Photo And Video Release Form Template: Fill & Download for Free

Obtaining a signed photography/video release form is one of the most overlooked steps in professional photography. Consider such a release form as a legally binding contract between a videographer and a subject where the subject transfers the ownership of the footage to the filmmaker: Video Release Form (Free Template)While preparing such a release form for using online, you need to request consent from subjects if you plan to use that media for commercial purposes. If someone using it for your personal library or editorial, then it is not required to have such a photo release.You also don’t need such a consent form if the subject or location is unidentifiable.

Yes, you should let them know but not only verbally or via email - for commercial use of these photos, you should also get a signed video release form from them - it is one of the most overlooked steps in the video production process for your Youtube channel.This situation can have significant legal implications as you didn’t take the time to get consent from your subjects to be in your film.A release form is a legally binding contract between a videographer and a subject where the subject transfers the ownership of the footage to the videomaker: Video Release Form (Free Template)Then go on to publish and share your work for commercial purposes. It can have significant legal implications without consent from your subjects to be in your video.At the same time, you only need to get consent from subjects if you plan on using a video for commercial purposes. If you’re using it for your personal library or editorial, then you don’t require such a video release.You also don’t need a video consent form if the subject or location is unidentifiable.The videographer will generally own the copyright for the videos. However, it can vary depending on such things like licensing agreement, whether the videographer is employed for their skills, or if the footage has been commissioned.

Allow right, I got a few folks asking me to answer this question… again!Smartphones have better cameras today than smartphones did last year, that is true. And everyone seems to want them to have better cameras than “real” cameras. So ok, here you go:Here’s the Kodak DCS2000 DSLR. This was made in 1992. It shot a 1.5 megapixel image into an 80 megabyte hard drive, and it could store 50 photos. They actually made a color version and a monochrome version. The color could shoot at ISO 50–400, while the monochrome version could do 100–800.There is a most excellent chance that your smartphone will shoot a better image than the Kodak DSC2000 DSLR. It will also store way more images, and even shoot video, if it’s a recent phone. And it’s also probably far, far more powerful a computer than your desktop PC was back in 1992.However, it you want a reasonable shot of the moon, I might still go with the Kodak and a 600mm lens. You just can’t get a good telephoto shot with a phone.Light and Modern DevicesPhotography is all about capturing light. One reason you might not have noticed, but I did hint at, that your phone today is perhaps better than that old Frankensteined Nikon/Kodak is the fact your phone’s image sensor is more sensitive. Photography is all about light, and the better your camera is at collecting light, the better a job it can do at creating an image for you.That moon shot was taken with a Micro Four Thirds camera, which is the smallest of the “large sensor” cameras around right now. That sensor is 10–12x larger than the sensor in your phone, so it’s collecting 10–12x as much light per shot. A full frame or “35mm” digital camera has a sensor that’s 40–50x as large as the sensor in your phone. So it’s collecting, as you might guess, 40–50x as much light. And at the same level of technology — there’s nothing magical about a smartphone sensor that can’t put into into a large sensor and actually work much better.And in fact, smartphone sensors are kind of topping out. Apple just moved from a 1/3″ sensor to a 1/2.55″ sensor, which is the kind most phones have been using since about 2014 or so. Most of the recent tweaks to smartphone cameras, like image stabilization, phase detection autofocus (PDAF), etc. are innovations that have been in big cameras for decades. In fact, every DSLR uses PDAF autofocus. Electronically-controlled film SLRs used PDAF autofocus long before digital was a thing. This is relatively new to phones and somewhat new to mirrorless cameras, but it’s a “yawn” when comparing phones to professional cameras.The Hardware LimitsNow, of course, those who don’t quite understand photography and computers might imagine that smaller cameras will eventually outperform larger ones. After all, even I mentioned the fact that your smartphone today is probably many times more powerful than your desktop was in 1992 or even 2002, right. The thing is, there’s nothing about a computer per se that mandates a large size. On the other hand, there absolutely is when you’re talking about photography.I mentioned the sensor size differences, and how much larger a full frame sensor is versus a small phone sensor. But why is that important? It’s all about collecting light, and as well, some limits we’re closing in on.If you look at any noisy smartphone image, you will see random specks — noise. But there are different kinds of noise. Your tiny sensor has tiny pixels that are, basically, smaller targets for photons than the 40x larger pixels on a full frame camera sensor. Each photon that hits adds to the image during your exposure. If you