Field notes and late night rambing

Goodbye my old friend, it's nice to see you again

I was on assignment the other day to do photos for a story about an exercise trend/fad that is based on classical ballet barre work. Yadda yadda. Anyhoo the client wanted some video for their web edition. Hey, no problem. Well actually it a real pain to do stills and video but hey if that's what the client wants then that is certainly what they are going to get. While I was doing my thang when I had a quick realization that the soon to be much ballyhooed Nikon D4 was going to be announced and with it will be, for me at least, a paradigm shift. Notice the quick mirror self shot that I did upon reflection, HA! I kill me!

 

There I am with my trusty and to a large extent beloved Canon HV20 camcorder dangling from my neck along with two Nikon D700 bodies to do stills. Often when I have to do stills and video for news pieces I have a lot more gear on me: usually each body has a pro zoom, 28-70 f/2.8 and 70-200 f/2.8 to make things nice and heavy, and the camcorder has an external mic attached, which makes for a very cumbersome working method. In those situations am quite like the guy with too few arms. Not fun but I get the job done. Oh and to make matters worse I will often wear a backpack where my extra microphones, wireless rig and a tripod with fluid head is stashed for all the video problem solving that often comes up. Again, not a simple rig to use. But soon this will be simplified with the new bodies that are coming out.

What? Why aren't you shooting with DSLR bodies that do video? Well I'm glad that you asked. First off, I don't do that much video that needs to be done at the same time as still photography which is my main occupation. Then there is the fact that except for the D3s all the Nikon bodies that do video are the consumer bodies with the crop chip and brother let me tell ya that once I got my full frame back I promised muh-self that I'd never buy a crop chip body again. You can't tell but that there self shot was done with my "secret weapon" Nikon AF-D 28mm f/1.4 that is essentially an insanely overpriced normal lens on a crop body but with full frame it's is a glorious and crazy sharp wide angle. There is no comparable lens for the smaller frame cameras so there you go.

I was not going to purchase a D3s just for video, no way. I prefer my D700's as they are smaller, lighter and less than half the price. If you are an independent such as I am you need to justify spending any money on equipment against how it will not just pay for itself but actually make you money upon that purchase within 18 months. Otherwise it costs you to own it and it is simply a waste of money. Not good business practice there. Yes I know about all the dudes shooting the Canon 5DII and all that but again there is no reason for me to purchase an entire Canon rig just to shoot some video from time to time so forget that noise bucko! Besides the 5DII has a much slower frame rate, horrible AF and is built like a toy. Yuck.

I got my HV20 before the VDSLR rage hit and within a month of me getting it it made me money and has continued to do so ever since. Also almost every client has cared not a whit about what video camera I've used. What they want is quality video that goes on the web. How I get there doesn't matter.

In the getting there even simple pro-am camcorders like the old HV20 do a better job of shooting video than DSLR's because they are set up from the get-go to do video. They autofocus and autoexpose properly and easily. They are physically set up to allow you to use external microphones and monitor the audio without adapters. They have the controls right where they need to be. Not to mention that they are cheaper to purchase than a new DSLR body. Can't go wrong. Except for the need to have another thing dangling from you while you make pictures. Oh yeah, that.

As I suspected, much of that has now changed with the Nikon D4 for three reasons: it is supposedly going to properly autofocus in video mode, it will allow you to make exposure adjustments while recording video and most importantly and fit's into the "why did it take so long?" department - you have a headphone jack so that you don't need an adapter to monitor your audio. Huzzah! Finally a DSLR that will harken the end of me lugging the HV20 about.

Does this mean that I've put in for a D4 for pre-sale? Nope. No chance. First off I never buy version 1.0 of any product much less one as expensive and complicated as a pro DSLR body. Second I'm waiting for the D800 or whatever it will be called that will be the little brother of the D4 for the same reasons as listed about my D700's. Lastly, I don't need one yet. The HV20 still works great, makes me the monies and doesn't need to be replaced. Yet. I do think that in about a year I'll put the old girl on the shelf with the other cameras from which I've moved past. The D700's will be with me for some time as they are simply superb cameras in every way. If I could get a D700 with the new video capacity then I'd honestly be set but alas it is not to be.

