If you are looking for rustic locations for photoshoots be careful when you are close to the border. I recently drove 35 miles south of Phoenix and stopped at an old gas station along route 8 about 29 miles west of Casa Grand (I-10). We were about 65 miles north of the Mexican border. The rustic weathered gas tanks were the perfect background for these portraits of my 2 kids. Little did I know I was putting them in danger. 2 vigilantes from the Arizona Civil Sentinels approached us and told us that 3 people had been shot in this area lately. Their web site says this about the route 8 corridor: “This is an area where there have been at least 14 confirmed shootings involving illegal smugglers, and American citizens.” They warned us to leave the area before sunset.
CBS News reported on October 14th, “The department of homeland security has learned that the drug cartels are sending hit men to Vekol Valley to shoot bandits who are stealing drugs from the drug smugglers entering Arizona from Mexico. The Vekol Valley is a major drug smuggling corridor.
The above photos were taken 5 miles from Vekol Valley. Next time We’ll head north for rustic locations.
Want to reach more people with your training or sales video? Do you need Spanish as well as English? We now offer DVD authoring with multiple language tracks. Just select the language and go!
You could also choose to use the same video footage with 2 different audio tracks to make one video for training and one with a music track added for a sales video.
Photoshop CS5 Extended is a powerful tool for photography and video. Some of the new features are huge time savers for retouchers. Other features greatly expand the creative capabilities for the working pro. I am thrilled to have another way to create photographic images properly formatted for a video or a DVD menu, and to create 3D graphics with animation to be exported to Final Cut Pro.
The Content -Aware feature allows us to delete an object from a photo and recreate the background in one move. This used to take much longer to re-draw the background manually.
Puppet Warp is a powerful tool and lots of fun to use as you can see in the basketball photo of my son, Justin (below). I can now bend an object with or without distortion, (i.e. I can reposition arms and legs).
Adobe Raw has improved controls to eliminate color and luminance noise in photos shot at high ISOs like indoor basketball and dusk architectural shots.
3D and Animation: I am most excited about creating 3D effects from text or objects. I can then animate the different layers in a PSD and even add camera moves. The files can be exported to Final Cut Pro. The cloud photo (above) is a still image pulled from the animation.
HDR Pro I have not used yet in CS 5 but I will try it soon. My 3 architectural shoots were done with Photomatix Pro for merging the bracketed exposures and tonemapping. I would then bring the flat image into Photoshop for curves adjustments and overall enhancing.
Large video and photo files have created the need for safe, no-hassle backup of data. I am going with the Drobo, a 4 bay external unit from Data Robotics. Each bay can hold any manufacturer’s 3.5″ SATA drive of any capacity. That’s right, they don’t have to match. It uses their own “BeyondRAID” disk management system. I will start with two 1TB Western digital drives. If one drive fails my data is backed up. When I add a third drive I will be covered in the event of two drives failing. If my storage needs grow suddenly I can install four 2 TB drives for a total storage of 8 TB.
The Drobo connects with FW 800. Setup and management of data is simple. For larger storage needs look at the DroboPro. It has 8 bays.
HDR photography is another miracle of digital imaging. HDR stands for high dynamic range. The digital sensors in cameras are limited to a narrow dynamic range (light to dark values). They cannot register the full luminance range that our eyes are capable of.
In architectural photography we have traditionally used lights to bring up the brightness of the dark areas. This required cases of equipment, cables and power packs and one-to-four hours to light most interiors. Those days are gone.
We now bracket the exposures, sometimes using as many as 11 photos to record the entire dynamic range of a scene from the dark mahogany wood furniture inside to the sunlit cool decking of the pool outside. We may use one light to bring out the texture in stone, brick or other materials. The software miraculously assembles the different exposures to render one image with all the detail. This image must then be brought into Photoshop and enhanced to produce the final, natural looking photo.
What does this mean to clients? We spend less time at the location and disrupt fewer people. We are not dragging cases of lighting equipment through the homes and office buildings. The time saved on location is spent on the computer to edit, assemble and enhance the many images it takes to create each final photograph.
What else does it mean to the clients. They love the natural look and feel of the interiors. This procedure also works on exterior dusk photos.
My production partner and teacher for HDR, Frank Salle, has many examples on his web site www.franksalle.com.
An experienced photographer can solve lighting challenges.
We arrived at Elliptical Mobile Solutions prepared to shoot a 3 minute video for their RASER product, a 1,000 pound mobile container for servers. We were shocked to find the large product tucked into a small room (16′ x 16′) with 3 walls entirely of mirrors and a low ceiling! The product was made of reflective metal. We now had light and sound bouncing off the product and the three mirrored walls.
The reflections from the metal and the mirrors were eliminated by using 2 large moving blankets to the right of the product. The blankets are not normally a part of our lighting kit. One small 500w Rifa soft box and a 300 watt Mole Richardson fresnel lit the right side from just over the blankets. A medium Chimera box (750w) provided the main light from camera left. That was all the equipment we could fit in the small room. Keep in mind we needed latitude for 6′ dolly rolls left and right. Black cloth and gaffer tape on the mirrors masked off any remaining problem areas.
