photography and cinematography

Wed - September 22, 2010

The best camera is the one you have with you.

My wife shot this with her iphone while we were on a walk. She was probably walking when she did it.

I'm always on the lookout for textures which I layer onto 3d models or whatnot. While picking up doors at Lowes, i looked down and saw this on our cart. I shot it with my iphone.

I own a lot of really nice lenses from Canon, Nikon and Leica, but they're all just paperweights if they're not with me when I see something worth shooting.

Three things I wish I knew when I started shooting:

1. It's the shooter not the gear that makes the picture.

2. Shoot with your eyes, there is beauty anywhere and everywhere. To that effect, try to have a camera with you at all times.

3. Anyone who insists on a particular brand of camera over all others is overly invested in their gear and has not learned lesson 1.

Sorry I haven't been blogging much lately, there have been some changes in my life that have made blogging not part of my regular routine. A pretty big change in my lifestyle, my good friends know what I'm talking about - the iphone 4.

No seriously, I never open my laptop anymore, everything I used to do on my laptop is on my iphone. Except this ancient software I still use to blog, which is why I keep forgetting to blog.

Summer vacation is over, we now resume our regularly scheduled blogging.

Posted at 10:19 PM

Wed - March 24, 2010

How do you make a 90 foot robot?

I missed my deadline. I finished the album cover for Reinvention about two weeks after it had left the building. The mock up cover was suddenly the real cover because I wasn't finished with the photos and was still revising the mixes and mastering when the hard deadline arrived. Actually we were 3 days past the hard deadline but the girl at EMI was gracious enough to grant us that boon. There are many stories of artists against manufacturing deadlines. Once Dave drove our 15 passenger van like he was in the Paris to Dakar rally to make the last fedex pickup at the airport. On a TobyMac record, I learned there is such a thing as same day delivery. They even picked it up at my house at the requested 4 a.m. It felt like a drug deal. I was waiting for federal agents to leap out yelling "hands in the air! do it now!"

You can see my original mock up if you scroll down a couple entries. It looks ok at small sizes but once it's blown up, it looks wrong to me.

I started roughing this out with a pencil. It was one of several cover concepts for Reinvention, I was trying to convey the idea of Superchick but bigger and louder and over the top, so rendering our iconic logo as a 90 foot robot fit the bill nicely. I had to squeeze time in for these cover concepts after we were done recording for the day since we were furiously trying to finish the album. Typically I would start at around 1 in the morning.

Here's my original quick sketch. I do all my sketching in a little notepad they gave me when we were at the cartoon network. You can read about that experience here: http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1399468893/E20060918145003/index.html

After I had my quick sketch down, I opened Illustrator to create my 2d vector image. I don't really know Illustrator, it just came with my Adobe production package. Fortunately it's not that different from Freehand, the software I learned on. The principles of vector illustration are the same and if you paid attention during geometry, its not hard. Once I got the hang of it, I made variations on the robot till one of them felt right.

If you squint, you can see I mocked up the very original cover idea in the middle. It was meant to look like an old dog-eared operational/repair manual for a robot. Kind of a cross between a Chilton's manual and the Filter Short Bus cover. It was cool in my head but boring on the screen.

Since I was pressed for time, I tried to figure out what I could do that wouldn't take a lot of time. I wasn't trying to come up with a great cover, at this point, I would settle for any cover.

Since the robot was a two dimensional silhouette, I thought if put it against a sunset I could fudge it just enough to trick the eye. We have this field behind our house and every time the sky looks compelling, I shoot background plates for this kind of thing. Last summer was meterologically violent enough to make the show Storm Chasers interesting so I had plenty of dramatic sunsets to choose from. I was mocking up the idea so I grabbed a low res jpeg instead of my original file which was buried on a disk somewhere. I was working quick and dirty. A decision I would come to regret later.

Of course the composite looked awful, so I added some lens flare. I've been going through a lens flare phase. It's been in a lot of my work, including the music video. Len flare is tricky to add to a moving picture! I have found that a good way to ensure your wife will not have sex with you is to detail the creative way J.J. Abrams used lens flare in Star Trek. Especially if you do it while the movie is playing. To further seal the deal, watch the "making of" video and when they talk about lens flare, keep saying "see! didn't I say that they had a guy shining a light into the camera?" Once while I was pointing out common visual themes in Bruckheimer movies, my wife interrupted me with "Why do you think I care?"

With enough lens flare, the composite looked acceptable but it needed a sense of scale. Sometimes our backyard looks like the set of Alfred Hitchcocks the Birds, so naturally I take pictures. We live in the suburbs so if I see anything interesting, I shoot it. I am like the native american indians, I use every part of the buffalo. The birds helped it feel more like a 90 foot robot and less like someone in a Halo helmet from Toys R Us.

