Petronas Twins Towers Photos and Videos Gallery

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Kuala Lumpur Malaysia is the home of the Petronas Twin Towers. Completed in 1998 and topping at 451.9 meters, these towers were until 2004  the tallest building in the world before being surpassed by Taipei 101. To this day, they remain the tallest twin towers in the world. By day or by night, the Petronas Twin Towers offer never ending opportunities to aspiring photographers and videographers. You can find below a  compilation of  my favorite HD videos and photos of the Twin Towers which I will update from time to time with new additions.

By clicking on the respective thumbnails, you can see play the videos. From there, you can also buy royalty-free license to distribute these videos and photos.

Landscape photography, alternate realities

Landscape photography is a fascinating discipline where you can experiment with a lot of techniques. You can choose to compose your pictures horizontally, vertically or go for a panorama. But with a tripod and few creative filters, new dimensions can be added to the scene, and produce something which can be quite far from the reality.

The scene in question was a metallic waterer standing in a fresh field of grass. It was a cloudy day with some sunshine and a strong wind which is plenty to play with.

As an exercise, I took a series of pictures from the same spot (give or take few meters) using a Canon powershot G9 and the following accessories: tripod, neutral density filter Hoya ND400, infrared filter Hoya R72, circular polarizing filter. Processing was done with Adobe photoshop CS3, Lightroom 2 and Photomatix. Please click on the pictures to see a larger version.


Photo 1: panoramic view (two pictures stiched together)



Photo 2:vertical view 



Photo 3: vertical view, HDR processing



Photo 4: long exposure (15 seconds, ND400 neutral density filter + G9 internal ND filter on)


Photo 5: long exposure (6 seconds, ND400 neutral density filter)



Photo 6: long exposure infrared (8 seconds, R72 infrared filter)



Photo 7: long exposure infrared (1 second, R72 infrared filter)



Photo number 4 is my favorite because it depicts the best this windy day of spring but I like also the alternate reality of number 7. These pictures are not very stock oriented, however it will interesting to follow them to see which ones get the most downloads.....

Clipcanvas HD footage marketplace review

In this article I review Clipcanvas, a HD footage marketplace I joined two months ago to distribute my clips. Also in this post, an interview with Cato Salter, CEO of Clipcanvas who was kind enough to answer some of my questions about his company.

Presentation

Clipcanvas is a HD footage and animation marketplace based in Norway founded in 2007. The website site with a black and gold design is fairly quick to load. A large window , on the right hand side of the screen displays continously three different footage every week. Video clips previews use the flash based Flowplayer technology with success: preview window is large (420 by 238 pixels) and the image is crisp and clear making it the best previews I have seen so far on any footage agencies.


How to submit?


You can either run the Clipcanvas uploader application from your desktop or normal ftp software like Filezilla.
The Clipcanvas uploader is pretty straightforward to use: Once logged with your credentials, you just have drag and drop your clips onto a window and click the upload button.
Once submitted, your clip will be placed in the ''tag your clips'' section of the site.The last step is to enter keywords (separated by commas) and minimal informations about the clip such as category,dynamic,handling,camera framing.
Based on my experience, once you have your keywords ready, the final submission does not take more than 30 seconds and if you have a group of similar clips, less than 10 seconds using the available fast tagging. Clipcanvas is by far the easiest and fastest site for your final submission. In addition, clip reviews are very fast, mostly done under 24 hours. I found out that if the Clipcanvas uploader was very slow, uploading using ftp was considerably faster so I will recommend the latter.


Video clips requirements


Clipcanvas accepts clips with a minimum duration of 2 seconds and a maximum size of 750MB in the following formats:DV,DVcam,DVCpro 25/50/100,HDV1,HDV2,Xdcam,Xdcam HD,ProResHQ 10bit,ProRes 8bit, AVC intra (must be delivered in ProResHQ),Cineform, 12bit (must be delivered in ProResHQ),Dnx, DnxHD,Photo.jpg/.mjp 75/100%, Digibeta (export to ProRes or photo.jpg before upload).
I did not have so far any rejections by uploading quicktime movies (motionjpeg 95%) rendering from avchd files.


Interview with Cato Cater, CEO of Clipcanvas

Q: Can you present briefly the business in which Clipcanvas operates?

A: ''We are in a competitive industry comprised of so many professionals with high standards, and it is important to us to do our best to meet the requirements and demands that this implies. This goes for our submitters as well as for our buyers. We deliver video footage to our customers in more than 7 different professional codecs and a total of 20 variations thereof, bringing flexibility to our buyers´ digital workflows. Our primary focus is HD. The main bulk of our customers are working in production and post-production houses, and this list is growing by the day, representing companies and buyers from all over the world''.


Q: What can you tell us about your upcoming developments at Clipcanvas?


A: ''With regards to developments in the future, I would like to say we continuously work on making improvements:
- the referral program is in place and will be available from early January - referrers will earn a flat 10% of sales generated by these referrals for a set period of time for each buying user referred
- we will also offer more advanced affiliate solutions for those that want to integrate more closely with Clipcanvas through an API (will also be available in January). For example, the API would make it possible for any of our submitters to display and offer their own clips for sale through their own webpages (if they have one), but it would require some programming skills (with which we might even help out with in certain cases).
- also we are continuously working to improve the service we offer, based on input from all our users, and some of these improvements take more time while others take less, some you notice and some you don´t. We still have a lot of work to do, we are working hard, and I hope our users appreciate this even if some developments take longer time for us to implement than we would wish for''.
''We market our service and the video content offered through Clipcanvas in many different ways, both online and in more traditional media and communication channels. This is something we will intensify in the upcoming year, as we are now at the point where we pack some punch in the market''.


