Stuff that worked well on Friday's three camera video shoot and stuff that could be improved....

We did a video shoot for Zach Theatre yesterday, in a hidden recording studio just west of downtown. I just transferred and reviewed the footage and I'm giving 95% of the stuff we shot an enthusiastic two thumbs up. We have more than enough primary footage, second camera angles and b-roll to create multiple final videos as well as three really great interviews. But part of the process of reviewing results is to see where we could have done better and whether or not some piece of gear let us down. 

This was our first three camera shoot on which we used the Fujifilm X-H1 cameras and I'll start out by saying that I love the look of all the files and personally think that the "Eterna" color profile provided in the X-H1 and X-T3 is the most beautiful profile I've ever worked with. Bar none. While I might consider using a log profile if we are shooting in contrasty Texas midday sunshine I'd want to really, really test out that choice because the stop or stop and a half of dynamic range the log file might  provide would likely be offset by lots and lots more time trying to get the color grading right while shooting, metering and light correctly while working with the Eterna profile would give us a file I could use right out of the camera. A big win for Fuji with the Eterna color profile. Nice, soft, flat but not too much... (I like it so much I used the Eterna profile all day long on a corporate job that was mixed daylight and flash, since I was shooting raw I didn't have to have any regrets but, for the most part, the Eterna files were very malleable and, with minor tweaking, looked just great). 

The image stabilization in video, using non-stabilized lenses, was very good. Not quite as good as some of the amazing Olympus camera bodies (EM-1.2, EM5.2) but good enough for me to handhold up to about 60mm with success. 

The video menu is great and very straightforward to master. Love that all in the stuff that doesn't  work in video is already greyed out. The ability to punch in for focusing and then back out to full frame couldn't be easier. The EVF is wonderful and the rear screen with touch controls makes using AF in manual focusing good. I was so happy to find that, when in the video mode, you can actually select 1/48th of a second shutter speed giving you a true 180 degree shutter angle when shooting 30 fps. Finally, I was super happy with the sound quality I got from the cameras. Not just when we were able to pipe in a beautiful feed from the audio engineer's mixing board but also when I was recording interview audio directly into camera via wireless lavaliere microphones. 

And you knew the list of things I want improved was going to follow right along, right? So here goes.  What the bejeepers is the deal with the battery grip and complement of batteries???! Here's the premise: Fuji: "Yes. We know our camera bodies suck juice out of our puny batteries at an alarming rate. Here's what we've done to make that better, we're making a battery grip that will hold two batteries while you keep a third one tucked into the camera. Cool, huh?"  Here's the real (tormenting) issue: The batteries switch over from the two in the grip, sequentially, and then finally hit the camera battery ----- but only when shooting stills! If you are shooting video and your first battery in the grip runs out the entire circus comes to a screeching halt. The camera just stops shooting. It doesn't care if you have two other fresh batteries in the same product, just brimming with fresh, juicy electricity, it just stops recording. 

What is the work around? Um. Um. Hit the record button again. A (sarcasm laced) great idea for the middle of an interview.... Just start over.

I must be missing something. Maybe putting the camera and grip in boost mode changes the battery usage order. I guess that's the next thing to test.

But let's not take the battery grip out of the hot seat just yet! One reason videographers grudging part with over $300 per camera for an added battery grip is to get the headphone jack that they finally just included on the body of the X-T3. It didn't exist on a stock X-H1. Yes, the camera body has a microphone in jack but no, the body without grip has NO headphone jack. So, across three camera bodies I have about $1.000 worth of battery grips; proprietary to one camera model, just in case I want to run audio at each camera location (and need to monitor it for quality!!!). 

(All the stuff in the strike throughs below is faulty information. Read the added material just below the strike throughs. Thanks, Kirk 04-09.)

If everything worked the way I think it is supposed to then I would be hearing beautiful sound through my headphones but, sadly, this is not the case. Lucky, I discovered an audio glitch when I tested the camera more or less feature by feature before committing to using three of them on assignment. At first I thought the whole audio chain was compromised or required some very special (and unobtainable) microphones or something. I would set the levels so they would never go into yellow, much less into red, and even with a minus 12 to minus 18db level I was getting some distortion in the headphones. The headphone level setting was set in the middle of the range as well. In fact, the setting level for the headphones had no impact on improving or worsening the distortion I was hearing. 