don’t have enough, you get a dark image. So maybe you boost the sensitivity (ISO). That ups the gain on an amplifier that makes your fewer photons brighter, but also adds more electrical noise to the system. The larger camera sensor, capturing 40x more photons, won’t have that problem.But here’s another source of all that noise. If you look at dark parts of a noisy image, they’re even noisier than the bright parts. Why? A thing called shot noise. Photons reach your sensor as a photon flux, the number of photons per second per unit area. But when viewed statistically, this is a Poisson distribution over time. In bright light, in statistically large samples, the number of photons captured by one pixel of an evenly lit surface will be the same, basically, as the number of photons captured by the neighbors. So you get an image of an evenly lit surface.But start getting dark, start lowering that photon flux, and you’ll find your samples are so low, the statistical distribution of photons starts to matter. Those image pixels of your evenly lit surface now have randomly varying pixel counts, and so you have the noise of the different light levels in what should be an evenly lit area.And phone cameras are moving closer to their absolute limits on shrinking. Sony announced a 48 megapixel sensor last year that can also run in 12 megapixel mode. It’s a bit larger than most 2018 phone sensors, and might be an improvement in hardware quality. But here’s the thing: the pixel size on that sensor is 800nm. The wavelength of light at the end of the red band, the longest wavelength you want to record, is 700nm. You really don’t want a smaller pixel size or you’re going to see weird color sensitivity.And as well, to actually get that 48 megapixels of resolution, you’d need about an f/1.3 lens. The fastest on any phone is an f/1.5 lens, on the Samsung Galaxy S9. Why? A thing called diffraction. As light passes though an aperture, it spreads out — it blurs. The wider the aperture, the less blurring. If your chip pixels are larger than the degree of blurring, no problem, you see a sharp image. If they’re not, then the effective sharpness is based on the lens, not the sensor. Not that everyone needs an 48 megapixel camera, but if they’re making it, it might be good to know how many megapixels are real, how many are “marketing megapixels”, before buying. Anyway, this new chip, the IMX586, pretty much defines the limit of hardware, which is one of the reasons that so many companies are going to software magic. More megapixels doesn’t help you at all with light, and if they put in larger sensors, your phone would be camera-sized.Smart Camera Tricks!So why are 2018 phones better at acquiring images than 2017 phones? The difference, in most cases, isn’t profound, but it’s generally moving in the right direction. Most of this due to computational photography — software tricks. And some of these actually come from real cameras. Others, well, I’ll get to those.Pretty much all of the new tricks relate to image capture, which is of course the collecting of light. And we’ve seen these for awhile, to an extent, on other cameras. I have had real cameras that can shoot multiple shots to average out noise, cameras that can collect light as it’s happening through multiple shots to create in-camera composites, and cameras that can boost resolution (spatial and color) with multi-shot modes. This isn’t new to photography, but it’s starting to be critical for the tiny sensors in phones.Just as an example, here’s a high ISO image in moderately low light. If you have shot with your phone, or in low enough light, any camera, you have probably bumped up the ISO settings to make the camera more sensitive. And with higher ISOs comes more noise. You can see the noise in this image without even zooming in, and the shot noise in the darker areas is particularly bad, at least until the blacks are crushed completely.Here’s exactly the same shot from the same camera at the same ISO 25,600… only, rather than shoot one photo, I have shot ten of the same scene and averaged them. Almost like magic, the noise has gone away.This was done with a Micro Four Thirds camera, so this last image has the benefit of collecting about 100x as much light as your phone would in a single shot mode. And the fact that I’m experienced in photography is why I know this technique (though I have had cameras with this basic mode built-in) and I don’t really care if my camera knows this trick or not. But as a novice, you might want this.If you’ve shot HDR mode on a phone or camera — which is usually recommended these days for phones — you’re taking advantage of another kind of “stacking”, this time for dynamic range rather than noise. The camera is shooting a bracketed set of images, to extend the light-to-dark range of the final photo. This is another feature that’s been built into “real” cameras for decades, both HDR (the camera builds an image for you) or auto-bracketing (the camera just takes the shots and lets you work with them later). The photo here was manually bracketed, but illustrates the issue: the whole range of tone could not be captured in a single image, even on my camera.And again, these are professional features in professional cameras that let me pick and choose whether I’m doing the computation in Photoshop or, maybe, the camera is. But the basic point of a serious camera is just to capture the image as best as possible, and they’re typically made knowing that the users will put these features together themselves, later, not necessarily in-camera.One more existing big-camera