We now had a low res mockup of my idea. I sent it and an entirely different cover concept around and polled opinions. It came back 50/50 so I chose the easier to finish of the 2 options. Or so I thought.

When it came time to do the high res final version, not only was it unexpectedly difficult to reassemble the elements in a way that matched the charm of the low res one, it became clear that the low resolution was hiding some issues. Namely, when you blew up the image it was obvious that it was a two dimensional shape pasted in. It was not going to make a good poster. I gave up around five in the morning. I crawled into bed a defeated man as I listened to the birds chirping their good mornings. Stupid birds.

When I awoke a few hours later it was clear I was going to have to create it in three dimensions. I'd been trying to arrange a version of Maya on the advice of my friends at Dreamworks, but Maya costs $4000, I've been wanting to learn 3D animation ever since Neill Blomkamp's commercial for Citroen. I was on a tight timeline and I did not have a copy of Maya, nor $4000 to burn on it, so I downloaded Blender. Blender is an animation program similar to Maya but free. It's fairly powerful but it's interface is very unique and I had to teach it to myself in a couple hours, it was a lot to learn. EDIT: as I read this, I realize that I glossed over many hours of confusion and frustration. It's not like anything I've ever used before. It was like learning to walk again, but with 3 legs. I say this because it makes extensive use of the middle mouse button. Like me, many of you are probably saying, but the mouse doesn't have a middle button... oh yes it does my pretties.

Creating something 3D in the computer starts with a wireframe mesh in the shape of your object, like if you built it out of toothpicks. Then, you skin the wireframe, like wrapping it in paper and finally you tell the computer where the camera is and where the lights are and the computer spits out an image for you. Here's a detail of how I modeled the hands, as you can see, it's made up of cylinders, spheres and cubes essentially.

and here's how the computer spit it out when I was done. I didn't model the robot properly, I just wanted to get close enough so we could see it existed in 3 dimensions. I tried to position the virtual lights so they would match the positions and colors in the background plate but still give some definition to the model. The camera I put low to the horizon looking up, as you would be if you were looking at a 90 foot tall robot.

I composited it into my background plate, applied lens flare and birds and for a final touch, gave it a bit of motion blur as it were shot from by a panicky person from a car and also a touch of film grain, as if the person had not joined the digital revolution, which would explain the panic since if they were not comfortable with digital technology, a 90 foot robot would be even more cause for alarm. Many hours later and two weeks after the deadline, I was done even if it was a pyrrhic victory. I proudly showed it to my wife who said :

"its head is too small, the original one looks better."

ah! the joys of being married to your marketing director. No really, she's the director of marketing at the label. How do you think I met her? I never leave the studio.

For those of you who would like to see the fruits of my labor in hi res, you can download it in a conveniently wallpaper sized 1600x1200 at:
www.maxwax.smugmug.com

Posted at 03:26 PM

Mon - March 15, 2010

Stroboscopic

What do you do when you don't have time to shoot new photos for the cd booklet and you're sick of band photos anyways? Well you fake some, that's what. I composited these out of raw footage from the Cross the Line music video. Fortunately the Red One shoots big enough images to make this possible. At 24fps I had plenty of frames to choose from. I'm always trying to capture the energy of the band and I thought this was a cool way to freeze motion on paper.

If you wanted to do this photographically, the correct way to do it is a very long exposure and a series of flashes during the exposure. You'll need a flash that has multi flash ability or very simply a cheap strobe from radio shack. I haven't tried this in awhile, but here's a shot from the last time I messed with it. You can find that original post here;

http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/iblog/C1484559475/E559226832/index.html

and if you haven't seen it, the cross the line music video and a short piece on how we did it all by ourselves here:

http://www.maxwax.smugmug.com/

and if you ever wanted to learn wire flying, it's all there too.

Posted at 02:35 AM

Mon - October 12, 2009

Wire flying

I posted some additional pictures and diagrams on wire flying at:

www.maxwax.smugmug.com

I did actually write out a blog post on all the crazy hurdles we had to overcome to pull off this video, but it got to be the length of a small novella. It was so long my wife didn't even want to read it, so I just posted some pictures instead.

wire flying is dangerous, so for legal reasons, I advise you not to even look at the pictures.

Posted at 03:55 PM

Wed - September 16, 2009

Making Cross The Line

I remember being in a movie theater, amazed that what I was hearing was recorded and written in our basement. Long before it was popular, we were making dirt cheap records in our basement without adult supervision. We carried that DIY ethic into our photography and album design and we've always wanted to make our own videos but it was too expensive to do so. Fortunately, what's happened in the graphic design, audio and photography worlds is happening in video and the barriers to entry are now largely about time and sweat. The recent advances in technology is giving rise to a new class of multi media artist. I look forward to the revolution being webcast.

Here's a short piece on how we shot a video by ourselves with a miniscule budget.

http://www.maxwax.smugmug.com/

(on a side note, the smug mug people have been great to work with.)

Posted at 01:32 PM

Wed - September 2, 2009

the music video at last.

So here it is finally, the music video that has occupied my entire brain space and left no room for blogging. I will have more coming about how we did it, but for now, I'll just post it.

see it in high quality here:
http://www.maxwax.smugmug.com/

or in normal quality here:
http://www.vimeo.com/6393547

in both cases I believe you can download the original file to see it without stuttering if you have a slower internet connection.

Posted at 02:52 PM

Wed - June 10, 2009

We built this city

Just finished this shoot for centricity, it's a band called 16 cities. In brainstorming a concept for them I wanted to construct a city in photoshop made out of shots from 16 different cities. Sadly there wasn't budget for travel to 16 different cities. I almost always come up with an idea I love that's about 50 times the existing budget, I'm sure I annoy marketing directors to no end.

I have been drawing more influence lately from film and tv promo images so I wanted a glossy bright look that was slightly surreal.

After Steve Ford and I did some location scouting on a conveniently overcast day (we love overcast for shooting). I evaluated the test shots and I settled on this location for the city shot.

What made this shoot challenging, and there's always a challenge, was that the band would be in town for 2 days, only one of which they would be available for this shoot and this was only one of 4 set ups, 3 of which were outdoors. There's only about 2 hours in the evening and 2 hours in the morning that are good for light and that's assuming that it's not pouring rain. I was hoping for overcast actually. So I had to make an outdoor shoot work regardless of the weather on a fixed day.

Since it didn't look like it was going to be overcast, I had to do a lot of testing.

This location is 15 minutes from my house, I drove out there every 3 hours to shoot test pictures and evaluate the changing light. I rode my motorcycle so the task wasn't an onerous as one might think. The day before the shoot the band had a wardrobe fitting and while they were doing that, I did test shots of the band so we could evaluate wardrobe and I could get a sense of how I wanted to light them. When I got home, I made a test composite of this entire shot, so I would know how I wanted them to stand. We didn't have budget to block the road off so people and lights would have to move on and off the road and I would have to know what I wanted. It's hard to make decisions when you might get run over.

I had a backup plan to shoot everyone in studio and mimic overcast lighting in the studio and composite the shot. I tested that idea by pointing my biggest soft box at my large white ceiling to get the softest most diffuse lighting I could, similar to cloud cover. I took a picture of myself under those lighting conditions and then composited myself in. It looked hilarious and not in a good way. So we were going to have to use golden hour for this location. I was able to make the other location work primarily by shooting in the shade. (I had sent steve out to the location at 4pm to make sure this was possible). We arrived at our main location around an hour before I figured the light would be good.

We got everyone sorted through wardrobe and then did a series of test shoots to finalize where people would stand. Traffic wasn't too bad, but we definitely had to have spotters in each direction to let us know when cars were coming. We used white gaff tape to mark everyone's positions as well as lights and camera. I used 2 lights, one main fill on an umbrella and one rim light. My main light was an sb800 and my rim was a vivitar 285hv on boom stands so I could get the height and angle I wanted. I used the alien bees wireless units and they performed very nicely. We had people assigned to the lights and they would walk on and off with the talent when someone yelled "car!"

When the light started to get good, we shot a series of exposures in between cars. Then we would walk off and wait 10 minutes. As the sun starts to go down, it changes literally ever 10 minutes. So we'd walk everyone back out, reposition lights and camera and shoot for another 5 minutes. We shot some without lights, some with only key and so on. We were out there for probably two and a half hours. I was happy about 30 minutes into it, but I kept shooting till it got dark just to see if the light would get any better.

When I got back, I had a series of images with varying light conditions. There were 2 sets that gave me the look I wanted and I picked out a shot and got to work.

My B plan for the sixteen different cities was to have all my friends who are shooters send me their skyline shots and make one uber city out of that. Everyone agreed to send shots. All my friends are very very busy so in the end, only Jen Kroll made the deadline, so that's her shot of Chicago in the background. The sky I shot the week before. It was a little challenging to composite this in a way that looked natural. It doesn't look realistic at all, but I wanted it to look a little surreal. It was probably 8-10 hours of post for this single shot. I was sad to walk away from my concept of a single city made up of landmarks from 16 different cities but I realized that probably only one obsessive compulsive person would realize that it was made up of 16 different cities. People would probably just assume it was vegas...

I tend to get calls where people want me to come out for quick shoot, usually just one set up, 2-3 hours. I wanted to illustrate that for this single shot that I saw in my head I spent an entire day in pre production and an entire day in post production. Counting scouting and conceptualization, probably 24 hours of time went into this shot. That's 3 full work days. It's not the most profitable way to work, but it is the only way I know how to work. I conceptualize the idea, I test it usually to the point of mocking it up completely, than I shoot it and then overshoot it. Then I detail it, till it looks right to me. If you shoot enough, anyone can assemble a good portfolio from getting lucky. When the band is only in for one day then you can't bank on getting lucky.

Since I'm not the kind of person who gets lucky, this is how I deal with it.

Posted at 01:58 PM

Sun - January 25, 2009

5dmkII

I read once that women like movies where one person dies slowly, but guys like movies where many people die quickly.

Well just so you know, if you're not into photography, this post will seem like one person dying slowly, so you can stop here.

Otherwise, on with it!

The canon 5D has been my workhorse camera for a couple years now and most of the images you've seen here are from it. I've had the 5DmkII for awhile now and here's my general impressions.

1. Useable 1600. It's not perfectly clean in the shadows but it's definitely useable. In a pinch, you can get away with 3200 but you will see noise in the shadows. These images are 3200. If you blow them up, you can def see shadow noise. That's ok for live or documentary but not so much for some of the album or magazine cover work I do. I'd rate it as a stop better than the 5D since I used to consider 800 useable and 1600 ok for some situations. From what i've heard the Nikon D3 and D700 are still the king of the low light game, but the 5DmkII is definitely playing in the ballpark. Especially when paired with the 50 f1.2 or 85 f1.2. With either of those lenses I can shoot indoors at night, existing light. You can not underestimate the importance of an extra stop of useable ISO if you shoot in low light. I was hoping for 2 stops of improvement, but it seems like about one to me. Think about adding a stop to each of your lenses... that's a big deal. That can mean the difference between freezing the lead singer in a mid air jump or having a blur.

2. It feels slightly faster, enough so that I probably caught a shot or 2 I might have missed before when I was shooting live concert action.

3. Video. For low light video, I believe this is as good as it gets. I own a $17500 RED camera and in low light, the mkII is substantially better than the RED. For all other things, the RED is better, but for low light shooting, I think the 5DmkII is one of the best options right now. It will not automatically make you into a cinematographer however, that is a unique skill set that requires practice just like photography. In addition, the lack of manual controls and poor ergonomics for video make it slightly challenging. Nonetheless I expect to see a flood of music videos and youtube spots shot on the 5DmkII. For the money, it's an amazing deal.

4. Massive drop in price for used 5Ds. I've seen several 5Ds go for around $900. This is a huge bargain for a great camera. Almost all the work on this blog was shot with a 5D.

If I was shooting concerts, I think I'd still get a nikon D700. It has considerably better autofocus points and seems to have a slight edge for lowlight.

If I was getting started and wanting to trade up to a full frame camera, I'd get a used 5D

If I was a budding filmmaker, I'd buy a 5dmkII.

On the low end side, I've seen refurbed rebel xts going for $299 and even less than that used. It's a great time to get into digital photography.

Posted at 03:10 AM

Wed - January 14, 2009

tour poster

Took a break from working on the record to shoot this tour poster for the boys.

For you shooters - large overhead softbox is the main light, smaller softbox underneath to control shadows, hard lights in back for the rims. If you want hard rims, you have to use a hard light source.....

Posted at 12:56 PM

Tue - January 6, 2009

Cintiq

I've been wanting a cintiq for a couple years now. It's a wacom screen you can actually draw on with a pen, instead of using a mouse. Technically you can draw on all screens with a sharpie but you only get to do it once. It's a bit of expensive kit, so I was worried it was going to end up being a paperweight. (I'm talking to you sony psp!)

I've only had it for a bit, but I find it improves my work flow with
photography - masking difficult areas and hand retouching
video - rotoscoping and wire removal
design - adding hand drawn elements
audio - increases audio editing speed

So basically you can have it back over my cold dead body.

I ended up getting the 21 instead of the 12 based on Kevin's advice. Kevin works at a big animation house. The kind that make movies about ursine martial artists. I know him and another guy there named Tim. Tim used to work at a company that made movies about vegetables that sing. It was good advice.

I got mine as a floor demo for $1800. I've since seen it refurbed for $1500. The 12 inch model is around $1000. If you don't need to be on the mac side, look for an older tablet (like from motion computing) that uses the wacom screen technology. I have seen them for around $650 on closeout and you could probably get a used one for $400.

This pic from above is one of my first quick tests. I was trying something in the marvel comics style for a tour poster.

Posted at 01:11 PM

Mon - December 29, 2008

old made new part deux

As promised, here are the instructions, although there are already many tutorials to be found on the web. This is called TTV and it stands for Through The Viewfinder. It's a way of adding some vintage crustiness to digitals sparkling cleanliness. Essentially you find an old camera and you point your digital camera at it's viewfinder. Some people use old cameras that have focusing screens, some people don't. A popular camera to use is the kodak duaflex and it's later versions the II and III. It goes for about $15 on ebay, something I found out when I bid $20 on 5 different auctions and ended up winning 4 cameras. woops.

