Here’s a photo gallery that includes all the albums and photos I’ve uploaded over time.  There are some beautiful, fascinating places out there! Enjoy!

For best viewing experience, click the full screen button in the upper right corner of the gallery: 

For those who prefer watching videos, I’ve got a few uploaded on Vimeo. Click here to view my channel.

Canon just finished its announcement of the first camera in a new line of digital cinema cameras, the C300.  Along with the rest of the film-making world, I was pretty excited to see what Canon was announcing today.  It was clear that they were woken up a bit by the sleeper success of the 5DmkII, and decided to build a camera with the same small form factor benefits but with the pro-video features the 5D was lacking.  Namely, uncompressed video, XLR ins, HDSDI out, reduced rolling shutter, etc.  I had hoped to see these sort of features with perhaps 2K resolution and 60fps at something around the $6-7K price range… a natural extension for the democratized DSLR video market.  But alas, the MSRP is a whopping $20K, and it records no higher than 1080P 30fps.  At that price I would’ve expected at least 4K at 30fps and 2K at 60fps.

They did mention that this is the first camera in this series, so maybe they’re doing like Apple has done with the iPad and are leaving themselves a nice upgrade roadmap.  All that means to me, though, is no early adopting on this camera.  What a disappointment.

Here are a few shots of the camera from Cinevate:

I finally picked up a time lapse controller for my Canon 5D, and I’ve been eager to get out and try my hand at this visually-arresting video technique. The carnival is in town for two weeks, so I ran down on Thursday night when I figured the crowds would not be overwhelming.

I was only there for about 5 minutes when a manager approached me.  I figured I was being kicked out, but he let me stay and even asked for my card.  Yesterday, he stopped by my office to check out this video and some other photos I took.  There’s now a possibility they could become a client.  You never know where your next client could come from…

I hadn’t read the manual on the controller, and I wasn’t sure about the length of the intervals, but I guessed and it seems that it worked OK. Perhaps a slower shutter speed on some of the daylight series would have helped them not look so choppy. I kept the camera on full manual exposure settings and focus so that there would be continuity in exposure, etc.

My favorite thing I discovered about time lapse is the power of using CR2 files, which allowed me to coax the richness of color with an ease you simply don’t have when simply color-correcting regular video. Also, I didn’t bother to go above my comfort zone of 1080P, but it was cool to realize I suddenly had the ability to render out a 4K video if I wanted to.

I shot this mostly with a 17-40 f4L. I did shoot a little bit of regular video, which I mixed in here and there.

One issue that remains a challenge for me is to figure out how to get my video to look as good on Vimeo as it does when played from my local computer. I’m seeing color management as a key item I need to figure out. Anyone have pointers for me?

I switched my shooting from jpeg to raw several years ago.  Even though file sizes jumped from 6MB to 35MB for each image, I haven’t looked back since.  Camera Raw offers tremendous post-production control over your images.  The camera simply records the raw capture of the image and doesn’t process any of the settings.  Since settings like white balance and sharpening are not baked into the file, you can manipulate all of these settings after the fact.  This allows for great flexibility in Photoshop or Lightroom to tweak nearly every aspect of the image other than focus and framing.

This is certainly nothing new to most photographers out there, and like I said, I’ve been shooting raw for several years now.  So why write about it now?  Well, I’m used to being stuck with ‘baked’ files when shooting video on the 5D, but I just shot my first time-lapse a few days ago at a carnival here in Danbury.  Time-lapse uses still images, so I was able to bring all the wonderful power of raw to a video project for the first time.  It was like discovering the magic of raw all over again, and it makes me wish it were available for all my video projects.  Yes, I could get video Raw that with a Red One, but I don’t have the budget to drop $50K on a new camera at the moment.

Anyway, I’ll post the time-lapse experiment soon, but I figured I’d post a few before/after shots from images in the time lapse.  Raw brings incredible vigor to an otherwise lifeless image.  Here are a few examples of before & after:

shoot first, focus later.

I was just checking out an interesting new technology rumored to be on its way to consumers later this summer. It’s called a light field camera, and it’s a fundamentally different way of taking photographs. It lets you shoot first and focus later. It also lets you shoot in 3-D!

Traditional photography records all the light coming from a specific direction at a specific point in space.  This is accomplished by the lens focusing directional, incoming rays of light onto the sensor or film.  A light field, on the other hand, is the light traveling in all directions.  It includes all the light rays in a scene.

For example, think of a scene lit with a single light bulb illuminating a table with a red apple on it.  Light travels from the bulb to the apple.  The apple absorbs all the spectrum of light except for the red which gets bounced off the apple.  This light, however, bounces in many different directions, which is why we can see the apple from many different angles if we moved around the scene.  A traditional camera would record the light bouncing off the apple from a specific angle.  If you were to move the camera around the scene, taking pictures from every possible angle, you could theoretically capture the entire light field.

Lytro is a new company that claims to have created the first light field camera.  Clearly, the new camera captures only a partial light field, as it would be impossible to capture an entire light field from a scene.  They haven’t released a lot of information yet about their product, and there is no specific release date or pricing information.  Also, there are no pictures of what the new camera looks like, though it allegedly is small enough to fit in your pocket.  Their web site does have a gallery of photos taken with the new camera, and it allows you to play with the photos, adjusting the focal point on the fly.

