PUBLIC MARKS with tags video & photography

There were a surprising number of games throughout the past few decades that featured friendly shutterbugs, so we made the tough decision to choose our 10 favourites.

Photography has had a relatively quiet but constant presence in video games over the last two decades, usually featured in video game titles as a mini-game or bonus mode. A few incorporate photography into the main storyline.

The problem Latvian startup Helico Aerospace Industries has set out to solve is most homemade action sports videos rely on a camera, such as the GoPro, being strapped on your person or action sports equipment, providing mostly a POV shot only. But, with drone technology, it could be possible to democratise the kind of aerial videos previously the domain of expensive, professional shoots only.

Update: There is now a new way to tether your camera to the iPad that does not require jailbreaking the iPad. Check out the new video here. Are you a photographer and an iPad owner? If so, you are really going to love this. Are you a photographer who swore you would never buy an iPad because it’s just an over-sized iPod Touch? Well you are about to change your mind.

Obviously we're big fans of photographer Roger Ballen’s dark and disturbing black and white photographs here at Phaidon. So we were pleased to get a call from him this morning telling us about this music video he's just directed for Cape Town hip hop trio, Die Antwoord. The band's music is characterised by its Zef references (Zef being South African slang for modern and trashy, with lots of knowingly discarded cultural references). Ballen of course is famous for his psychologically charged and unsettling images from South Africa of individuals marginalised from society often depicted in the setting of strange, cell-like rooms. So how did the coupling come about?

A tiny way to capture a big world Dot puts world class panoramic capture right in your pocket - letting your iPhone 4 capture an entirely new class of video.

Revolutionary Cinema Accessories for the Digital Filmmaker

Sliders / Follow Focus

You know how people sometimes say that jazz is the only truly American art form? Animated GIFs are like the jazz of the internet: they could only exist, and be created and appreciated, online. That said, PopTart Cat is not exactly on par with Thelonious Monk. But photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist Kevin Burg may have finally found a way to elevate the animated GIF to a level approaching fine art, with their "cinemagraphs" -- elegant, subtly animated creations that are "something more than a photo but less than a video." Here's one of my favorites:

New York City-based photographer Jamie Beck, in collaboration with Kevin Burg, a web designer with a background in video and motion graphics, has elevated the art of animated GIFs. In a post yesterday, we showcased some of Beck's collaborations with supermodel Coco Rocha. After the post was published, Beck sent us a detailed message explaining her work process, which we've reproduced in part below. You can view all of Beck and Burg's GIFs on Beck's From Me To You tumblr. They hope to launch a separate portfolio website in the next week or so.

Just when you think GIFs have hit their ceiling of maximum ingenuity, along comes photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist Kevin Burg with their absolutely phenomenal contribution to the evolving art form. My friend Gerard forwarded me John Pavlus’s FastCo Design profile of this duo and I’m still in a state of “Why didn’t I think of that?” disbelief of what these guys have done here. Beck and Burg have termed this style of GIF a “cinemagraph” — sublime little animated gems that enter the realm between photography and video. Each sublime cinemagraph requires hours of manual editing in order to inject life into them, and not one second of this hard work goes unappreciated. I can’t wait to see what these guys do next. To see more of their creations be sure to visit their Tumblr page.

Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg's animated photos turn the medium of choice for 4chan trolls into something approaching high art. You know how people sometimes say that jazz is the only truly American art form? Animated GIFs are like the jazz of the internet: they could only exist, and be created and appreciated, online.

"Some artists work in oils, some in pastels, some in acrylics. Photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist Kevin Burg? Their medium of choice is animated GIFs.

Here at theMET, we're always looking for creative projects that catch our eye. More than anything, we love posting about work that pushes boundaries, showing our audience something that has been changed, flipped or spinned into something magically different. Then, we see it as our job to find out the story behind such projects. What inspired the artist or photographer to start down that path? What do they hope others get out of their work?

Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg have been making quite a splash this year with their "cinemagraph" technique, combining still photography and video to "unfreeze" a photo in time. The results are stunning, and show that there was more potential in the old animated .gif format than had yet been realized.