I thought it might be the headphones so I tested the camera+battery grip with AKG headphones, Audio Technica headphones, Apple earbuds and even a set of Bose noise cancelling headphones. Each had the same issues. I thought it might be a microphone mismatch so I tried a box of different mics and a squadron of microphone pre-amplifiers. (yes, we disabled the internal mics for our test). I even went so far as to disable the external mics and to test again just using the internal mics. 

Edited on 04/09: Interestingly we did not have the headphone distortion problem on a shoot we did last Friday, using many of the same components. To be fair to the Fuji X-H1 I went back and re-tested again. This time I did it in my living room. Components all over my coffee table. But the times I tested the cameras before were all done at the desk in my office. I took the camera, headphones and a microphone back to the office, sat down and listened again and there was the distortion. So I started looking around my desk to see just what the heck might be causing the distortion I was hearing.

For starters my desk is the epicenter of about ten hard drives, each in their own enclosure, each with its own power supply. Then there is the 27 inch iMac about two feet from my little test area. Oh, and there's also a dual band modem/router, and, and, and...... As I moved the camera set up closer to the desk and tested it the distortion was a bit more obvious and when I moved away from the desk it diminished. And when I moved to the living room, about 30-40 feet from all electrical circuits, the microphone pre-amplifiers were as silent as mute angels.

So, this is a big mea culpa. Sometimes we imagine that technology has perfected all the routine stuff and that it will work perfectly no matter how much we try (wittingly or unwittingly) to fuck it all up. The pre-amps are a bit sensitive to huge, giant, unsavory electrical fields. Can you blame them? 

I am now chastened and must send an e-mail to my friends at Fuji to apologize to them for blaming my bad technique on what I see is now a nearly perfect camera.

In addition, all the audio that we ran into three X-H1 cameras at our video shoot last Friday is perfect. Not a trace of distortion or noise. 

I'm sorry to have been so far off on this and will try to be much more careful in my testing of microphone and headphone circuits in the future.

Moving on. Let's talk about lenses. While I love the Fuji XF-18-55mm f2.8-f4.0 you can already see the problem. It loses a stop from the wide end to the telephoto end. If you think of it as an f4.0 lens and don't shoot at f2.8 you won't see the exposure change as you zoom through the range but many times, in low light you'd pretty much kill for that extra f-stop. 

I queried Fuji about their cinema lenses but someone suggested that for corporate video work the really nice, red badge, constant aperture lenses from the XF line up would work just fine. And I'm happy to say that if you never want to zoom that's probably really true. They are very, very good lenses. But, sometimes you want to zoom during a shot; or the client wants you to zoom during shot and so you go for it and give the system a try. On Friday I was a little shocked. I was using a 16-55mm f2.8, constant aperture lens and I needed to do a slow zoom in from a medium composition to a tighter composition and somewhere, mid-zoom, there was a disconcerting and abrupt bump up in illumination as though passing through a certain focal length range triggers a compensation that opens up the aperture to compensate for the light lost when zooming longer. It's a design glitch. I could hardly believe it but I tried it twice more, here in the studio today and was able each time to replicate this issue. 

We need to find a zoom for the system which doesn't do this (I guess that's why I was asking about the cinema zooms...) while zooming. I love the images from the 16-55mm but I'll never be able to do a zoom shot with it in video. And even though zoom ins are generally overused it's still a tool we need from time to time.

Moral of the story? If you don't do your own tests, on every piece of gear you own, problems will come back and bite you on the ass. But don't think this glitch bitch is just about Fuji, I can well remember more than a few heat related shutdowns from a number of Sony cameras. All full-framers....

Seems the only perfect digital camera ever made is the Sony RX10 IV...

Enough about the cameras. We'll get that stuff sorted out. The video looked astounding. The rendering of flesh tones was the best I've seen from a less than $10,000 video camera. I think it's a bit above the benchmark Sony FS-7, less noisy than a Panasonic GH5, and fun to shoot with. Loving the front and rear tally lights....