The duaflex does not have a visible focusing screen and though it's widest aperture is f8, the viewfinder doesn't go through the lens and seems much brighter than f8. It's relatively easy to disassemble for cleaning, although some would argue the dirt and crap is why you bought it in the first place.

You're going to need a macro lens, or a bellows setup like I have above. To get the biggest image possible, I used an old manual focus nikon 85mm lens on a bellows. Any old macro lens will do really. Then you mount the duaflex as close as you can get it to the lens and keep it in focus. You really don't need something as elaborate as what I made, I've seen people use cardboard tubes. I built it this way cause I have an extra something in mind to do with the rig.

After you have your macro lens mounted and your duaflex at the right distance, you need to block the light leaks, so you should fashion a black tube of some kind. I made mine out of black poster board and gaff tape.

You're just trying to keep the light from reflecting off the viewfinder. It doesn't have to be perfect. Most designs I've seen use the tube itself as the load bearing element that holds the camera. It would weigh a lot less than doing what I did.

Having shot just a little with this monster rig, I must say it's very odd to shoot with. The duaflex reverses the image left to right and all your motions must correspondingly reverse. I've contemplated putting a lens in the rig to flip it or using some kind of mirror. Also, it's hard to get it up to eye level since I'm looking down through the camera. I have some ideas for how to improve these things and I'll post if they worked out.

I don't have any really great shots using this rig yet, but here's something I shot just to show you roughly what it looks like.

Posted at 09:18 PM

Sat - December 20, 2008

old skool meets new skool

I've been messing around with new tricks. This is a shot from my 5D but through the viewfinder of a vintage kodak duaflex. You can get them on ebay for around $15. More detailed instructions soon.

Posted at 06:59 AM

Thu - December 4, 2008

How a magazine cover gets shot...

I got a request to shoot superchick for a magazine cover, which was probably due to me being in the band and thus free. We're big fans of NBC's Heroes and the show's theme; that we have a purpose and a destiny resonates with what the band believes, so Heroes was the inspiration.

I started off by visualizing the picture in my head. I wanted it to seem as if the band was floating. I sketched out a rough drawing on an envelope, which I would show you, but I lost it. If anyone finds it, please let me know since it also had our pre amp settings on it. I am not terribly organized. The picture I drew looked somewhat like the final photo except the cables hung straight down. I thought the cables would give it a sense of height and realism so it wouldn't feel like I'd merely photoshopped people into the air.

After I had my visualized idea, I had to solve the logistics. I'd recently had to solve the wire flying problem for our music video so I was able to use that prototype for theis photo. The rig was made out of rock climbing gear from R.E.I.. I've done enough rock climbing to understand how to set anchors and tie ropes so it was only a matter of riding the lift up 40 feet in the air to set the anchors. It was a touch unnerving I'll admit to be that far up in a swaying bucket lift.

Then I had to light it.

Suspending 5 people simultaneously in the air in an aesthetically pleasing manner was a logistical nightmare so I decided to shoot each person one at a time and composite it later. This also allowed me to be in the picture. It ended up being 5 people because Brandon decided there was no way he was going to be hoisted up in the air. I respect that decision. If you've met Brandon you will understand that when he makes a decision it is to be respected.

I'd planned on using a strobe for the main light because my stands only go up to about 25 feet and I didn't want to have to hang a light as well. At it's full extension the stand can't hold an HMI so I used a lighter weight strobe with a very shallow softbox. This let me put the light right above the subject's head with them 20 feet in the air. I used fresnel CDM 150 constant lights for the side lights because once the subject was in the air I wanted to be able to aim them easily and it's not always easy to aim a strobe using the modeling light. As it turns out this would be a bad idea.

I did my testing at ground level to get my lights and exposures ball parked. The 150s weren't nearly as much light as I wanted so I had to dial the alien bees down to almost nothing. I didn't bring enough strobes to do the sidelights so I just lived with a slightly higher ASA than I would normally. I should have tested it at home first, but since we use these lights for video tests, I misjudged their brightness. This only goes to show just how much more light you can get out of a strobe than you can out of constant lights.

After I had set my exposure I hoisted my first victim in the air and set about aiming lights. It didn't last very long. Matt is usually my test subject, since he has a history of skateboarding and is not afraid of much (besides planes). It wasn't very long though before he was begging to be let down. Literally begging. Later we would discover that if you're male and you're in a harness, you should check to make sure it is set just right before you put your full bodyweight on it. I won't be more specific except to say that none of the girls suffered from nearly the same discomfort as Matt experienced.

Because of Matt's sacrifice I was able to get my exposure dialed in so we hoisted tricia into the air. When I looked at what we were getting however, I realized that the rim lights were not defining the legs enough and since i had a frensel 575 HMI I used that as a backlight to pick out the lower half of the body. It was not my intention to use a visible backlight but I just went with it. One has to think quickly when the talent is literally hanging in the air.