 

As they say "Time ... marches on!" and for this here cowboy that's a good thing.

Lani and The Stachettes

Since I work almost exclusively on location I am in some ways a bit jealous of the dudes who have the time and budgets to create entire sets for their subjects to be photographed in. So one of the things that I try to do when it suits subject and when it is f rankly even possible is to find a way to take a location and make it look better/different than it does with just a bit of tinkering. Sometimes that means moving object or furnature around, sometimes it means doing things with light and other times it means coming back at a different time or day so that it works for your intent.

I was doing some promo photos on location that went into the late evening that was going to include a number of set ups for a variety of looks that the client wanted. During the scouting I noticed this interesting lawn with a tree and stone path that led to some steps. I thought that it wouldn't work when the light was soft but after dark lit up it could be amazing with a bit of work. The energy was great that day and I mentioned that if we had the time and inclination after all the other shots to try something different and lo everyone was up for it.

Thus it was almost dark when I dragged all our gear down the road and had my assistant get us a bunch of candles from the home that the majority of the other photos were done at and had him set them up along the path. This brought color, warmth and a sense of depth to the image. At camera right I had a head with a 40 degree grid spot and CTB gel placed up the hill aimed at the tree for a moonlit backlight feel to give in addition separation between the girls and the dark moody background. On camera left I put another head into my 43" Octabank and put it up about ten feet pointing down about 45 deg aimed at the groups delightfully animated front girl Lani. After a number of shots we brought out more candles and put one in each of the other girls hands to light their faces for additional texture and mood.

Now, if this was done in a studio it would be a pretty big set to build and that would be the hardest part. The lighting would be easily controllable as it would be done in the dark with only the candles burning in during the exposure and everything else being lit by strobes but in this case my fill light was the moon! Being locked down on my tripod kept the camera steady but the girls had to remain motionless during exposures of up to 8 seconds including Lani who was doing all the wacked out poses for me. Yet when I said "Hold it!" they did and slap me silly, the frames are sharp.

So here is my favorite from that series: a photo that I had no idea would happen and certainly not like this when I drove past on my way to the shoot.

 

 

Technicals: Nikon D700, Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 set to 45mm. 4 seconds @ f/5.6, ISO 1600, Daylight WB. Camera on Gitzo 1320 tripod. Lights triggered via Pocket Wizard.

Stick it out and turn it around

I will unabashedly admit that I like for my images to in some way feel like you/I are “right there”. Personal. Intimate. Up close. A sort of sit on my lap and let me tell you a secret kind of thing when ever possible. It’s not always an option and in many ways for good reason. I’d love to see football shot from the perspective of the players: to mount remote controlled cameras into the lineman/wide receiver’s helmets would be amazing but they would never let you do that. But a boy can dream right? And dream I do. I love remote cameras for getting a perspective that you just can’t get when the camera has to be attached to your face. Then again not everything lends itself to that either because the logistics of camera placement would be either insane or would just be a lot of work to get possibly one frame that is interesting. Or worse after all that work of getting there early and setting up the remote you get nothing usable or interesting at all. But between having my camera attached to my head and triggered by radio when it’s “way over there” there is a middle ground: the camera on a stick.

Get out of the way

The last few weeks have been pretty brutal but good. Lots of shooting, new clients!, but also a bit of fun to keep me from going totally insane. What always happens, it seems, is that the wave hits whereby I’m popular and busy as heck and all the normal life stuff gets thrown into a basket to wait upon my triumphant return. Now that the wave has subsided I can get to all the stuff in that there basket and play catch up for a few days until the next wave of work comes in of completely indeterminate size and duration.