But my favorite piece of video gear is fast becoming my Beach Tek DXA-2T audio interface. It's not powered  and uses really clean transformers to convert a balanced signal from XLR connected devices to a signal that is perfect for most camera's microphone inputs. I love the device because it makes professional microphones sound and perform better with most consumer hybrid cameras but it comes at no cost in terms of signal loss. And there are no batteries to forget or to run out of mid-shoot. I would tell everyone to run out and buy one but I think the product is now discontinued except for a copy-cat variation from Saramonic. I love being able to grab one of the knobs on the small unit and pad down the signal to the camera rather than having to go into the camera's menu and touchscreen to accomplish the same task. I won't go to a shoot without one of these. It may have been a perfect audio product. I'm sad not to find one on B&H's site or on Amazon. 

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't again make the point that in video handheld shots are, to my mind, special effects shots that get really boring and annoying really quickly. If you value your audience you'll put the camera with which you do the majority of your shots on some sort of stabilizing platform rather than defaulting to image stabilization. I love having a locked down version of a shot, using a good tripod. A moving shot, also using a good tripod, and then, in order a shot from a "chicken foot" monopod with a fluid head, a monopod with no head and finally, a gimbal. The less jittery the shot the happier the audience. 

There are a lot of good $10,000 video tripod and head combinations in the marketplace and most are probably made for cameras in the 18-30 pound range. I've got a Manfrotto video tripod with a 501 head and I think for DSLRs practicing a lot with one of these probably trumps the results of someone who uses their pricier tripod a lot less often. As with anything else, it's not the Speedo or goggles the determine a good 100 butterfly, it's 99.9% the swimmer. Same with adequate versus perfect tripods. 

wow. That was a lot to wade through but it's helpful to me to put it all down so I can process my most recent experience. Would I have changed the way I shot, lit or ran audio? Probably not. If anything I would have pushed my partner to spend more time of some sort of camera support and dissuaded him from too much "Jason Bourne inpired camera movement (fight scene kinetics...). But it's all a big learning process, right?

If anyone is interested my cold is receding and I'm giving credit to Mr. Nyquil for getting my first good night's sleep of the week last night. And this is how I reward you? With a long, rambling blog about video? Almost criminal.

Exposure. White Balance. Stable platform. Enough headroom for audio. The foundation for successful video production. 

I'm not very good at wide angle photography...yet, but my new lens appears to do it very well. A first day quick peek at the Fujifilm 8-16mm f2.8 XF lens and a confessional about wide-angle-phobia.

It was a glorious day in Austin, Texas. The temperatures were mild, the skies were clear and blue and with the NCAA Swimming National Championships in town there is swimming in the air and beautiful swimmers all over downtown soaking in the Austin vibe. Rumor has it that the Stanford team is doing some of their practices at my home pool, WHAC.org.  Of course I went out for a walk with a new lens. Think of it as the break in period.  And what a nice day on which to do it.

So, what lens are we talking about? 

It's the recently introduced 8-16mm f2.8 XF (Red Badge) lens from Fujifilm. 

The lens has somewhere over twenty elements and many of them are either aspheric or some other speciality glass. The lens is big and heavy so it's not my first choice for a "walk around" lens on any of the Fuji cameras. Here's what the lens has: a short zoom range of 8-16mm. A non-changing maximum aperture of f2.8. A very nice aperture setting ring. Weather sealing. A permanently attached lens hood. No front filter ring and a big, fat front element. It also has sharpness. Lots and lots of sharpness. 

While I'm not very cozy with wide angle lenses I'd like to do more architecture and industrial photography and the consensus is that having a few good wide angle lenses might be a positive thing for dealing well with that sort of work. I much prefer those telephotos that are just a bit longer than a "normal" lens but I'm trying hard to figure out what my wide angle vision is and how to nurture it. I know from endless reading and some lucky shots that it's great to have a foreground element in order to create more impression of depth. And I definitely know that, if I am foolish enough to attempt doing portraits with the lens, I should never put my portrait subject on one edge or the other. If I want any chance at selling a portrait with this beast it will be because I put the subject directly in the center and that someone other than the subject is actually paying for the assignment. 

I am keenly aware from reading reviews on both Lenstip.com and OpticalLimits.com that the lens measures well and produces very sharp files but that some of the performance superiority comes from crafty software corrections and enhancements. Had the lens been introduced in the days before built in lens profiles I would have my doubts about its value proposition. Since I can't see the faults through the opaque machinations of the software I'm blissfully unbothered by theoretical limitations due to it's actual optical performance. If it looks sharp and it measures sharp then I'll just applaud the work of the programmers and venture forward. 