trick and we’re ready for these ideas to show up in 2018 smartphones. In 2016, Olympus introduced a new feature in some cameras called “Pro Capture”. Basically what this does is capture images before you press the shutter button. On the professional Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, the camera can capture up to 15 images even before you press the shutter. How? Well, being a mirrorless camera, the image sensor is always active anyway, so in this mode, as soon as you half-press the shutter, it starts grabbing full quality raw images into a circular RAM buffer that holds 15 shots. As soon as you press the shutter all the way, those 15 shots (or fewer, if you set it up that way) are stored to your SD card, along with anything else you shoot (up to 60fps, that’s a really fast camera).Now, Olympus is just using that function right now to get you your best shot — maybe you didn’t react quite fast enough, so this is erasing the likelihood of that just-missed shot. And this a feature that can’t really be added to DSLRs, which is one reason I do think that mirrorless cameras will have an increasing edge over DSLRs. I’m about to hit up the things phones are doing for you, but realize that there’s nothing there that can’t drop into an Olympus, Sony, Panasonic, or Fujifilm… or, now, a Nikon or Canon mirrorless, either.The Smart CameraSo, you paid $1,000 maybe, for that smartphone that might include one $25-$30 camera module and maybe 2–3 $10 camera modules, and you’re comparing it to a $1,000-$5,000 camera with a $500-$25,000 lens? Prepare to be disappointed. Only, if you don’t know how to use that expensive camera, you may be better off with the phone because it actually is “smart” and getting smarter. It’s actually a pocket computer, after all — that’s where most of your money went. And these days, in addition to that 6–10 core ARM processor, 4GB+ of DDR memory, 64+ GB of storage, a few phones have custom AI and image processing chips, to increase their ability to do cool stuff with your photos (among other things).So let’s take that computation and apply it to HDR. In a big camera, HDR brackets an exposure. I can set the exposure distance between images, and whether I want 3, 5, or 7 images. All of that pretty much requires me to understand photography enough to decide which of those I want; should they be separate by 1EV, 2EV, 3EV, etc? Yeah, I got that… but maybe you don’t. So one of this year’s cool functions from several companies is basically embodied in Apple’s “Smart HDR”.So rather than say “four images with 2EV separation”, your iPhone and its AI/image processor are looking over your scene, even before you press the shutter button. When you do, the scene is being analyzed, and the exposure steps and count are decided based on what’s best for that particular scene. That’s actually a thing I do in my head when shooting difficult lighting scenes. But Apple’s put an AI in there so any novice can get a much better photo of that scene than they could last year…. without the need to take some photography lessons!Another is Google’s Night Sight mode. Look back at those photos of my bar in low light… that would have looked absolutely horrible on a phone. Earlier phones may have done more or less what I did there, shooting a few photos and averaging the shots, but that light was absolutely too dark for a conventional phone, and you as a user would have to know much, much more about photography to get any kind of good result on your phone. But now you don’t!When you’re in Night Sight mode, your Google Pixel is analyzing your subject, your subject’s motion and lighting, your own motion, and it’s shooting live shots to a circular buffer, just like the Pro Capture mode. Except that it’s also deciding how fast to set the exposure based on all of that motion. When you shoot, some of those shots are kept, and all of those factors go in to Google’s AI and determine the exposure lengths and how many (up to 15) it will use to create a single image. So it’s doing the same kind of “thinking” I might do in a difficult situation. And it’s magnifying the light gathering capability of the phone’s camera by up to 15x… still far, far short of a full frame camera, but day and night over a single shot from a phone.So at the end of the day here, you have a phone with a tiny sensor and a “brain” that can replicate some of the more advanced techniques used by photographers, to get a better image. It can’t think, it can’t be creative, but it can shoot photos in a way that a novice might not understand, much less manually replicate.The Digital DarkroomThe other thing real photographers know is that your in-camera image is only part of the work. There are exceptions, but for the best results, particularly in art photography rather than, say, photo journalism, I’m going to capture my images in raw mode (a direct readout of the sensor) and I’m going to edit various things in Lightroom or Photoshop, just as if I were printing a photo for release from a negative. That’s a big part of the reason that a professional will get a better image with your camera than you will with hers… and yes, that’s only the technical part. The camera’s really not going to help with your composition… well, maybe not.So when I shoot with my pro or enthusiast camera, I’m expecting that camera to be good at one thing: capturing the best image possible. My digital darkroom is on a PC at home, I might publish it to the internet, I might make a print, and those are two different things.Your phone, on the other hand, is your camera, your digital darkroom, and your