Jon Saunders carves a full pipe in the Washington, D.C. metro area on Wed., July 13, 2011.

Vincent LaForet, a New York based commercial and editorial photographer, has been blogging his little heart out about the camera.  He got his hands on one last week (he is a Canon Explorer of Light – one of the photographers who works with Canon on making better cameras)  and produced a video with the camera.  Now, virtually every photographer on the planet is waiting for the video to go live.  Check his blog for details.  For Canon and LaForet, it is a genius guerrilla marketing campaign.

LaForet has called the camera a “game changer,” with the potential to change the photo industry forever.  I would have to agree.  I preordered mine today.

Without regurgitating camera specs and press release info, I want every photographer who reads this site to know that their workflows are about to change in a very big way, if they haven’t already.  We will record scenes in video clips and fire off a photo when “the moment” happens.  The camera can, after all, shoot HD video and photos virtually simultaneously.    Who cares about wasted video; the camera records to a CF media card.  As we download our HD video footage, we will begin editing and captioning our photos.  After transmitting photos, we will begin editing our HD video.  When the video edit is complete, we will send it to a server that encodes the video in all the proper formats for mobile, web, standard and high definition televisions.  I’m a bit of a workflow nazi, and the idea of using one camera for photos and video makes me want to explode!

You can now say goodbye to:

• Carrying around two camera bags and three cameras.
• Pixelated video screen captures.
• Grainy video in low-light situations.
• Importing your footage in real-time.  What a waste of time.

Unfortunately, we will probably see more:

• Shaky video (handled camera without a tripod)
• Poor audio quality (the camera has a stereo audio-in port…so don’t forget to use it!)
• Jump cuts during peak moments.
• Mics on hotshoes.  Yikes!  That’s going to take some time getting used to!

Note: Some of the ideas in this post build off of light diffusion ideas available at Strobist.

What you need:

• Cardboard Box
• White cellophane (trash bags work too)
• 11 x 17 white office paper
• Clear tape
• Box cutters (the terrorist-free kind)
• Three 60 watt lamps

1. Open the box
2. Cut away windows from three side of the box
3. Cut your white diffusion bag/cellophane/paper to fit the three windows
4. Tape the diffusion onto the three sides
5. Bend and tape the white paper to the bottom of the box, creating a seamless curve down onto the side of the box that was not cut.
6. Set up the three lights, one on each side of the translucent white diffusion panels on the lightbox.
7. Set your camera’s white balance on the incandescent setting (the light bulb).
8. If shooting small products (lets say less than 6 inches tall), then set your camera on macro focus
9. Start shooting

Total construction time: 15 minutes
This won’t win you the Pulitzer Prize, but it might earn you some sales.

If you ever have an opportunity to visit Duluth, Minnesota, do it. It’s quite an amazing little city on Lake Superior. During much of the twentieth century, the city was an industrial port town, with a cement plant, nail mill, wire mills, and the U.S. Steel plant. The population surged well above 100,000 residents, many of Finnish descent. But due to foreign competition, the steel plant closed in 1971. More closures soon followed, leaving an industrial complex scattered along the banks of Lake Superior.

Today, many local businesses have began the process of reclaiming some of these relics of the past in the name of tourism. Needless to say, Duluth is one of the most visually unique American cities that I have ever visited.

I’m excited to announce that the mining series that I helped direct, photograph, videotape and multimedia-ize won first place for online convergence in the Associate Press Managing Editors contest for newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. It was a huge group effort, with Mike Belt reporting for LJWorld.com, Brian Powell and Greg Hurd producing for our television outlets including River City Weekly and 6News, David Ryan and Nathan Borror leading the design work. They are all top-notch.

The three-part series explores the legacy that the coal, lead, and zinc mining industries have left on parts of southeast Kansas, northeastern Oklahoma and southwestern Missouri. The project focuses on the environmental, socio-economic and health-related problems that still linger in the region caused by the mining industries.

Project Update

“Congressional leaders are developing legislation that could lead to a buyout of residents in a small Kansas town threatened by collapsing abandoned mines. U.S. Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kan., and Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., are working on a bill that, if passed, would provide $6 million to buy out Treece and close the town near the Oklahoma border in southeastern Kansas.” – Source: Lawrence Journal-World. Read article.

One of the coolest new features on Google Maps is the ability to create “My Maps.” I geo-tagged photos and 360-degree panoramas to a Google Map from a project that explores the long-term health, environmental and economic-related effects that mining has had on parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Click the image above to view the interactive Google Mining Map. You can visit the original Google Map here.

As you’ll see as you zoom into the Treece and Picher areas, the towns look like a heavily bombed war-zone, with gray mounds of chat contrasting with the predominantly green agricultural region. Although the Google satellite image of the particular region could be of higher resolution, Google Earth and Google Maps provide a new way to understand and illustrate our planet’s environmental issues.

• Download Mining Map KML to Google Earth

I’m resurrecting this audio slideshow from a few years ago because, well, it’s rattlesnake roundup season. I photographed and reported this story for the Lawrence Journal-World after thumbing through an events calendar for Kansas. Rattlesnake roundups are under increasing scrutiny by wildlife groups and animal rights activists as studies have found the species to be in decline. Currently, there are no federal or international laws that protect the western and eastern diamondbacks or the western or prairie rattlesnake. Additional resources can be found at the Humane Society’s website.

Last week I spent a few days traveling around Kansas shooting video and photos for this story for the Lawrence Journal-World about wind energy. When I arrived back in Lawrence, I had put 1,000 miles on my VW Rabbit, clicked more than 1,200 accuations on my Nikon D200, and logged about 5 hours of HD video on my Canon HV20. The Canon HV20 is an amazing little camera and it affords me the abilty to pull still photographs from the HD video. The image is big enough to run 10 inches wide in our newspaper. Wow! Watch the video below.

Just to set the record straight, I’m generally turned off by jam bands, dead heads, and patchouli oil. For the fourth consecutive year, thousands of tye-dye wearing music lovers set up camp at the Clinton Lake State Park for the Wakarusa Music & Camping Festival. The four-day festival has basically become what Woodstock was generations ago. Although the music and overall “cultural experience” doesn’t do much for me personally, I’ve always loved photographing the event.

I made plans to shoot aerials of the event from sky aboard an ultralight plane. If the wind cooperates, photographing from ultralight planes can make for a much smoother ride and ultimately produce better photos compared to photographing from a conventional plane. Ultralights also fly at a much slower speed, generally about 30-50 mph, providing more time to compose and frame shots. But photographing from ultralights isn’t as simple as one might think. There are risks, including dropping your cameras and lenses 1500 feet below and less room to maneuver. Afterall, an ultralight is basically a big kite propelled by a lawnmover engine attached to a bicycle seat and a seat belt. It can be a bit spooky.

Either way, it was quite an experience and I was able to make a few photos from the sky before 7 p.m., then high-tail it to the venue for a few ground shots. Enjoy.

Ben Harper performs at Wakarusa Fest 2007.