Conclusion


In summary:

Plus for contributors: Euros zone, video previews, referral program (to start in January 2010), ftp, quick final submission, quick reviews, high commission rate (60%), option to set your own prices (from 50 to 500 euros).
Plus for buyers: billing accounts, live support,free H.264 watermarked previews for testing.
Minuses for contributors: did not find any... but feel free to leave a comment if you find some!

Overall, I found Clipcanvas to be a great marketplace to join and I am looking forward to their new developments in 2010. The number of clips doubled in the last 6 months and Clipcanvas has now a library of just over 50,000 clips. For future reference, Clipcanvas is ranked 157,235 in Alexa.com and below is a 6 months trailing of Clipcanvas traffic compare to some of its competitors.











With a bit more than 100 clips on line I already had my first sale and looking forward to have more. Clipcanvas referral program is not ready yet but feel free to join by clicking the banner below. You can also follow Clipcanvas on twitter or join their fan page on facebook.


Browse my HD clips at Clipcanvas !

Compilation of HD Stock footage agencies requirements

A quick memo about the requirements of the HD stock footage agencies I contribute or plan to contribute to. I will update this table from time to time but feel free to leave a comment if you find that some informations are outdated...Thank you.





Submit Footage Clips to Shutterstock and make $$$!

Experiment 3: HDR and microstock

HDR photography or High Dynamic Range photography is a processing technique that I am using quite a lot to process my pictures. To have a quick glance to what HDR is all about you can read an article on wikipedia. HDR processing is always followed by a step called tone mapping, needed to convert HDR in a viewable format.

For the story, I came across my first HDR picture a few months ago on Flickr and was immediately intrigued by the vivid colors of the thumbnail. It was an architectural shot with stormy sky and the picture was spectacular, certainly different to all have seen before. I started playing with Photomatix and Artizen , two programs to process pictures as HDR and when I got familiar with them I started uploading pictures on FT then later to all the other microstocks including SS and IS.
HDR is hugely popular on Flickr (257,230 results for photos matching HDR and 7660 groups !!) but what about microstock ?
At the time of writing, a search with the term HDR returns 455 hits on SS, 443 on DT and only 217 on IS. HDR pictures seem to be a tiny fraction of pictures on microstock but it still difficult to know their exact numbers since I think only few people use HDR as keyword…

To talk about to my experience with HDR and microstock here are some numbers:
HDR pictures represent 60 and 65 % of my portfolio on SS and IS respectively.
Among the 5 top sales on SS, 4 are HDR. SS and IS are certainly very picky for noise so HDR processing has to be light. Others sites like FT or 123RF currently accept more extreme HDR shots.

How do I work with HDR?

My personal experience might be different to other people because it depends on your material i.e the camera(s) you are using.
I always process HDR from 3 JPEG (bracketing -1/0/+1). I just cannot get the same results using the RAWformat of my Olympus E-20…. but it is possible to do HDR with a single RAW.
Before processing the 3 pictures have to be perfectly aligned and often the software does not do it correctly. I do it manually with a very handy software called HDR Alignment Tool v2.0 developed by a photographer that you can find here.
You can always use a tripod of course but it is not always convenient....
Then it is just trial and error playing with the settings of artizen or photomatix to get the effect you want.

Pro and Cons about HDR in microstock

+ Boost sales
+ Increase the dynamic range of pictures
+ Produces vivid colors


- Increase the chance to be rejected (noise)
- Processing time consuming
- Storage ! (especially if you use 3X JPEG)
- It is easier to get “unnatural ” pictures than aesthetics pleasing pictures that will sold on microstock

Finally HDR does not work for all the subjects but with some patience and practice very interesting results can be obtained with architecture and landscape for example.

Some of my HDR microstock pictures are visible on the bottom of this page and for more example you can visit my Flickr page .
If you want to share your experience with HDR and microstock, feel free to comment this posting.

Good luck !


Links


Flickr groups:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/photomatix/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/artizenhdr/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/tophdr/


HDR artists:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/atrium09/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thepres/

What happened in June ?

As I just started this blog and to get a bit of history here what happened in June.
It was a quite interesting month actually with the dismay of FT (big bug of their V2) and the arrival on the market of Snapvillage, new baby of Corbis. The upload on FT being down for few days and a bit frustrated I decided to start contributing to other microstocks (IS,DT,LO,BSP,SV).
My applications on SS,CSP and SXP were rejected which mean that I have to wait a month to resubmit :( Anyway it was a good start and since all my pics on FT were exclusive, I had to start from scratch to build a new portfolio....
So here is on the table below the stats of June. No pictures have been sold on other microstocks except FT and the results are quite good with a average of $1.92 per picture sold boosted by the sale of two exclusive licenses.

All figures are in USD. Click on the table to enlarge



June highlights:

• BME on FT

• Pics uploaded on 5 new microstocks

• 1st picture accepted on IS was a HDR architectural shot

Fotolia