I picked up the lens from Precision Camera yesterday, along with a second lens which I hope to test out tomorrow. I have only had a few hours to walk around and get used to shooting such a wide angle view. I've read that it's at its very sharpest at 12mm and at f4.0 but I tried all sorts of combinations with it. It's big but handles well. It's heavy but then most fast, well made zooms are. Is it worth $2,000. USD? I have no idea if it's worth that for anyone but me. From my point of view the right project pays for the lens and then I get to use it again and again. If I were shooting just for fun???? Right, I'd just be shooting with the old 50mm on some ancient (but perfect) body. 

More to come but I'll try to do some sort of from memory captioning on the images below.

Shot at 14-16mm f5.6

Shot at 8mm f5.6

Shot at 12-16mm on f5.6

Shot at 8mm at f5.6

8mm.

8mm

12mm.

8mm.

8mm

12mm

10mm

14mm.

12mm

8mm

12mm.

8mm. 

I have my fingers crossed for luck. Luck that I'll learn the ins and outs of shooting wide. 

So many people seem to like crazy, wide. Maybe I'll become acculturated. 

Picking up a bargain lens. A used, Sony FE 28-70mm, f3.5 to f5.6. The full frame "kit" lens.

Sony FE 28-70mm OSS lens. Sitting on the front of my A7ii "beater." 

"I'm upgrading to some Zeiss stuff. Do have any use for a Sony kit lens? The 28-70mm FE?" That's how the conversation started. I hemmed and hawed since I already own the Zeiss 24-70mm f4.0. But then my friend tossed out a price that was less than half of the "new" price for the lens and I couldn't resist. After all, one can always use a good "back up" lens and the many reviews out on the web are mixed as to which lens makes better photographs. 

My friend is mostly a Leica user. He shoots with an S2, and just recently picked up an SL and a 50mm f1.4 Aspherical, but he'd decided to put a toe into the Sony waters, just to see what all the fuss was about, and just couldn't bring himself to use a "kit" lens. 

Next time I see him I'll thank him again. The lens is really very good and the combined image stabilization of the camera and lens is also a nice touch. 

I rushed into my initial lens selections when I plunged into the Sony system -- well over a year ago. I started off with the 70-200mm f4.0 G lens (which I think is spectacular) and the 24-70mm f4.0 Zeiss lens (with which I have been perfectly happy). Had I done a bit of research and tried both the kit lens and the Zeiss lens, side by side, over a long weekend I just might have returned the more expensive one and kept the cheaper one. But knowing my own butt covering propensity had I bought the 28-70mm I would start to think about the truncated wide angle capabilities of the kit lens and almost immediately started looking at wide angle zooms to supplement. In the end I would have spent much more money on a kit+16-35mm than I would have just sticking with the 24-70mm. And I know myself well, when it comes to lenses; I never shoot much at all that's wider than 24mm. I just don't "see" wide. The times I've splurged for something like the Nikon 17-35mm lens I ended up blowing the dust off of it a bit later and selling it at a loss. Just never use them. 

I do have a 14mm Rokinon sitting in a drawer ---- just in case wide is required. Rarely use that one either. 

Circling back to the 28-70mm. It's a nice lens. It's very sharp in the center and adequate on the sides and corners. In the old days I might have wished it had a faster aperture but I'm happy to apply more ISO if required and I'm more and more starting to savor a little more depth of field and sharpness in my photographs. A little context is kinda nice.  It feels nice and focuses quickly on the most recent A7xx bodies. It comes with a flower petal lens shade. Please don't put it on your lens backwards. Use your shade in its correct orientation or forever brand yourself a photographic moron...

The bottom line is: the kit lens is a nice companion for the A7ii body. Both are small and light and I can walk for hours or days without noticing the (light) weight. For the price I just didn't think I could go wrong. Ah, the power of rationalization...

Sony FE 28-70mm OSS lens. Sitting on the front of my A7ii "beater."

Photos from the dress rehearsal of, "The Great Society." The second interesting play about LBJ's legacy. We're three cameras deep in this one....

