Blog Archives

Instagram Stories has been wildly popular since it launched a little over a year ago. It’s developed since then into a fantastic tool for Instagrammers to get more involved with their community. YouTube seems to have taken note of this, and are currently testing out “Reels”, according to their Creator Blog. It’s their take on this popular feature.

There are a number of differences between Reels and the way existing Stories-style features work. For a start, the clips don’t get automatically deleted. You can also create multiple reels to separate content by topic, event, or whatever you like.

The new “Reels” feature will be part of the improved Community updates on your channel. Although, it will have its own tab. It will soon be introduced into beta for a handful of creators for feedback and testing. YouTube told Techcrunch that the idea is to introduce a new video format to the platform. A way for creators to express themselves and engage with their audience without having to post a full video.

The more people engage with reels, the more YouTube will assume that they and others will want to see even more, so it will keep pushing them out.

Given constantly evolving changes to YouTube’s search & suggestion algorithms, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of an impact this has. Will it just make the popular creators even more popular? Or will it allow the smaller creators a chance to build up their audience a little quicker?

And by smaller creators, I mean those with 10K subscribers, because that’s the minimum you need on your channel in order to access the Reels feature.

Hopefully, by the time it goes live, they’ll lower that bar a little bit and let more people utilise them.

You can find out more over on the YouTube Creators blog.

Iceland is one of the destinations on my bucket list. And while I’m gradually saving up and making plans, I enjoy looking at the photos from this magical place. Photographer Axel Sigurðarson is lucky to live there, and he’s spent a large part of his life exploring this country.

When Bárðarbunga volcano had its largest eruption since 1783, Axel was there to document it. And he shared his wonderful photos of this phenomenon with DIYP.

The eruption officially began 29 August 2014, preceded by around 1,600 earthquakes in 48-hours. It lasted until to 27 February 2015, and Axel visited the site in September, only a few weeks after the eruption began.

He spent about a week staying close to the scene. He took photos both from the ground and from the air, and other than the eruption, he also made portraits of the scientists he met at the site. During his stay, he flew a couple of times, photographing from a small plane with a pilot. They would fly over the eruption, and he says that the experience was incredible:

“When you opened the windows on the airplane you could feel the extreme heat right in your face and there was some crazy turbulence going on.”

When he was on the ground, he would take a trip in his jeep to the roots of the eruption along with a group of scientists. As for the gear, Axel used a Canon 5D Mark III with 24-70 f2.8 and 70-200 IS f2.8. Here are more photos he took during his stay: