OK, so for those of you whose boredom has reached desperate levels, here's a place where you can keep tabs on what's going on in my whirlwind life. Wondering who I am or why I started this blog? Find out here.
You can browse my most recent posts below, use the calendar on the right to browse by date, or simply search for something using the search box on the top right.
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 …continue reading »
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 …continue reading »
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.
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!
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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:
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.