Thus I was having a lovely cuppa joe this morning, playing catch-up on things and started reading the post that John Stanmeyer did whereby he talks about the inside story of the making of his photos for the National Geographic article about how Brazil has had a dramatic shift in their population growth largely due to the popularity of soap operas and how that altered the cultures view of women and the size of families. No, really. True story. But I digress …

As I was reading his account I was looking at the photos he posted and doing my EXIF reading thang and about halfway through I had two complimentary thoughts:

1)      She-zam Andy! (That’s a joke you old folks will get, the rest of you just chuckle a bit to play long)  … it seems that John not only basically used one lens and one bodies to shoot this project, a Canon 5DII with a Canon 16-35 f/2.8 and a 24-70mm f/2.8, but it seems that he used the same body as well. The serial number seems to be the same for all his posted shots. He may have used other glass but in the shots he posted in his blog it was just these two. Now this is not going to be another “How EXIF data got me inside his head” post, because the led me to the next thought,

2)      He basically only walks around with one camera and one lens, got it? If you go to his website he lists his gear with is two 5D Mark II bodies, the 16-35, the 24-70 and then three fixed fast lenses, the 24mm f1.4, 35mm f/1.4 and the 50mm f1.2. That’s it baby! He doesn’t work with glass longer than 70mm.

The conclusion of these repetitious points is that Stanmeyer, like many other magazine editorial photographers don’t use as much gear to get their photos and some would think. Studio photogs have loads of lighting gear, sports photogs have loads of long lenses and setups for remotes and all that but the guys who shoot for publications like National Geographic on stories that deal with people load up with more research and luck than gear.

Photographers are intensely gear centric; far more than just about any other artistic profession other than musicians. We tend to ogle shiny new toys far more than we go out and use the toys that we have. Guys like Stanmeyer, David Allan Harvey and Alex Webb know exactly what they want to shoot and how they need to shoot it: people in an intimate setting. No fuss, no muss. To do that they use one body and often a single focal length, something in the “normal” range of 35-70mm. In comparison your news photographer basically doesn’t have a clue as to what he will need for the day because it all changes constantly. Thus when I am to cover a news assignment I carry one body with my 28-70 f/2.8, another body with my 70-200 f/2.8, my 17-35mm f/2.8 in a pouch along with a 1.4 converter for the long zoom, a flash and more gear in the car just in case.

BUT!, and you know that there is always a but, I prefer to shoot with one body and if possible a fixed lens, 35mm f/2, 50m f/1.4 or my beloved 28mm f/1.4. Nothing more. I have come to feel that as lovely as gear is, and believe me I have plenty of it, it often slows you down physically and mentally. I believe that the all-in-one zooms that many amateurs gravitate to are anything but a benefit to someone learning to make quality images: if you have an 18-200mm lens what kind of subject matter are you going to shoot, everything? Come on, pick a subject, gear up for that and focus on it.

There is something very creatively freeing about only having one focal length or a relatively small range of focal lengths to work with. This is why I’ve gotten such a kick out of making photos with my phone over the years: no options other than trying to make something interesting happen within the frame. Simplify, simplify. In this manner you spend more time looking for and creating images than fiddling with your many options and the gear that brings the same.

If you have less to work with in terms of tools, you can focus on what you can do with the tool that you have. Sometimes less is more and sometimes almost nothing is a whole lot. Whenever I can I try to strip the gear down to as little as I can.

When I was given an assignment to cover a big fashion show I made an effort to go early so that I could cover the back stage activity which is always more interesting than the event as seen from the other side of the curtain. Although I had with me a lot of gear including long lenses to get the runway shots that I had to have, boring!, when I slipped behind the scenes where it was very crowed I only took a body with my 35mm f/2.0 and worked that for a while:

I really don’t think that having more lens or body options would have enabled me to get “better” images here. If anything they would have slowed me down and distracted my vision.

Spot on

The other day I had what I’m now thinking of as an “Old Man Moment”. I was setting up a shot and I was walking around with my old beloved Minolta AutoMeter IVF getting readings. The subject of my photos was a bit of a photographer himself and while I was working he and I were talking about photo stuff. So he says to me “What’s that thing you are using?”, meaning my hand held light meter which I was using to dial in my strobes. I explained what it was and what it did. He seemed confused. “Doesn’t your camera figure that out for you?”

That baffled me for a sec. I explained that the camera can’t control the output or placement of my studio strobes and thus I have to set everything manually. He replied that it’s silly that with all the technology we have the camera can’t automatically set the lights. Well with lovely things like the Nikon CLS system it can but with a fair amount of limitations and since I was using 5 lights for the shoot the camera can’t handle all the calculations. Yet.

