In this episode of the vlog I’m briefly talking about the rumors surrounding a Canon pro level mirrorless camera, some of my though processes for using rear button focusing, and the lessons I learned in shooting my dual rear button focusing video.
I want to be up front and clear about something here, this isn’t a review. Moreover, these lights were purchased with my own money, which makes this that much more frustrating for me.
What this is, is my experience with trying to get these lights initially setup and working. To be fair to Dracast, the light could have been defective — though that doesn’t really excuse the discrepancies between the marketing and the product that was actually delivered — though I couldn’t find anything obvious that indicated that it was a defective panel either.
That said, I find that I no longer have the patience to put up with products that don’t deliver, so I’ve moved on. However, I wanted to talk about the problems I ran into with these lights in case anyone else was looking at them.
In this episode of the vlog, I’m back to talking about the topic of video workflows and pre-roll checklists to get everything setup and right before you start recording.
Additionally, I’m also talking a bit about batteries and battery powered lights. Primarily, because not having them on my pre-roll checklists and not checking that I had enough battery power before shooting ruined a couple of takes and ultimately prematurely killed a day’s shoot — fortunately, it wasn’t in front of a client.
A few months ago I posted a video describing a hack that I was using that allowed me to use my colorimeter as a basic light meter. In response to that video, someone suggested that I should really just get a light meter. Of course that was my plan all along, but I didn’t want to stop shooting just to find and buy a light meter.
In this video I’m revisiting the the topic of light meters, this time with my own; a Sekonic L-308X-U(Affiliate Link) .
In the past I’ve written down my take on what I though about the features of recently announced cameras. Now that I’m diving into doing video, I thought I’d take a stab at doing that same thing but as a video.
In this case, Canon recently announced the latest generation of the EOS-1DX, the EOS-1DX Mark III. And while in many respects, the camera is really just yet another evolution of the professional DSLR, there are some interesting new features in the design, that I wanted to talk about.
Storage is one of the biggest unanticipated hurdles that I’ve come across when it comes to shooting and working with video. And not in the field actually, my biggest problems are storing and backing up the video I shoot in a reasonable way.
This is a simple hack using a colorimeter that has an ambient light reading mode, such as the i1 Display 2 or Colormunki Display, and the ArgyllCMS package’s spotread tool as a incident light meter.
To camera settings to EV use my exposure settings to EV conversion tool.
It’s another year, and the peak of another hurricane season, and living in South Florida means there’s another hurricane headed our way.
As things currently stand it’s still too early to really know how things are going to shake out. The National Hurricane Center is currently predicting a major hurricane in the category 3 range with winds around 115 MPH will make landfall somewhere along the Florida peninsula. Though with the storm still more than 3 days away, the actual strength and location is far from clear.
My family and I have already started implementing our hurricane plans and should be as prepared as we can be by the time the storm arrives. However, as you can imagine this is also an incredibly stressful time for us, and as they say the best laid plans never survive contact with enemy.
Ultimately what this means for this site, and the YouTube content I’ve been producing lately, is that there will almost certainly be a gap in the coming content due to the impacts of this storm. As things stand, there are already videos scheduled to be published through September 9th, but after that I’m not sure how much of a gap will likely ensue.
I’ll continue to update this post as time and information allows.
The other day, I was thinking about how as a digital photographer I’ve lost a little bit of the inherent understanding of my medium that film photographers had. When film is your medium, you’re always reminded of just what exactly is being captured and produced when you make an image. You can’t avoid seeing just how small the image really is.
However, with digital photography, the size of the sensor isn’t something I have to really deal with on a day to day basis. Sure, like any competent photographer I know that the bigger the sensor the more light it collects, or how sensor size affects depth of field. However, the true size of the image I’m dealing with is largely lost in the day to day workings.
So lets have a quick look at just how big the images we start from are.