Posted by Jeremy T. Hanke on Dec 9, 2015 | 2 comments

Every year we see a lot of new things in the world of content creation. Our Holiday Guide is where you can find things we may not have done standalone reviews of but which have impressed us enough that we think you might want to pick up one for yourself or a filmmaking loved one.

Books

It may surprise you to see all photographic books in our lineup this year, but each of these has a markedly powerful use for media creators in all forms—from still to motion and even animation.

The Soft Touch: A Photographer’s Guide to Manipulating Focus
by Jim Cornfield
MSRP: $34.95
Discount Pricing: Click Here

This unexpectedly beautiful book explores a long lost art of photography and cinematography: the intentional use of soft focus. Done correctly, this can open up a world of possibilities to you both in production and post-production. If you want a chance to really explore a new way of showing imagery, this is the book for you.

Foundations of Posing: A Guide for Photographers
by Pierre Stephenson
MSRP: $34.95
Discount Pricing: Click Here

If you’ve shot anything, video or photographic, you know that the dynamic posing of your subjects is one of the most challenging things to learn without help. Rather than just including photos of a bunch of poses without explaining why a pose was chosen, this book actually helps you understand what different ways of framing a person’s body in a setting and in the image itself do for the image. This is an incredibly impressive book that I highly recommend if you, like me, have had difficulty setting up the visual language of pose.

On-Camera Flash for Wedding and Portrait Photography
by Neil van Nikekerk
MSRP: $34.95
Discount Pricing: Click Here

This is actually an amazingly helpful book for filmmakers and media creators who need to do their marketing photography, but don’t want to invest in a ton of studio lighting and higher end gear. This books helps you harness the power of an on-camera flash and come up with really impressive results with a little creative forethought. (And as an, FYI, if you haven’t already picked up Neil’s book, The Direction & Quality of Light , treat yourself and pick it up, too! It’s amazing!)

Equipment

The power of LED lights continues to increase, while the cost of them decreases. With their cool running temperatures, they’re the friend to both filmmakers and photographers alike. I’ve personally used both of these lights to illuminate numerous scenes and been very impressed with them. Both of these lights emit a nice 60 degree angle emission which is generally pleasing.

Flashpoint CL-1300B Bicolor Light Panel
MSRP: $499.95
Discounted Pricing: Click Here

This is a broad lighting source consisting of 1296 LED lamps in a square that manage to kick out 4,536 lumen per color channel. (Why they don’t use the same comparison—LUX—for this light as they do for the 500R, I don’t know. Having used it for lighting up a studio for a commercial shoot and for lighting up a greenscreen almost singlehandedly, I can say that the 1300B seems to be 2.5-3x brighter in useable light than the 500R.) One of the incredibly cool things about this panel is that you can flip it from daylight to tungsten, so you can match most light sources you wish to augment. You can also add up to three more of these panels and connect them with an RJ-45 cable to create an amazing wall of light. (To see more information on this panel and read the review from the folks over at ProVideo Coalition, click here)

Flashpoint CL-500R
MSRP: $250
Discounted Pricing: Click Here

Weighing just 2 pounds, this little 500 lamp light is shockingly robust, kicking out 3,600 lux of 5600K light at 1 meter while using only 35w of power. It includes a diffusion screen and you can adjust the brightness from 10%-100%, although, as with most LED lights, you’ll most likely want to bounce it off a reflector when it’s at full brightness to keep the harshness out of your talent’s eyes. I personally like that it’s got an umbrella channel built into the light, so you can reflect it off a photographic umbrella, instead.

To read more about this light, check out this review at Shutter Muse .

Online Software

One of the areas a lot more filmmakers and content creators are needing to leverage is in the online realm. However, it’s often not the design elements you might expect that slip through the cracks and become daunting for creatives; it’s often the “simple” things you’d think would come with your website theme, but don’t.

Most notably we see this in the form of front end creation. What is Front End creation? Well, it’s the ability to allow your fans and subscribers to create new content related to your creation and submit it. If done properly, your intellectual property can actually help empower others to create within its borders, further empowering the property. However, to do that, you need to make it easy for people to create things and submit them, without having to do anything more than create a login. You don’t want them mucking around in your back end—especially with wordpress, the most popular blog and content management system for most of us creatives, which is unbelievably confusing and hard to streamline for outside users.

We spent the last year testing out two software packages—Wordpress FrontEnd Pro and Toolset for WordPress—aimed at doing this very thing and, while both were useful, we give our number one recommendation to WordPress FrontEnd Pro due to the simplicity with which it is to set up and use.

It was an easy matter to set up fields that people could input into and it was capable of generating a new post or page with that content right out of the box. Options for people captioning images they upload are there, as well, as are preferences for how images are displayed, sized, and linked.

With that said, it’s not as customizable as some folks are going to want, with its hard coded layout set so that all additional fields you create are listed in the form of an unordered list. (For programmers, you can tweak the CSS or use one of the programming hooks to change that.) For most users, however, the default will work very well—and they offer optional expansions for dealing with WooCommerce and/or BuddyPress.

WP User Frontend Pro For most of our readers, a single site license will be the most attractive at $49. (For folks actually developing sites, you can get packages for unlimited sites for $159.) Before you buy, you can try out their free version (which only allows you to create a single form and doesn’t have some of the more refined options), but just realize that the forms you create in the free version WON’T migrate to the pro version, so don’t put too much effort into your tests before you decide. You can download the free version here https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-user-frontend/ .

With that said, if you need lots of customization and control of how new fields show up, you will definitely want to opt for Toolset for WordPress.

It’s extremely robust, but it is more expensive (at $149), more challenging to set up, and consists of multiple plugins all running in tandem. (While you can turn off some plugins, like Access or the Bootstrap module, you will at least need to run the Cred Frontend Editor, Layouts, and Views to have the type of controls you’ll likely want.) They include a nice installer and, once it’s been activated, it can update your plugins for you.

To get a good feel for the plugin set, check out this overview from the folks at WPMayor .

Closing Thoughts

Hopefully these have given you some cool gift ideas for the multimedia creative in your life! (Or some good ideas of what to spend that Christmas money on for yourself!)

Jeremy T. Hanke

The director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films, Jeremy Hanke founded MicroFilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make better films. The second edition of his well-received book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) is being released by MWP in fall 2016. He's curently working on the sci-fi collaborative community, World of Depleted, and directed the debut action short in this series, Depleted: Day 419 .