Then that reminded me of a shoot a few months ago where I was shooting an event and was next to another professional shooter whereby I was close enough to hear: Click! “Mmm, dark.” Click! “Still dark.” Click! “Still too dark.” I mentioned something like “Why don’t you just get a meter reading?” The response knocked me to my knees, “Naah! I’ll just change my exposures till it looks good on the screen.” Turns out the photog only shoots in Aperture Priority and will fiddle with the exposure compensation for a while until the exposure gets right. Holy wasted time Batman!

So it seems that because I own and actually use a hand held light/flash meter I am a bit of an oddity. And because I learned how to use a spot meter, that wonderful tool that is in just about every camera priced above $500, I am also a master of the arcane arts. Ok I understand that yes I learned to shoot on film and before the era of the intelligent multi segment meters which we take for granted. And yes I learned how to judge the reflective values of objects so that a spot meter can be used to determine not only exposure but also to figure out the range of brightness within the scene to be able to figure out how to process the image to make the best looking print/file because I learned the Zone System that Ansel Adams developed.

I guess that I’ve also taken something for granted: me. I am used to my working method and because of it I am an automated photographer and don’t use automated systems except for TTL flash in some situations and AF in poor light. The rest is up to me. I really only use my LCD screen to check my moments/compositions rather than exposure. In this way I can spend more time looking through my lens than at the back of my camera.

Case in point: I was shooting at a night club a while ago and the interplay of people, light and color was pretty interesting. I saw this couple and they were playing with his cell phone. I liked the way their faces were lit by the screen so I got a quick meter reading off his face with my spot meter and shot away. No lost time or lost frames because I botched the exposure a few times to dial it in. Huzzah!

Techicals: Nikon D700, Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 @ 35mm. Daylight WB. Handheld 1/3sec, ISO 4000.

How not to hunt

There is an adage which goes something like “don’t go looking for something because that’s all you will find”. Unless I get an assignment whereby the client tells me exactly what the client wants with a shot list the best way that I can assure that I will come back with interesting photographs is to not go looking for any particular image. Instead I try to go into the situation as untainted by prior expectations. I want to take every experience as new and fresh: hopeful for the unexpected.

The worst case is when I have to shoot something that I’ve shot before. When this happens I hear myself saying, “Nope. Shot that two years ago. Hmmm nice but similar to a shot from five years ago. Oh! I could … huh-uh. I did that and it turned out nice enough for my folio. What else is there?” It can be daunting and for me that’s the fun: to always find something new no matter how familiar you are with the subject matter.

Some people say that if you are in a visual rut you should take a trip to someplace far away that you have never been to before. The new environment provides loads of stimulation due to the foreign and exotic nature of your surroundings. It’s both the appeal of much of the imagery we love about National Geographic and a good deal of the phrase “Wow! If I was in Africa/Japan/Russia/wherever I’m sure that I could make great photos!” … the places and people don’t look like what you are used to and instantly take on an interesting quality.

But what if you could do that, see things as exotic, while in totally familiar territory? Besides all the savings in travel you would constantly be seeing new and amazing things. That’s what I try to do. It’s not easy but for me it’s the way to be.

So I got assigned to cover another triathlon this year. I know ‘em and I love/hate ‘em. This one was blesses with some lovely light so that helped but as much as I love to play with shadows I made a point to not do that at all. I forced myself to find a way to make photos of a subject where I have limited physical access to different from what I’ve done before.

So one thing that I did was put my camera on a monopod and trigger it with my remote cord. That way I could shoot straight down on the swimmers as they swam past me on the floating dock. There were loads of images that were, EH!, but this one made me happy. I think that it’s the feet which I didn’t expect.

 

Next time I’m going to get a housing and get in the water with them. I wonder if I can shoot UP?

The all seeing eye DO’C

I really like spending time with other photographers who don’t do what I do because I always learn something. This is partly because I want to know everything. Yes, everything. So I always learn something, from a technical stand point, from hanging over the shoulder of another visual professional. But more importantly, and fun!, is looking at the way that they think and work. The getting into the head is to me the most interesting and difficult aspect of learning from and about an artist.