While in the harness, Tricia had to find ways to pose that seemed magazine cover worthy and we quickly blew through a stack of shots. I was shooting as fast as she could change expressions or positions. This is the great strength of digital. It costs nothing more to shoot 1000 shots than it does to shoot 1. I moved fast hoping I would get lucky before she became too uncomfortable. I won't get into the digital versus film argument except to say that while I find film more aesthetically pleasing, this shoot would have been prohibitively expensive on film.

After Tricia was done we shot everyone else, by Matt's second try he was able to adjust his harness in a way that did not interfere with his ability to create children later. Lastly they hoisted me in the air and Melissa clicked away on the camera which was locked down on a tripod for all the shots to ensure a consistent lens length and field of view.

After that I had to take it all down again and that creaky bucket lift freaked me out just as bad the second time.

When I got home I had 678 photos that looked like this:

Ignore the overhead lights in the picture, they didn't affect the exposure. Those are just the room lights. Out of these pictures I had to make one picture. For anyone who was playing a guitar I didn't bother hiding the harness under their clothes. I figured the instrument itself would mask it. That was another decision I would come to regret.

As you can see the harness is plainly visible. Also while we hid it on Tricia, the harness tended to pull out at the sides giving her an extra wide waist. Girls rarely like to appear wider than they are.

After I threw out all the obviously bad pictures I had it down to 108. Out of those I had to compose a pleasing but realistic composite. Here's an early rough attempt:

It's actually very close to the final but I went through several iterations, trying out different poses. It took awhile. After I was happy with my composition I sent it out to the band to see if anyone wildly objected to the way they looked. No one did, so it was time to clean up the photo. Clean up was challenging, I had to erase harnesses, ropes and lights and in some cases clone in parts of the picture that were obscured by the harnesses. If you look at the shot of Dave you can see where I had to invent parts of his arm. Also I had to make it look like everyone was in the same physical space so shadows had to be added and I made Tricia's belt reflect in Dave's guitar. I had shot a plate of the floor which I used to set the physical space. the plate looked like this:

I used that to clean the floor of assorted ropes, cable and light stand. At this point I decided that the cables looked awful. I hadn't noticed when we were shooting and I tried erasing the cables but it just lacked that touch of reality that would add an apparent height. I tried reflecting the band in the floor and that only made it look lower. So I had to reshoot the cables. I did that in my house, the setup looked like this:

My poor wife was enlisted to click the shutter and I flung cable about to get shots like this:

From that i had 132 shots of cable. I worked those in until I was happy with the composition and then spent some time making it pop with my usual post techniques. Since the color theme was black and gold I had to change everything that wasn't black or gold into black or gold. I never could get the boombox right. From about 800 shots (counting test exposures) and 35 hours of work I had one picture. One perfect picture for a magazine cover. It wasn't as awesome as I'd hoped for, but it still looked pretty great to me. The only thing left was to turn it in.

Sadly, the magazine didn't like it and it didn't run.

And that is how a magazine cover gets shot....

down.

ah well. it was all good fun anyways.

Posted at 02:39 AM

Thu - September 4, 2008

makin movies...

I've shooting tests for this video we have coming up and I'm really amped about the images I'm getting back. These images are frames from 24fps RED camera sequences. There's just a small curve applied in the first grading pass and nothing else done to them. If you notice, they look very similar to the images from my canon 5D. What really cool though is the RED is taking them at 24 frame per second as RAW. It will do up to 30 fps at 4k and 120 fps at 2k. What the DSLR is to film cameras, the RED is to movie cameras. I was fortunate to be around when the adat and pro tools upended the audio world, when the DSLR upended photography and now here we are again as RED upends the movie world. To give you an idea how much resolution is going down the pipe, the shot below is a 100% crop of the shot above. The shot below is 640 across which is the resolution width of a standard definition 4:3 television. Think about how many TVs across is the image above.

This camera is ground breaking. It's like a dream come true for me who's been dying to shoot arri 35mm for 15 years. However good it is though, it won't light or compose the scene for you. No matter how good the gear is, the operator is the most important piece of the chain, I've seen amazing RED videos (you can watch the trailer for Knowing) and I've seen really bad ones....There's a reason, these images look just like my Canon 5D images and the reason is that's how I like to light.... (if you're looking for a way to get HMIs without spending $7500 per light, this is lit with cool lights HMIs and CDMs)

Jealous? If you read this far, you probably are slightly jealous... well here's some groundbreaking news for you: the new Nikon D90. It has a movie mode. It will record 720p at 24 fps. Through nikon glass. (DX crop, thanks Ben!) It's like a RED for $1000. There are limitations for sure, but if I was looking to shoot a music video and didn't have a RED, I would buy a Nikon D90. In fact, I'm pretty sure Shara is getting one for Christmas this year....

