Educational

Voice Overs enjoy a ubiquitous presence in the broadcast and entertainment industries. Invisible actors populate the voice tracks of cartoons on Nickelodeon, wildlife documentaries from the plains of the Serengeti, automobile commercials during NFL football games, podcasts and instructional videos, and countless animated feature films in theaters and on DVD.

An external sound system completes a home theater, and turning one on yields unexpected pleasures. Recently, I stumbled upon a new TV series on HBO and a romantic drama on Blu-ray Disc both designed to indulge the ears.

The series, True Blood, features a waitress who can hear what people are thinking. As she works her way past tables, thoughts cascade toward her from every direction. And the audience hears the cacophony, too, brilliantly steered from multiple speakers at the sides of the TV and near the sofa.

The movie, August Rush, on Blu-ray and also available on DVD, features a humdinger of an opener: a child prodigy deciphers the musical nature of wind rustling the field in which he's standing. As the wind shifts, the sound washes over the audience from various directions. The powerful effect is all but lost on viewers relying on the TV's internal speakers alone. The same is true for the restaurant sounds in True Blood.

Sony STR-DG820 7.1-Channel Home Theater Receiver

Families with digital cameras take thousands of pictures but banish most to a computer hard drive never to be seen again. They never make the connection that their home theaters are digital photo-ready. This despite the fact that gathering people on the couch for a slide show was second-nature a generation ago, especially after a vacation or during the holidays. With some advance planning, setting up and running a picture show is a lot less labor intensive than dragging a mechanical projector and retractable screen out of the closet each time you want to impress the neighbors.

Loading slides correctly was a hassle before the show turned digital.

Today, your big screen is already in place. And with that bright display, you don't even have to dim the lights. So why wait? Here are five ways to do it.

One of the cooler jobs at B&H belongs to the guy in charge of identifying and evaluating the rare and/or oddball items that come through the doors in the B&H Used Department. Due to a great measure of modesty and humility, this particular person prefers to remain anonymous, so let's just call him 'Steve'. The scary part is that 'Steve' can usually identify the oddest pieces in the lot at first sight. And don't be surprised if he points out the brass thing-a-ma-jiggies on the focusing rail aren't original. 'Steve' knows his stuff.

We continuously turn up rare and unique photographica here at B&H, and thanks to 'Steve', these gems can now be browsed through in the new 'Collectables' section of our website. To kick things off we assembled a cross section of notable photographic eclectica available in our Collectables section. Some of these items are original manufactured products, and some are hybrids, i.e. a Zeiss 16mm Hologon with a Leica M mount.

 
Linhof Technica III 5x7 Folding Rangefinder

Interviews conducted over a telephone are so deeply woven into the fabric of our everyday lives that it's difficult to imagine talk radio or the evening news without them. Telephone interviews are critical in the production of documentary films, audio and video podcasting, and they are almost as widely used in journalism as the pad and the pen.

One of the neat things about being the largest photo retailer on the planet is that along with the garden variety of used cameras and lenses, we also get a rather eclectic variety of collectables – not to mention truly oddball items - passing through our Used Department on a regular basis. And being the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, we have become the default, first-stop sniffing point for folks looking to trade in, trade up, or simply sell off that bag of camera gear Uncle Bob bequeathed you when he crossed the end zone.

Even with high-rejection shotgun microphones, blimps, softies, and windscreens, wind din is the bane of location recording. An entire industry caters to addressing the problem. Yet, we still regularly encounter wind-related noise when we set up outdoors and slip on our headphones. Here’s some practical advice gleaned from customers in the field who know how to whip wind into submission.