photo publisher. So for most people, everything you do is with that one device. And most consumers aren’t going to bother with the digital darkroom part, so there’s a program making those decisions for you, too.There always has been a little bit of this on consumer cameras, at least once they got exposure and focus automation. What they can do for you has just been slowly increasing over the years. An older camera would judge exposure by averaging all the light in your camera’s exposure sensor. Most point and shoot cameras and phones today have an “intelligent” auto mode that matches your intended shot against a library of shot templates — it’s an expert system, a kind of 1990s version of artificial intelligence. And these days, the phone may use a neural net or some other deep learning AI to basically take in all those templates from the earlier days and form new decisions based from that “learning” but not related specifically to any one template.A Short HistoryAnd the growth of the camera phone has been pretty rapid. Back in 2010, most companies didn’t really give much thought to the camera phone. Smartphones had cameras long before Apple or Android were a thing, but they weren’t really there for consumer photography. The front camera was there to enable very low resolution videoconferencing, limited by the network speeds. The back camera was for utility: snapping a whiteboard, taking a visual note, that kind of thing.Around 2010–2011, this started slowly changing. We were still pretty early into the era of consumer smartphones, but it became clear to the phone makers that cameras were being used for regular photography, and so they started making them better every year, to get you to buy a new phone, and because that was one place individual companies had lots of control, lots of choices in camera modules, and even the option of working on their own software magic.None of these things were particularly relevant to experienced photographers, because they already knew how to use a camera. And while I’m not about to object to new camera modes, I don’t expect to see smartphone-like even-more-auto modes on anything but point-and-shoot cameras. Heck, Google even now has a mode called “best shot” in which you’re actually letting the phone chose the image for you from a set that starts before you press “go”.Novices are, No Surprise, NovicesSo you might ask why, at least every week or two, someone does really want me to tell them that their phone is just plain better than any old DSLR, so that they’re in camera nirvana and don’t need to think further. But it’s not like that, and it never will be… you’re just getting more help than you used to, but you still have a weak camera with that phone.If you don’t know how photography works and just pick up a consumer DSLR with kit lens, fire away with JPEGs, and get a little disappointed, no surprises. Because that camera does that photo improvement thing a little bit, but that’s using it basically set on “1”, while your smartphone is always on “5” and may be cranked to “11” with different modes like “Night Sight”. They are different tools designed for different jobs.And it’s awfully likely that the DSLR or mirrorless you picked up five or ten years ago wasn’t a whole lot less helpful in this regard than a shiny new one today. Because they are simply made for people who know how to use cameras, or soon will. And that phone from 5–10 years ago doesn’t hold a candle to the phone of today, because the world’s largest software and AI companies just happen to make smartphones, and they know that consumers buy, at least in part, based on the camera. The cameras themselves are close to the “wall” set up by basic physics, but software is pushing beyond.As a novice, you will have increasingly better photos on your phone, but the same results on your buddy’s DSLR, so you assume that phones have become better. But that’s simply a judgment made based on ignorance of photography. What you have really discovered is that, until you’re ready to put in the work to learn photography, the smartphone is better for you — not for someone who knows what they’re doing.And that’s okay. Photography can be a very deep dive. You can get a modern smartphone and spend lots of time learning other important elements of photography, like composition, if you want to rise above just being a snapshooter or selfie-o-holic. You don’t need to think about other technical issues until you’re ready for it. And today’s phone will shoot raw images — Google even has a thing called a “computational raw” image, which is the stack of photos captured in its clever multi-shot modes and processed, but not crunched to a JPEG. So you can go slowly in exploration of “digital darkroom” techniques. You will, if you’re pushing limits, figure out where the limits of your phone as a camera are. At some point, you may wish to give a real camera a go and find there are no such limits to it, with the right camera and lens anyway.Read MoreDave Haynie's answer to With all of the camera phone technology available, do you think DSLR’s will eventually fade out?Dave Haynie's answer to Which mobile phones camera can give DSLR like picture quality?Dave Haynie's answer to Are smartphone cameras getting better than DSLRs?Dave Haynie's post in Clickworthy: Image Stacking Magic (Part 1)Dave Haynie's post in Clickworthy: Image Stacking Magic (Part 2)See the light with Night SightNight Sight: Seeing in the Dark on Pixel PhonesApple’s Smart HDR sounds a lot like the Google Pixel cameraWhat is Smart HDR? Explaining Apple's new camera tech | Trusted Reviews