a CEO, but it’s also important for perception that you support your own products as well — dogfooding and all that. Mayer’s new Flickr account sends a powerful and positive message both to Flickr’s staff as well as to Flickr’s users.
Flickr is a powerful tool for the mobile publicist -- if it can just survive Yahoo's inexplicable apathy.

It's semi-official: New data confirms that London 2012 was the first Mobile Games | #MoPR

From Robert Andrews at paidContent:
We have already reported strong mobile figures from the BBC (a third of web visits, a tenth of video streams) and NBC (16 percent of web users, 45 percent of video requests).

But (newly released) stats show even higher mobile engagement - 60 percent of visits to the official London2012.com site and apps came from mobile devices.

14 August 2012

Michael Rosenblum's new book 'iPhone Milllionaire' is now available on Amazon | #MoPR

Michael was working on this book when I attended his New York Video School's video boot camp in Manhattan last fall. The concept is both straightforward and astonishing: If you own an iPhone, you have the only tool you need to produce powerful video for paying markets. (That would include public relations.) My copy is on its way and I'm looking forward to spending the weekend reading it.

13 August 2012

How to tell a better story in video | #MoPR

Here's a solid introduction from Casey Frechette at Poynter on using shot sequencing to improve storytelling in videos. It includes an outline of Michael Rosenblum's five-shot method.

10 August 2012

What do media want from PR? More video, more photos | #MoPR

A new survey of journalists and publicists suggests there is a substantial gap between what reporters expect from and what they get from online newsrooms:

Bulldog Reporter:
The fact is, 86% of media websites use images and video with a story, and 80% of journalists and bloggers regard images with news as very important and say it significantly improves the chance of them using that content in a story. They expect to find images readily available in a company newsroom. Yet when asked what features journalists and bloggers think are important, only 4% of PR people said they thought images were very important, 22% said they were important and just over half (56%) of the respondents routinely add images to their press releases. When asked why they don't add images, 39% said they thought it was not necessary, 7% said they don't know how and 54% said they do not have the resources to produce visual content.

09 August 2012

How to spread your photos across the web via Flickr | #MoPR

Blogger Ann Smarty:
The Web is full of blogs and sharing sites. Many people are always on the lookout for images they can use royalty-free. Stock photos only go so far, and bloggers may want to use something a bit better. This is why so many choose Flickr, thanks to the Creative Commons section.

These photos are easy to embed with links and author names, and you can find them on multiple sites. For example, Wikimedia Commons has a lot of Flickr images.

If you want your images to gain a wider viewing, offer some of them for fair use. You don't have to offer every photo, but try a select few.

Google data: The London Olympics are the first mobile games | #MoPR

Robert Andrews blogs:
Over the last week, we have reported how almost half of U.S. and UK Olympics video streams served by NBC and the BBC were to smartphones and tablets. Now search data further reinforce how the mobile internet has reached new heights this summer.

Google on Tuesday published data showing the largest share of searches for “Paul McCartney”, as his performance closed out London 2012′s opening ceremony, came from smartphones…

08 August 2012

Social media ROI -- for dummies | #MoPR

The next time a boneheaded executive demands to know the return on investment for social media, ask: "What the ROI on an industry convention?" Social media marketer Brad Shorr explains via Ragan's:
At a convention, firms exhibit their wares and talk them up. To a greater degree than what usually occurs on a sales call, prospects and customers at aconvention are invited to look under the hood, to kick the tires. This is like the content syndication and discussion threads that take place on a firm'ssocial media pages. They provide people with a more intimate and critical look "inside the box." And just as we hope at a convention, we hope our socialmedia content differentiates us from the competition.
Few CEOs would question the value of putting on a great show an industry convention or of networking at parties or receptions. Executives consider these tactics to be common sense. Actively participating in social media should fit into the same category. We do it because common sense dictates we should.

The ROI argument is just mumbo jumbo.

Telling a story in images and music | #MoPR

In this 5:50-minute film, Brad Kremer uses images and music to tell the story of landscape photographer Michael Levin's recent tour of Japan. He uses no narration, sound bites, or ambient sound -- and a minimal amount of text. Yet he tells a coherent story anyone can follow. He shot the film with a Canon 5D Mark II, a Canon TS-E 90mm f2.8 Tilt-shift Lens, a dynamic Perception dolly and a steadycam. He edited it on Final Cut Pro.



KI: Michael Levin from Brad Kremer on Vimeo.

 You can learn more about this project at PictureCorrect.com or at Brad Kremer's Vimeo Channel.

07 August 2012

A shopping list for the mobile publicist: video gear

Glen Mulcahy at the VJ Technology Blog offers The MoJo Gear Guide, which includes all sorts of gadgets to add power, utility and efficiency to your mobile devices. Remember: Any tool that works for a mobile journalist will work just as well for a mobile publicist.

06 August 2012

Using a smartphone as your ONLY reporting tool

Multimedia journalist Matt Augstine also offers a step-by-step look at what he does when he arrives on a breaking news scene.
  1. Pull out my phone and snap a few pictures.  I’ll then touch them up a bit real quick in one of my photo editing apps before I tweet and post to Facebook, letting the audience know that I JUST got on scene and telling them what I’m seeing so far.
  2. I’ll start looking for folks to interview and video/NAT sound opportunities, which I generally keep between 30 and 60 seconds and usually voice over with a bit of background info.
  3. I’ll continue to tweet and Facebook updates as often as possible and when new information breaks.  I generally try to include photos with my posts and tweets to add even more context.

03 August 2012

Covering the Olympics ... with just an iPhone

Guardian photojournalist Dan Chung is traveling light: he’s covering the games with a simple iPhone setup. 
Using different combinations of an iPhone 4s, a clip-on Schneider lens and a pair of Canon binoculars, Chung has been live-blogging all aspects of the games. His photos yield surprisingly crisp results, indoors, outdoors and even underwater through a viewing window — which again reinforces the old photographer’s adage that the best camera is the one that’s with you.

02 August 2012

The future belongs to ... the dumb phone? | #MoPr

Developers are working on a concept called the data locker, which would give consumers far greater control over their personal data online. This would create higher quality data, they say, and thus make the data more valuable. All of which could eventually kill the smartphone. Fortune Tech explains:
Azigo's Paul Trevithick offers a nuanced position, reasoning that advertisers will adjust their relationship with consumers because it's in their best interest to do so. If customers become a source of quality data, the need for dodgy data mining is minimized.  ... The great migration of personal data to the cloud has reached a critical phase. What will seal the transition? "When smartphones become…dumb," he says. "When a company like LG, or Samsung, or HTC makes a phone that has no local storage and gets everything from the web then the era of the dumb phone will begin." At that point, so goes the argument, a personal locker will become the center of the experience of using any device.

01 August 2012

5 reasons why short videos are the future of marketing

Filmmaker Kerrin Sheldon blogs for FastCompany:
Here are 5 reasons why online video will soon dominate your time spent on the web, and why if you're a marketer, you can use video to propel your business forward.
  • More and more users are consuming their video entertainment online.
  • Marketers are using video to engage social media audiences.
  • Barriers to entry are low.
  • Quality is expanding quickly.
  • There are plenty of avenues for dissemination.