A photograph from Zach Theatre's, "The Great Society." 

As you might know I've spent quality time over the last 28 years documenting almost every single production Zach Theatre has done in that span. I've used at least 30 different cameras and hundreds of different lenses and I've enjoyed watching somewhere between 350-450 performances. I know a lot about theater, I just don't know what I like... Just kidding. I know exactly what I like.

I like plays that challenge my view of life, make me laugh, make me cry, etc. But most of all I like plays that are fun to shoot. That doesn't always mean comedies or musicals; it means any play that is well staged, beautifully lit, powerfully acted and, in some way accessible to me. Having literally photographed thousands of hours of material (both content on the stage and set-up advertising shots in the my studio, or a temporary studio at Zach Theatre; on the stages at Live Oak Theatre, The Paramount Theater, the State Theater, The Rollins Stage at the Long Center, and the rehearsal stage at the Austin Lyric Opera) I think I finally know a thing or two about how to photograph plays and operas, and just how my photographs will be used. The photographs I share here on my blog are not necessarily the ones I, or the marketing people from the theaters, think are the perfect ones to use for mass market communications, they are the ones I like from the shows --- for one reason or another. 

You would think that, over time, I would become a bit jaded and, more or less, just photograph productions on auto pilot by now but you would be wrong. This year I decided I needed to up my game a bit, mostly for my own enjoyment and for the challenge of making better works. A constant push for me and for my clients, and especially for the actors who commit so much time and energy to make their art work.

To this end I've started going to rehearsals and digging into the look and feel of the content while trying to better understand what the artistic directors are trying to do in their interpretations of the material. 

For "The Great Society" ( a drama about the second term of LBJ's presidency) I started my research by going to an early rehearsal and mostly watching the blocking while reading over the script. I came back a week later and we set up some lighting and used an a6300 to record three video interviews with key actors. About a week before the design rehearsal (the first rehearsal with full costumes and fully finished sets) I came by just to sit for a while and look at the set on the stage. It was also a nice chance to talk with the lighting designer for the play and try to understand the way she would use lighting to help drive the drama. 

I came to the design rehearsal which pretty much gave me the run of the house for photographs. This is where I got a lot of the closer, wider shots which I like very much. It was also the first time I was able to see a production run all the way through the script. It's great to know where the action builds and when there might be "reveals" that are important. This play is in three acts with two intermissions so there is a lot of action to remember and to prepare for. 

For the design rehearsal I brought along "the twins." The RX10ii and the RX10iii. Don't know why I did it that way but I liked it. A lot. I used the 2 for most of the close stuff and

A Favorite Selection from my Photographic Assignment. Making Marketing Photographs for the "Ann" play at Zach Theatre.

From the play, "Ann", starring Holland Taylor

at the Zach Theatre in Austin, Texas.

From the tech rehearsal. 

Photographed with with Sony a6300

Sony 18-105mm G lens

Photographing "Tribes," A new play at Zach Theatre. A surprising camera choice.

Mitch Peleggi (former X-Files cast member) in "Tribes."

I'm pretty sure a huge percentage of the photographic community thinks I'm nuts for changing cameras from time to time and constantly experimenting with new ways of photographing things but I think they are equally crazy for doing things over and over again in the same style and with the same cameras. Just look up Albert Einstein's definition of insanity somewhere on the web....

But I have to tell you that sometimes you try something new and it works. Against common legend lots of stuff works really well. And here's the important context: You only need stuff to work a bit better than your best targeted end use...  That web profile photo? Doesn't need to be shot with the new 100 mp Phase One camera. Honest. 

A case in point: My photographic coverage of the dress rehearsal for Zach Theatre's: Tribes. 

There is usually an audience ("friends and family") in the theater for the final dress rehearsal and for reasons of budget (and the fact that all the costumes and light cues are done) we've started shooting the "live" marketing images of the big plays on that day. What it really means is that I'm often relegated to a position in the cross over row in the center of the house.  It's a reach to the stage. And on a show with a small cast and a tight set my full frame cameras, coupled with the 80-200mm f2.8 lens is getting close to the edge of practicality. I end up wanting to get closer and have tighter compositions on my subjects. I want to feel the action in the photographs. 

While the image files of the Nikon D750 and D810 are great and the dynamic range ample, the handling and quickness of the system, for theater, isn't optimal. The light changes quickly and, by extension, so does exposure and even color balance.  Theater photography cries out for the instantaneous feedback of a good EVF camera. I have tried using the Olympus OMD cameras with longer lenses but the focus in low light just isn't fast enough to keep up with the action, sometimes. I've been looking for a different solution. I want a long lens, great image stabilization and fast, sure focusing. I took a deep breath and plunged into shooting Tribes with one of my favorite cameras for most stuff: The Panasonic fz 1000. 

This camera has what I was looking for in all the parameters I just outlined but the perceived weakness of that camera for this kind of work has always been questions about the low light performance of the 1" sensor. Is it too crowded with pixels to keep the noise down to a minimum? Or at least at a level commensurate with the final, targeted use of the images?

On Tuesday evening I headed to the theater with the lightest camera bag I think I have ever taken there. It had just two cameras and two extra batteries. That's it. Two Panasonic fz 1000 cameras (pro's cameras travel in pairs, set up identically. If one fails it's brother is ready to jump into the fray with no hesitation and no set up delays. After all, a lot is riding on getting good marketing images---they help put paying patrons in the seats!

My basic setting for the camera (I used only one) was manual exposure, ISO 1250, raw, and f4.0-5.6. 

I tested the dominate face lighting in an early tech session and found the color on faces to be equal to 3700K with 2 clicks of green. 

Here's my assessment: The magic, dfd focusing of the fz 1000 (same as the GH4) is great. Really great! When used with "pinpoint AF" the camera absolutely nailed every single frame I shot. 100%. If I did not get sharp focus on a face it had to be because I forgot to aim the AF sensor at the face. Better than my Nikons? Well, if the comparison includes the 80-200mm f2.8 then the answer is a resounding yes.

Here's where this seven hundred dollar camera beats the crap out of all the other combinations you might bring to bear in the theater: You get a long, long, very sharp zoom lens that caps out at f4.0. I worked the long end of the lens for a lot of the images and it was wonderful. I doubled my range and did so with a camera that could be handheld down to about 1/60th of second because of the I.S. 

Anything slower than 1/60th is a was at 400mm because you also have subject motion to contend with and their is no magic cure for subject motion as the shutter speeds drop. 

But here's where the Panasonic beats my Olympus OMD EM5-2 cameras resoundingly: The EVF (set to manual, not automatic) when thoughtfully calibrated (which means shooting and comparing the results in the EVF to the results on your post production monitor) is a perfect exposure setting tool. If it looks good in the EVF of my fz 1000 I have a 95% assurance that it will be correctly exposed when I get to the post production stage. That's huge. Try as I might to do the same with the Nikon D810 the rear screen of that camera is good for little more than composition compared to the radically cheaper (but more capable) Panasonic. Again, for a busy shooter doing post processing on say, 1200 files late at night, this is impressive and appreciated. EVF as color meter and finely tuned exposure meter. Sold. Dammit Nikon! Get me a D500 WITH an EVF. Stat.

When I got back to the studio at a late hour I put the images in Lightroom and started playing. Most needed a 1/3 to 1/2 stop nudge up in exposure to be perfect but, in defense of the camera, I tend to shoot to protect the highlights and am willing to put the "sensor invariance" to a little test. The files sharpen up well and there was no objectionable noise in the darker background areas --- certainly no problems with color speckling or grain clumping. The details could use more detail at 100% but in actual use they are right on the money. 

Would I do it again! How about next week. I am shooting another play the Sunday following this one and I'm also bringing along the Sony RX10 (original, not the model 2) to see if the f2.8 aperture really buys me anything. My primary camera will be one of the fz 1000s. I am putting them in their own rotation to try to keep from wearing out one or the other prematurely. I have no idea how well made the shutters are in a "consumer" camera but I do put a lot of internal wear on cameras. I tend to shoot a lot. My final word is that the smaller file size is a post processing blessing and a relief to my client who was getting tired of sorting through 36 megapixel images. "Sufficiency?" Naw, just matching the highest use target to the right camera. 

Experiment successful. And yes, on a paid job. It's not like I haven't put 25,000 exposures on the camera already....