This goes along with what I’ve said for along time: you can’t teach someone to be an artist/creative. You can teach the history of the medium, techniques and important works of the masters of the art. You can even give people ways to better tap into their creativity. However you can’t teach someone to be creative about a method of expression that doesn’t resonate with them. If you are a dancer by nature it might be pretty hard for me to help you become an excellent conceptual abstract painter. Ya know?

But put two professional photographers of different disciplines together and the chance is that they both are going to come out of the situation enhanced. So I have sort of a policy that if any of my photo friends need an assistant, I’d love to work for them for a day or so. I mean why wouldn’t you? If you could spend a day or so working under the eye of a fellow professional that you look up to, you should jump at the chance. Really. I can easily think of two dozen photographers who I’d love to assist for a week. The amount of subtle things that I could learn would be amazing.

So when I got the chance to lend a hand to my friend Daniel O’Connor for a few days that I had free I jumped at the chance. Daniel is a seriously good local architectural photog. Although I have done a bit of that sort of thing over the years and it reminds me of a combination of landscape and still life studio photography I am a but serious amateur in that field. Dan is a whole different level. That’s the appeal.

Daniel was shooting a sweet house in Denver that was designed in 1960’s Streamline Moderne which is that neato Art Deco kinda thing that was just finished being built. He was shooting it for the architect for their folio. Anyhoo, it was amazing to move all the furnature around for him. I did a lot of that. I got to find out that yes I like to have a sense of detail and all that “things that only I see” stuff but wow! Dan sees e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g! His attention to detail was enough to make my head spin. He also has an eye for composition that is very finely tuned to a sense of flow that is kind of an almost visual Feng Shui. So I spent a lot of time on a ladder doing minute adjustments to the orientation of bottles two rooms away from his lens. After figuring our his camera placement we for one shot, no joke, spent two and a half hours trying various arrangements of furniture to get the right look. It sounds like I’m making this up or being snarky but the deal is that for all the work and fiddling it really made a difference in the final image. I would have given up long ago but he kept at it until it really really worked.

So Daniel is all about patience within the composition and finding what for him is the visual way that not just the eye but and feel for how a person physically would move about the space in the photo. This I found interesting because I often like to use objects to act as borders or frame an object within the composition. To Daniel that is a bad thing as it cuts off movement. He works at f/13 a lot with his lenses hyperfocal focused and I spend a ton of time @ f/2.8 or wider focused dead on the subject. Different worlds. However he, like me, tries to work with the natural light whenever possible and prefers to shoot tethered to a laptop for critical jobs. Great minds and all that.

So it was a fab time. Learned a bit, thought a lot too. Daniel now wants to assist me sometime and I’d love it. I just hope he doesn’t blink or he’ll miss it all.

The start of something new

As I’ve said before I simply love to photograph things in motion and the emotion that comes from it. That has led me to as I like to say “shoot any sport but not really with anything longer than an 85mm lens” mostly because I want to take a personal approach to my subjects whenever possible. You just can’t be personal when using a 400mm lens. You get out of a persons comfortable “conversational distance” when you get beyond about 4 feet away. Try this: while having a serious conversation with someone notice that you are most likely within 4 or so feet away from the person. Now while continuing to chat slowly start stepping backwards and notice how it feels to be speaking from 5, 6, 8 or then 10 feet away. It feels like there is this emotional gap between you and the other person that is similar in size to the distance you physically are from each other. Funky huh? So when trying to show any kind of intimacy with the subject you have to often be in that conversational space. Thus the 85mm lens comment. Got it?

As in my work such as the documentaries on the wrestling team and the culture of the roller derby team I want the images to make the viewer feel like they are right next to the subject of my stories and that is because I am physically right there when I take the photos. But there are some special aspects of physical activities that aren’t about motion but the ripple effect it produces on the body and the emotions. It’s in the eyes and written on the face and body.

