I want one of these!

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.

It was filmed on a Canon 5DmkII and edited in After Effects and Premier.  It also includes my first experiment with my green screen.  I used Boris ChromaKey, which seemed to work remarkably well.

Disclaimer: it was around 3:30 am when I filmed myself for the voiceover, and I look like I’m a bit stoned.  It was also right on the heels of working a 70+ hour week, so I was just a tad fatigued. Oh well, it was too late to re-record; and I would’ve just been more tired anyway.

Music:

Bach Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 in G Major by Yo-Yo Ma
Valse Frontenac by George Winston
Sailing by The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards
A Mother’s Heart by William Joseph

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:

Here are a few shots from Thursday and Friday.  Shane Hurlbut is a director of photography for many feature films, including Terminator Salvation and The Greatest Game Ever Played. He shot an upcoming movie, Act of Valor using Canon 5D mk IIs for about 80% of the movie. He’s also teamed up with Letus to create a new series of DSLR cinema rigs.  Got to demo the rigs with the president of Letus and Julien Lasseur from Hurlbut Visuals. The series of shots of the model were from a workshop I helped with at the Westcott booth, presented by Andy from Unknown Photographer. A few people wanted to see the final shots to compare notes on the strobe techniques Andy used.

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?

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

• 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.

Enjoy!