Where's Waldo? Find the grain and lack of sharpness in 

this ISO 1250 image, shot wide open near the long end of the 

lens, handheld. You might see it by I sure don't. 

Not in any meaningful way. 

Reasonable and appropriate lens buying. Part two. A do-everything zoom?

The Nikon 24-120mm f4.0G lens is not big news.

But it may be a good problem solver for event shooters.

I know it's the opinion of many of my friends and colleagues that I should just calm down, buy into one system for the long run, and use the same cameras and lenses, day in and day out, until technology makes big leaps or the market drops dead. But they all know that this is probably not going to happen at the VSL H.Q. I get bored doing the same thing over and over again and I get even more bored doing the same things over and over again with the same cameras and lenses. Lately, I am trying to be a bit more rational and so I've really tried thinking through the cameras and lenses that might be the best fit for two different assignments this week. 

Tomorrow I need to go to a technology conference and shoot all of the signage, decor, staging and convention style showcases and demo areas for the production company that's producing the show. No talking heads, not fast moving action, just good documentation of a lot of fun graphics stuff. There are two advantages to this job: one advantage is that the graphics and signage materials are beautifully designed and extremely well implemented, and the second advantage is that the show is mostly contained on three floors of a new, big, shiny convention hotel right in the middle of downtown just across the street from Medici Coffee House. I think I may even be able to ride the bus to this job. How novel!

This kind of shooting mostly involves walking around looking for good shooting angles, staying out the client's way and making exposure choices based on how well lit everything is. In this instance I think flexibility with the gear is important. That and image quality. 

I won't have the opportunity to light anything (other than what I might be able to do with on camera flash) and there is a lot to do in a proscribed amount of time, and that led me to start considering a lens that would cover everything from a wide angle point of view to a very tight headshot crop. I used to own a Canon 24-105mm L series lens and found it to be incredibly useful so I started looking for its counterpart in the Nikon lens catalog and came across the 24-120mm f4 (the newest version of three). 

The reviews on this lens are decidedly mixed (from the pundits) but the overwhelming number of ordinary consumer reviews on Amazon and B&H Photo are four or five stars. The biggest two gripes are that the lens has a lot of geometric distortion (it does) and that it isn't as sharp at 120mm at it is at the rest of the focal lengths. 

I decided to buy a copy and test it, knowing that I could take it back if I wasn't satisfied with the performance. I bought the lens on Saturday at Precision Camera and spent Sunday afternoon shooting with it on a

Wild, massive, fun, scary, edgy creative projects help keep everyone on their toes and force you to learn new things.

A construction inside an old airplane hanger at Meuller Airport.

I have a friend that I met through swimming named, Chris Archer. He's an awesome former UT swimmer and all around good guy and he's been working as a photographer for the last few years. I used him as an assistant on a food shoot for a major hotel last year and really liked his personality and his work ethic, so when he asked me if I would help him with a complex video project I was pleased to say, "yes."

Chris is relatively new to video and up until recently most of his shoots have been done with a Nikon D800, and mostly handheld. But Chris is a disciplined professional who can jump into new stuff and study it deeply.  Chris teamed up with a modern dancer named Amy to brainstorm a really cool video project that would be a gem in each of their portfolios. Amy created a dance that takes place on a field of sand, against a curtain of falling sand, set against limbo black and Chris created a way to shoot that creative construct with fine control and very high production value.

This is the basic set construction. The wooden structure provides a place from which to 

pour sand and anchor our black background. Note the two troughs for sand that radiate out from the center point, near the top of the structure.

The project required about two tons of sand and a lot of lifting. Inside each trough, in separate compartments, are electric sanders that provide vibration to even out the distribution of sand. The construction of the super structure took the entire day, last Sunday. Once the structure was finished we tested it and fine-tuned the flow of sand. 

Then Chris was able to bring out his camera and start figuring out where the edges of the frame were and how to set up to take advantage of the confines of the set. I got busy lighting stuff. I brought along my gray case full of grip gear in order to safely and securely set up lights overhead. We knew we wanted a soft, overhead light for our main camera work so we settled on a Chimera Pancake, with skirt. We attached it to the safety rail of the structure, right over the spot in which Amy would be dancing. The light source inside the Chimera Pancake was a 1,000 watt mogul bulb (big ass tungsten).