When I went to cover the Tough Mudder event that was happening in the mountains surrounding Beaver Creek, Colorado I had an idea. Ya see the Tough Mudder is kinda brutal. It’s a 9 mile course that is based on a British special forces training exercise whereby each participant simply needs to finish. In it you run from obstacle to gnarly obstacle and basically get beat to a pulp. Greased monkey bars anyone? Well I knew that it was going to be visually interesting but besides the photos of tired runners climbing walls and running through mud fields to hop over hay bales while being blasted with fire hoses, I knew that the most telling images would to me be at the end. Not them struggling to cross the finish line but what they looked like at the end of it all: exhausted, elated and filthy.

Therefore I set up the most basic of studios: white seamless paper on a north facing wall near the finish line and went to find interesting faces. To keep everything simple I shot all the portraits with my AF-D 50mm f/1.4 set to f/2.8. That was it. I got everything out of the way to quickly get a few frames of the dirty and often still gasping Mudders. Did I mention that the event took place at an elevation of over 8,000 feet?

 

This is going to be the beginning of a series that I plan on doing where I shoot portraits of the finishers of endurance races and other physically punishing events. I’ve done some research and hope to get long distance runners, cyclists and the like. No professionals, just (ab?)normal people who enjoy getting kicked in the shorts.

It's not what it seems ...

I'm not a sports photographer. I'm just a photographer who likes to shoot sports. Wha? Yeah it has to do with that thing called "the score". I don't care who wins and many times the game winning hit, kick, basket, goal or what have you doesn't happen in a very dramatic way. If it's soccer, which I love, that game winning goal might happen early in the first half when neither of the teams thinks that much of it as there would be loads of time to catch up and flip the score. So even if you get an image of that quick shot which had little visually going for it, well, it's not that much to look at. Many times the best and most interesting images that come from a sporting event have little to do with the final score. Instead they are found moments of motion or emotion. Those are the ones that I most dig.

I forget who said it but I was covering a golf tournament and was moving along with a few other press photogs and someone said, "It can be a lovely day, great weather, gorgeous backgrounds, nice light, good angles, perfect access and regardless of what moments we capture all we are going to bring back are photos of guys playing golf". That really hit me. Except for a few publications who are dedicated to being visually important and are willing to explore the sporting world beyond "the game winning" image most publications who visually cover sports are doing so often want literal imagery. They want a photo of "Steve Bigun of The Flaming Bongos who clinched their win over The Blue Nothings" regardless of how boring it is. ArrrGH!

So like many photogs I make sure that I get the necessary action/winner shots but I try really hard to make the rest of my coverage more interesting than just "that". But I'll tell ya, if the sport doesn't have a ball it is often very tough to make it interesting. For instance even worse than golf are foot races. I've covered the famous Bolder Boulder 10K race quite a few times and man-alive you bring back lots and lots of pictures of, uh, guys running. The trick is to have tricks and to dig deep to attempt to see something that isn't that obvious.

So when I was assigned to cover the 5430 Triathlon I knew the pitfalls: running and cycling. Not bashing cycling at all, I was the captain of my cycling team, but guys on bikes are just as boring, if not more so, than running. I do think that swimming is fun to photograph because the water makes things interesting due to it's non-linear and thus slightly chaotic nature. Thus, having shot this kind of thing before, I knew that the best opportunities for interesting images are during the start and transition from swim to land.

The light was less than amazing due to clouds on the horizon. I've shot this before with a glorious sunrise but not this time. But with the blue sky, everyone on black wetsuits and red caps it made for some interesting color. Shot this while the first wave contestants were getting final instructions. To me it's largely a study in rhythm.

As they headed to the water I went onto the dock where they pass on the way to the open water and with the camera held with the grip up so as to get it as close to the water as possible I shot the next wave as they passed by. I had no way to see through the viewfinder but once you get to know your lenses and how focal lengths see, it's not that hard to "blind" shoot and get pretty close to what you intend to capture.

Earlier I set up a camera as a remote at the waters edge to get a low angle on the competitors as they left the water and got on land. To me this can be some of the more interesting images because they are on this course backlit and are dripping. The back lighting is a problem but just using regular fill flash doesn't do the trick for two reasons: 1, your flash sync speed isn't fast enough to prevent ghosting of the motion and 2) light on the camera isn't interesting at all.