I’m curious how the lenses will work.  It seemed to me at least from the photos available in Lytro’s gallery, that the process can only duplicate a moderately narrow depth of field, typical of what is found on most consumer point-and-shoot cameras.  I’m also not sure how zoom and field-of-view will work.  I’ll be quite interested to see this tech in action once the cameras are available.

shoot first, focus later.

Photo By Lytro / Richard Koci Hernandez

I just spent two very quick, very busy days at the 2011 NAB show in Las Vegas.  As usual, there was tons to see and lots to learn.  Highlights for me were, in no particular order:

• Trying out the Angeneux Optimo lenses. Sadly, $50K for a lens is outside my budget for the time being.
• Seeing the Kessler Crane Revolution head and Orion controller in action.
• Getting hands-on with the Cinevate stuff.  Most of my current rig is made by Cinevate, so it’s great to see the rest of the product line first-hand.
• Getting an up-close look of the new Red Scarlet in action as it wandered around the show floor.

• Checking out a promising-looking new powered cage by ECC Tools at the Oconner booth.
• Trying out the Phantom Gold super high speed camera. Again, sadly $150K for a camera is outside my budget for the time being.
• Meeting Vincent Laforet, Dennis Wood of Cinevate, and Mitch Aunger of Planet5d.
• Lots of 4K eye candy by Christie, Panasonic, and others.

For those of you who haven’t seen my photos on facebook, or just want to be able to view them full-screen, here’s a gallery from my recent trip to Europe.  Photos are from a couple of towns north of Paris, the French and Swiss Alps in the haute savoie region, parts of the Rhone region of France, and from Prague in the Czech Republic.

Enjoy!

River Design began offering video services late last year, with significant investments in a professional rig. We’ve seen some early success with several projects already completed (I’ll be posting those soon), but I was most impressed with my recent experience with the iPhone.  While on vacation in France & Switzerland, I decided to whip out my iPhone and film a bit of the beautiful mountains while I was skiing.  I then did a quick edit in about 10 minutes and uploaded the resulting video to youtube.  All of it was done right on my phone.  It’s not a terribly professional result, but considering that the camera, editing and encoding package, and uploader all fit in about 1/5th of my pocket, I was pretty amazed.

Check it out for yourself:

And as a little bonus, here’s one I shot with my iPhone and the GoPro Hero, mounted to a chest strap.  I edited this one using iMovie on my laptop, so the result, while still far from professional, is a step up from what the iPhone can produce by itself:

Hello, neglected Blog! I’ve been rather busy lately, and I fear I’ve dropped the ball a bit on our relationship. But someone has to pay the bills, right?  Well, in a feeble effort to make amends, here’s a quick post on one of the many things that has been keeping me from you.

I spent this past Saturday morning shooting people.  Two to be exact.  What’s more, I first put their arms and legs into casts.  But don’t worry, though about 400 shots were fired, no blood was shed, and the police should leave me well enough alone.

Saturday’s photo shoot was for some product packaging for one of my clients, G4 Medical. The products are cast protectors, used to keep a cast or bandage dry while taking a bath or shower.  We shot at two lovely homes in Greenwich, where I was able to find bathrooms large enough to fit my lighting gear and allow enough room to use my 50mm lens without distortion.  Here are a few shots from the day.

And Blog, please don’t be jealous… I’ll be making a conscious effort to devote a little more time to you in the near future. I promise.

Entering the Canon Expo

I spent today at the once-every-five-years Canon Expo in New York. As expected, the hot topics on the seminar agendas were related to shooting video with DSLRs.  I attended sessions with Steven Poster (president of International Cinematographers Guild and Director of Photography for a slew of feature films from Blade Runner to Cats and Dogs), Shane Hurlbut (Director of Photography for Terminator Salvation and upcoming Acts of Valor), and other HDSLR mainstays such as Vincent Laforet.  I was particularly impressed with the work Shane has done with the upcoming Acts of Valor, an action film about the Navy SEALS. He shot all the main action shots with Canon 5Ds and 7Ds, and the results were stunning. Even more interesting, when the film is released next year, it will screen in over 300 IMAX theaters, further proof that the Canon’s image quality can meet the demands of the big screen.

The expo itself presented an impressive, sweeping display of Canon’s pioneering technology. I got to try out the new 8-16mm fisheye zoom, but Canon staff wouldn’t allow me to save any pictures to my CF card because the lens is still in development.  In fact, the lens at the show is the only of its kind in North America. I also tested a prototype for the new 70-300 mm zoom.

Most impressive, however, were the new 8K monitor and 4K cameras, both still in development. The images produced by the 8K monitors were simply astonishing. One lady next to me mistook the 30-inch displays to be 3-D, but they are actually just super high resolution 2-D displays. In fact, they are 4X the resolution of 1080P HD. Think of the iPhone 4 display’s resolution, but applied to a 30-inch monitor. Photographs were absolutely stunning, and video looked indistinguishable from real life. Unfortunately, something like this can only be seen to be appreciated. My guess is that this technology is a long way from the living room, but it should find a fabulous fit for photography studios.

I would have liked to see more DSLR video rigs on hand, but I was able to do some test shooting with some of the new lenses. They did have a Cinevate rail system to try out, and a Redrock Micro shoulder-mount rig, but I would have liked to see more by Zacuto and Cinevate.

It’s exciting to think what we’ll be seeing in 5 years at the next Canon Expo.  I imagine that the world of cinematography will be almost entirely converted from film to digital. And hopefully I’ll see one of those 8K monitors in my studio…