When I told her about the D90 she said: "well if it's a $1000 RED, why didn't you buy that then?" It reinforced the sinking feeling I had when I realized all the money I'd spent on camera, lights, jib, steadicam, dolly and tripod added up to the cost of a fully loaded brand new Nissan 350z.

A long time ago, I told you guys I had a long list of things I'd wanted to do before I died and I'd crossed everything off the list except learn to make movies. Well... here we go...

If you'd like to make movies, look into the D90. It's not a RED yet, but it's hands down better than any $1000 camcorder that exists. 24p 720 through DX crop nikon glass. This is where it's going to get really really interesting.

UPDATE: Depending on your gamma setting, especially if you have a mac that's never been calibrated with a colorimeter, these images might look blown out to you. They are slightly blown out intentionally, but really not nearly as much as you're seeing.

Posted at 10:51 AM

Thu - August 21, 2008

Tricia and Nick, sitting in a tree...

Tricia got married last weekend. I don't shoot weddings, but I was put in charge of the photobooth. I ended up shooting in the same style I use for magazines and album covers since that's what I'm comfortable with. I could not believe how much fun people had! It wasn't even open bar! I was only set up for 2-4 people at a time, but groups crowded in anyways and since the music was so loud, it was all I could do to get everyone under the light. I wish I could show you all of them, but here's a sampler. These aren't photoshopped, they're pretty much right out of the camera. Who has time to photoshop 350 pictures?

oh and I did grab a handful of shots.. here's one I liked shot with the 50f1.2:

Posted at 09:26 PM

Tue - August 5, 2008

Seeing RED

Isn't this a nice shot of my wife? Looks a lot like my normal photography. So why is it in final cut and not photoshop? Because I didn't shoot it with my Canon 5D. It's a single frame from a 24fps sequence from my RED camera. You should see it in motion, it looks amazing. It's like a 5D that shoots 24fps all the way up to 120fps. I've barely scratched the surface. Just wait till I really learn to use it. Of course, no one is waiting for me, I shoot my first music video in 2 weeks. Gah!

Sorry blogging has dropped off, I've been cramming 4 years of film school into 4 months worth of time.

oh.. and producing the newsboys record with my fellow monk gocher.

Posted at 01:47 AM

Tue - June 17, 2008

Sara

I was finishing up some edits and came across this lovely shot. Sadly, the Sara Groves cover shoot for Radiant was shelved after Radiant was discontinued so they never did end up using these shots. Nonetheless, I did enjoy the shoot and wish I had time to shoot the cover for her Christmas record. I was right in the middle of finishing up our record when they asked so I had to pass. Here's hoping I'll get to work with them again. Sara is gorgeous and amazingly charming and it's hard to believe she had the same awkward high school stories we all did, but she does. Ugly ducklings do grow up to be swans.

lots of stuff going on over here. I'm backed up 3 records already. Crazy.

For you shooters, this is my old standbye. One flash off camera through an umbrella. Expose manually for background. Bring the flash up to taste. Shoot RAW. Edit to taste.

Posted at 01:19 AM

Tue - May 27, 2008

Haley n Wes

Had some fun this weekend with some friends of ours. This is a crop of a horizontal shot since the details got lost when shrunk down to the size I usually use on this blog. The full picture is better but I couldn't stand for you to miss the expression on his face. They've been married a couple weeks. :)

For you photo guys, if you couldn't guess, it's one umbrella off to camera right, although in addition to my normal sb800, I had a vivitar 285hv in there to give it more juice. By the time we shot this, we didn't need both flashes since the sun had gone down, but I used them both anyways. I split them with a cheap pc cord splitter. Incidentally, the 285HV seems like it was made by the people who make cereal box toys, but it puts out light just the same. If you need a flash and don't have much to spend: 285HV. I got the white of the dress and the black of the pants to co-exist by opening multiple raw versions, -1, -2 stops in this case and painting in what I liked about each exposure. RAW has more dynamic range than jpeg so I always shoot RAW. I might not if I was a wedding shooter with 2000 shots a day to wade through. I think this was my 16-35 but I'm not sure. I was shooting with my 50mm 1.2 at 1.2 originally but man I had trouble getting it to focus properly shooting into the sunlight.

Posted at 12:17 AM

Tue - February 5, 2008

to touch the sky...

Blogging may drop off a bit here as we are getting into the deep deep phase of recording. We're trying to get as much done before the band leaves for tour, so it's pretty much 11 hours a day every day for the next month and a half. yah baby. When we're done with this, we're all going to be wearing gold plated diapers. Here's a teaser shot that has something to do with the next record, but it's secret for now...

Posted at 10:08 AM

Tue - December 4, 2007

the great depression

Some friends of mine love vintage pictures so we shot this family pic for them. The smiles don't really go with the era, but ah well, what can you do? I feel like this caption sums it up:

Having made a fortune in real estate, the Phillips family considered the great depression a bit of lark actually.