An hour and a half later we were ready for a sound test in this echo chamber. Our blankets eliminated echoes from camera right. The mirror at camera left was covered with a 12′ x 12′ silk normally used for lighting. The silk extended back behind the camera.
All reflections and echoes were eliminated. The client’s comment on the final video…”I love it, love it, love it!
Watch the video
If you are not sure whether your company should use videos on your web site then you may want to read this Testimonial. It was sent by Denise Nojaim, The Executive Administrator to Shane Albers, CEO of Investors Mortgage Holdings, Inc. Scottsdale, AZ.
“I just wanted to drop you a note and thank you for all the good work you and your team did on our video shoot. What was supposed to be a quick, 20 minute video address turned into a 40 minute production that you and your staff handled flawlessly, not once, but twice!”
“The final product has been a huge hit. Communicating our message to our investors via video, instead of via a printed letter, really added to the sincerity of the message since our investors were able to see our President and CEO “in person,” as it were. Its positive impact cannot be overstated; I have had several investors write to say they didn’t understand the Conversion Transactions until after they watched the video.”
“Again, thank you for your professionalism and guidance through this project and I am looking forward to working with you again in the future!”
Sincerely, Denise
- Producer, editor, cameraman: John Trotto
- Sound, lighting: Frank Salle
- Makeup: Giselle Fox
- Teleprompters: The Prompter Posse
- 2nd camera assistant: Ryan Nelson
You are putting together a multimedia presentation. You need photos, some video, the perfect song and you need to record a voice over. Oh, and you like that Ken Burns effect. Would you think to call your photographer? You should.
Call one vendor. Explain your goals one time and let us assemble your presentation.
It’s a new world out there. We’re making it easier for you.
Combined experience for Frank Salle and John Trotto:
Photography – 55 years, Yikes, that’s a lot of pixels!
Video – 13 years
The Ken Burns effect is the panning or zooming in or out on a still image to create motion when there is none. Ken Burns is the award winning filmmaker whose recent work, The National Parks, runs on PBS.
Searching for music can be very tedious and expensive. We have many sources to find you the right music for the right price. If you stay away from current, popular music ($15,000/song) we can find your song for $40 – $60 dollars.
Resizing the pixel aspect ratio of your stills takes some knowledge of both Photoshop and Final Cut Pro so they won’t distort.
Assembling all of this in Final Cut Pro provides much more creative freedom than other editing software.
The ASMP, a guild of professional photographers, has set up a Tutorial on their web site to help still shooters who want to learn video. Providing motion as well as stills is seen as an important step to remain competitive in this industry. I was flattered to be chosen as one of the 14 photographers in the US to contribute information and experience to this new feature for members. This would have been helpful information for me 3 years ago when I began to purchase equipment and software, and learn the video production industry.
Although the 14 photo-videographers use different equipment and provide a wide variety of services, the tutorial can guide those interested. The equipment and software is more complex than that which is used in digital photography, and the learning curve is longer.
The tutorial on video addresses many business questions such as usage rights, whether to be a camera person or producer, rates for the various people in a production (DP, camera, director, etc.), invoicing and marketing the two businesses.
Here is a link to the new video page on the ASMP web site. (American Society of Media Photographers)
http://asmp.org/tutorials/video-tutorial.html
You may need to be a member and log in to read beyond the first page.
Digital SLR cameras from Canon and Nikon have Rocked the video world, but cameras from Red Digital Cinema will turn it upside down.
Photographers turning to video like the DSLR’s for their familiarity and they can use the same lenses. They produce stunning quality even at low light levels. They provide the “Film look” of selective focus because of the larger sensor. The Nikon D90, to select one, records in 720P at 24 FPS. The price is under $900. One problem is that the CMOS sensor will show action or panning as “jelly movement” The chip is scanned in lines by a rolling shutter from top to bottom. As you pan across an object like a light pole the bottom of the pole is scanned later than the top thus it is skewed diagonally down the frame. Recording quality sound is harder because it lacks XLR inputs. XLR cables for audio are balanced so there is no hum. Also none of the DSLRs are capable of recording for longer then 12 minutes. Excess heat buildup on the flash card can add artifacts (noise). The Canon 5D mark II sells for $3,300 for the body only.
Red Digital Cinema will release the 3K Scarlet this spring. It has been reworked to better compete with the video-capable DSLRs. Red calls their line DSMC, digital still and motion cameras. Yes, the Red will shoot high quality stills also. The Scarlet records in uncompressed raw, whereas the DSLRs record in compressed JPEG. The proprietary CMOS sensor doesn’t show “Jelly movement”. The Scarlet brain only will sell for $2750. This is the basic sensor and lens for “run and gun” shooting. A package will sell for $4750. the quality it delivers is worth many times that. All Red cameras are modular. All the accessories for the scarlet will fit the 5K Epic, to be released later this year. The accessories, such as A/V module, RedMote, and battery pack, are added to the back of the camera. Nikon and Canon lenses can be attached with an accessory ring however there will be significant cropping due to the smaller sensor area (2/3″) in the scarlet.
The Red Mini Prime lenses will sell for $950 each. they are cinema grade and fast, 1.5.
Their flagship camera, the Red One, is the first video camera to replace motion picture film cameras from Ari and Panavision. This will eliminate the costly and time consuming telecine process for converting film to video for editing.
More info at www.red.com