My solution was to mount the camera on a ground plate with a wide-ish lens and trigger the camera via my Pocket Wizard radio remote. I then hooked two of my Nikon SC-17 TTL sync cords together so that I could attach my SB-800 in high speed sync mode and not have that little delay that happens when you use the wireless TTL so that I could predict my moments more accurately. Using high speed sync eats up flash power so I used a Nikon SD-8a battery pack to reduce the recycle time down to about 1.5 seconds. This all enabled me to get 8-9 feet from the lens axis and produce a more dynamic and sculpted light on the wet motion.

So even though I shoot sports to me it's really just an excuse to try and photograph things in motion and if possible the emotive/evocative moments that surround the game.

 

A video confession

I’ve been watching a lot of tutorials on video color grading lately. For those of you not working with video in a professional context that means that I’ve been learning how to adjust and tone the video that I shoot much like you work with still images. But not at all.

 

Ya see when I become Emperor things will be made consistent. We won’t have 32 different terms for the same thing so that when you learn a new discipline that really isn’t that far away from your main body of knowledge you don’t have to pick up a thousand new words for things that you basically already know how to do. Thus I’ve been learning how to “color grade” video using basically the same kind of tools that I’d use to process a still photo. And friends I gotta tell ya I just can’t believe how picky these guys get about the subtleties of the color in their video, I mean wow.

 

So why the heck am I torturing myself with this rot? Well I’ve been editing a large-ish video project that I’ve been shooting for a local client of mine and it’s made me want to have a better and larger set of processing tools. I have an excellent video editing suite but in the past nearly all my video work has been news/editorial and just like when being a still image news photog you aren’t supposed to play with the image in post. But for commercial work it needs to be cleaner, more interesting and maybe even slick. Depending.

 

This is a lot like how I had to learn how to actually use Photoshop for more than cropping. Now when I’m shooting portraits and the client wants, for instance, some skin smoothing I can do that easily. But back “then” I had no idea how it was done.

 

Now I’m not interested in doing feature films at all as that is way too much like work for me but I do really enjoy shooting and editing video. Much like the audio based multimedia that I’ve been working with for years video is just another way of telling stories. Unfortunately in the past when I’d have my video camera rig on me I would also have two still cameras as well making for a very clumbsy me. It’s very hard to shoot stills and video of the same time and not make a mess of it. But I had clients who wanted both and since they were paying for it and knew that it means that you have at best adequate stills and passable video, I did the best with what I had to work with.

Oh and for those of you who haven’t seen the mess that video editing looks like here is a screen shot of all the cuts, bits and tweeks I had to do just to get that two minute and a smidge piece to look that way. Ugh!

I got my first video only assignment last year and it was a very freeing experience. I was to shoot the annual fireworks held at the University of Colorado’s football stadium, (boring!) but we got a torrential downpour (Yah, bad weather!) so I spent two hours with my lens not pointing up at a bunch of meaningless flashing lights. The weather became the story so I shot it that way. Considering that I put it together on daily deadline and did it all muh-self I’m pretty happy with it all things considered. It’s raw and such but for my first “real” news video I can live with it. (It’s much better than the stuff I did when I also had to shoot stills!)

 

So anyway I’m doing more commercial video now and it’s freaking great. I’m be able to get good sound, put the subject in good lighting, and do two dozen takes with varying angles to then edit it together and with some post production have it, well, look good. She-ZAM!

And it’s funny because I was at a very cool seminar a few weeks ago all about better reaching advertising clients and one of the topics was “do you need to shoot video as well” and the consensus was that if you can that’s cool but to do it right takes more than just handing you, the qualified still photographer, a camera that shoots video. There is the audio, the lighting, the direction of the subject and all the editing/grading that makes it work. But I was chuckling to myself because I am not nor will I ever be a junior Spielberg but I do think that I can fake it all well enough to have people write me a check for the work that I do.

Oh and I’m just about 3 chapters away from finishing “On Directing Film” by David Mamet and I think that his insights may have effected my still photography brain even more than my moving pictures brain. How did that happen?