UPDATE: completely forgot, this was my favorite image from the shoot, almost makes me want to have kids.

Posted at 01:37 AM

Tue - October 30, 2007

Sara

I was in Minneapolis last week shooting Sara Groves for a magazine cover. Sara's new album sounds fantastic and she and her husband Troy are about the nicest people I've ever met. Unfortunately for my outdoor location, the crazy winds played havoc with her hair and inverted one of my umbrellas. This isn't the cover shot or setup, but it's one of my favorites.

Lighting setup: Nikon SB800 into umbrella, camera left.

Posted at 10:33 PM

Mon - October 22, 2007

woof

The girls brought their dogs to a vocal session the other day....This snapshot of trish is existing light (window) and I used a high pass filter to give it a little pow, which is one of my favorite tricks right now. In photoshop, duplicate your layer, run a high pass filter on the duplicate and then set the duplicate layer to overlay. Instant contrast and pop in the highlights. It really makes the details crisp without oversharpening.

Posted at 09:46 AM

Sun - August 19, 2007

12 days of Shane and Shane

It's christmas! Actually it's not, but to stay on top of their publishing schedules, magazines are shooting their christmas covers now. It's challenging to do a christmas themed magazine cover in 106 degree weather. On friday we found out the band could do it sunday and we'd have 5 hours total from 2-7. A little brainstorming later and here's what we got. Considering the budget and time constraints I was pretty happy we got anything at all. If you don't know, this is Shane and Shane and they have a very cool earthy folk rock thing going on. For christmas I thought I'd punch it up a bit. I originally wanted to dress them as the blues brothers but that idea got shot down. This is my first assigned magazine cover and at christmas, you can see for yourself what magazine it is. The Shanes were a hoot to work with, I wish I could show you all the outakes, they are not afraid to throw down some magnum. Or blue steel.

Same crew, same good job: Abby, Evan, Sharon, Blake and Shara.

Posted at 11:00 PM

Mon - July 30, 2007

Lanae

Shot another new artist for Centricity, her name is Lanae and she's an interesting singer/songwriter being produced by the prolific and talented Mark Hammond. Mark's done a lot of stuff for Disney and he knows how to make a vocal shine and seriously is a really nice guy. You might think that I say everyone in the music business is "a really nice guy" based on how often I say it, but actually, if they're not really nice people, I just don't mention them. Today was an experiment in daylight fill flash and if you read this blog, you know by now that it's lit with one nikon flash through an umbrella. Same procedure as shooting sunsets, expose for the ambient, then creep the flash up till you're happy with it, which in this case was ALL the way up. Speaking of sunsets, I was hoping to get a nice one, but it wasn't meant to be, so I borrowed a trick from Frank Ockenfels 3 and made a sunset via the SB800. I haven't really tweaked these yet, so you can still see the light stand if you look close. Pretty much the whole day, all I used was my trusty nikon flash.

Nice work Steve, Abby, Evan and Lanae!

Posted at 02:11 AM

Mon - June 18, 2007

Field lighting

I was at historic Churchill Downs for my good friend Lee's wedding and while I normally travel with a Westcott double fold shoot-through umbrella, all I had with me for lighting was an SB800. My significant other wanted a snapshot and without an umbrella or reflector I wasn't sure what to do. After walking around outside a bit, it occurred to me that the exterior walls at Churchill were white enough to serve as a huge diffuser, so with some strange looking photo yoga, I was able to get the shot I wanted. I set the exposure manually for the ambient light and then crept the flash up manually. It's 1600 ISO so it's a touch grainy, but with one hand holding the camera and the other pointing the flash behind me over my shoulder, 1/50th was all I could manage to hold steady. A nearby couple promptly handed me their point and shoot, but I sure hope they weren't expecting similar results. I've gotten so used to setting up reflectors and diffusers that I almost overlooked the really obvious solution. I read recently on strobist about how you can even use someone wearing a white shirt as an impromptu bounce diffuser.

Here's a ringlight experiment with the alien bees ringlight. It looks rather lovely on my calibrated screen but completely loses all the detail in the blacks on an uncalibrated macbook so you'll just have to either take my word for it or go buy a Pantone Huey and calibrate your monitor. More on that in a later post. This shot was taken before the wedding, and the groom, Lee "rock and roll" bridges, is the stunned looking fellow in the middle. :)

Marking a very rare occasion, I was actually a groomsman, which as Lee explained, "was the only way to get Max to show up". It was a lovely wedding actually and I wish Erin and Lee the very best.

note: I didn't shoot the wedding, bands are enough pressure for me already thanks! If you screw up an album cover you can always do it again....

Posted at 01:47 AM

the lonely hearts

Keeping it unreal.

Balancing ambient light and strobe

Marathon cabs and cameras in your head.

G.R.I.T.S in the studio.

More Experiments with Light