Despite now having about half a dozen triggers available for the Godox flash system, the Godox XPro still seems to be the most popular. I have six of them myself so that I can use all my Godox lights with different brands of camera. The main attractions for the XPro are the easy access to settings due to the array of buttons and that huge LCD. But in the rough and tumble of location shooting where gear often just gets thrown into a bag, that big LCD can become a liability....

You may remember Laowa fully funded their new 12mm f/2.8 lens kickstarter within 30 seconds of going live last month. Thanks to the claims of high quality and “Zero Distortion” (or really close to it), people took notice and they pre-sold over 700 lenses. At the time of the campaign launch, one of the videos for the new lens didn’t seem to get much notice. It does, however, show off a very cool feature of Laowa’s lenses....

After Effects is probably my favourite tools in the Adobe Lineup. Essentially, it is for video what Photoshop is for stills. It has a whole lot of very powerful features to let you animate, composite, and otherwise manipulate your video footage. It also lets you do motion graphics, camera tracking, and a host of other cool things. But it can be a little overwhelming at first. This new course from motion graphics artist Roland Hartmann (graphicINmotion) will help to introduce you to the application gently....

After buying Joby and Lowepro, Manfrotto’s owner Vitec Photographic has announced its collaboration with Sony. The two companies will work together with the goal to develop a new line of tripods, plates and heads for Sony Alpha cameras, and the expected launch is in 2018. Marco Pezzana, CEO Vitec Group Photographic Division states that they’re proud to announce the agreement with Sony. He sees their brands, Manfrotto and Gitzo, working side by side with the prestigious Sony brand....

Well, this is a surprise. Manfrotto has entered the world of memory cards. And they’ve done it with UHS-II V90 SD cards, V30 microSD cards, and UDMA7 CompactFlash. They’re called Pro RUGGED memory cards, and Manfrotto says that they are “the toughest memory cards on the market” for professionals. Although unexpected, the launch of SD and microSD cards makes some sense, but the CompactFlash is an odd choice when everybody else seems to be piling onto the CFexpress bandwagon right now....