The Video Snapshot. A twenty second, unplanned clip. Still testing the fine art video waters with the Olympus OMD EM-5.2... :-)

Olympus OMD EM-5.2 short field test from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.
I was testing the OMD EM-5.2 with a Pansonic 12-35 when two women walked into my frame...

I have a day long assignment to make a video for a restaurant on Weds. I'll be shooting with a friend so we can get a lot of coverage. We'll be working all day long and the restaurant will be open for business and filled with customers. I want to do the whole video hand held so we can move quickly, don't have to take up floor space with tripods and other clutter. Since that's my target I am pretty much set on taking the two OMD EM-5.2 cameras and a bag full of lenses that we can share. But I'm always testing, testing, testing to see what we can get away with so I was out today getting more and more familiar with the camera and the Panasonic 12-35mm lens. I figure the more automatic my processes are while shooting the more and better moving images I'll be able to get.

It was bright and sunny today and I was shooting outside for the most part. I stopped by the Graffiti Wall and shot some stuff and everything looked really good. Extremely fine detail, like distant, blowing grass, still aliases more than I'd like but the close in stuff --- like we'd want to use in a restaurant video --- is very well behaved and looks good.

Since the light levels were high and I was shooting the All-I, 77mbs format at 24 fps I wanted to stay at 1/50th of second shutter speed. I wanted to stay at ISO 200 for best quality and I wanted to stay under f11 to minimize diffraction effects. It all added up to exposure chaos until I put the six stop Tiffen neutral density filter on the front of the lens and then everything fell into place.

I'm always trying to think of how to do video differently and I like the idea of very short videos as "snapshots." Inadvertent street photography-type video. Today two woman visiting the wall walked into my frame as I was practicing holding the camera still. I let the camera run for 20 or so seconds and the video above is what I got. It's a selfie wielding woman in a black skirt and the back end of someone else. For some reason, when thrown together I think it is interesting (and funny).

Between now and Weds. I am also experimenting with the Nikon cameras on monopods for the project. We'll see which version makes the cut.... And gets into Final Cut.

Thanks, Kirk

(I initially tried to embed this video using the blogger service but the compression was amazingly huge and extremely bad. I took down that version and uploaded the video to vimeo instead. Ahhhh. Much better. )