Chimera Pancake Lantern with skirt for blocking off spill light and directing illumination into a smaller circle.

If you look at the image below you'll see a rare example of my attention to both safety and detail. I needed the light to be at least two feet out from the support in order to hit the "sweet spot" of the dance set below so I used one Super Clamp to attach my rig to the 2x4" board. The rig consisted of a Super Clamp, holding a Manfrotto Magic Arm, connected to a stand adapter and then to the light. You can see a second Super Clamp near the bottom of the frame with a wire attached. I have a tether wire running to both the Magic Arm and to the speed ring of the light itself. This way, if anything chooses to detach itself, all the materials would be caught by the tether wires instead of raining down on dancer or crew. Safety first with overhead instruments.

A view of the Magic Arm and its safety harness.

All the principal photography was done with the new, Sony F55 camera which shoots in uncompressed 4k, uses a full frame sensor, and was set up with a PL lens mount. We used Zeiss Super Speed Cine Primes for the entire project. Chris's choice of lenses was the 35mm t-1.5, the 50mm t-1.5 and the 85mm t-1.5, and yes, they are worth the cost. Each of the lenses was amazingly sharp at its widest aperture. Sharp in a way that very few camera lenses I've played with really are. The camera is not light at 13.5 pounds and gets incrementally heavier with every attachment one adds. Like high performance battery packs and one of the most detailed EVF finders I've ever looked through. Interested in the F55? Look at one here. Sony made this camera for people (Hollywood) who want to make feature films.

Sony F 55 on Sachtler sticks with Zeiss Super Speed lens.

As you can imagine, we all worked hard at keeping sand off the camera and especially out of the optical pathway. I didn't try to take any still shots with it but I'd guess with the huge pixel wells on a full frame, 8 megapixel sensor, the low light shots would be amazing. Interesting fact: the native ISO on the camera (base ISO sensor sensitivity) is 1250. But the camera is nothing without the idea and the nuts and bolts production.

By Monday Afternoon we had thirty feet by nine feet of black flocked material stapled into place

and the volunteer crew was loading up the sand troughs and filling up the dance area.

Volunteering to help Chris and Amy with their project was an good move for me. We got to try out lots of things I haven't done before in a shoot. And helping them with their creative project reminded me of the enormous value of shooting for yourself; following your own creative muse with a disregard for cost and time. Getting things right because you want them to be right, not because you need to get paid. I think the process of self-assigning kicks up the creative juices to a higher level because your audience is so much more discerning and, at the same time, less compromising. The cost of a project like this? I'll estimate just the rentals and raw materials at about $ 6,000. Time is a whole different matter. This is not a Kickstarter project or a project funded with other people's money. This was a project that Amy and Chris did because they had a vision and wanted to see it through without compromise or distraction. 

Chris and Amy did about two weeks of planning and preproduction for the shoot. The stage assembly, video shooting and set tear down was four, twenty hour days in an airplane hangar with no air conditioning or amenities. In Texas. In the Summer. The edit will probably take weeks of time. Do the rest of us have the same commitment to creating our own art? It humbles me and makes me think that I'm just playing around at being a creative person sometimes. Working on a project like this (as a volunteer) kicks your ass in a number of ways. First, you want to make sure your friend is able to achieve the vision he had when he started. That should be a matter of pride for any volunteer. Second, you are learning by example how to be "all in" for a project. Chris and Amy sweated every detail and spent an incredibly concentrated amount of time during the actual shooting. No breaks for play-off games on TV (what a crappy waste of precious time that would be). No end of day re-caps at the local watering hole. Just work until you get "it."

Finally, they show me by example what it takes to make a vision not only come alive but to do it in a way that faithfully captures the initial dream. Not "good enough" but exactly "what I saw in my mind's eye."

This is the incredibly talented Amy. No Diva here. She hauled sand, carried in drinking water and repeated tough motions over and over again for the camera. Graceful as they come but also tough as nails...

At one point we needed to go harder and stronger with the lighting. So we did.

We were shooting some footage for slow motion and needed some extra light power for the exposure. We decided on a bare Arriflex 1000 watt open face fixture with barndoors and used the rudimentary controls to tighten the beam a bit. We also added a front fill light which was an Arriflex 650 watt open face fixture in a Chimera video softbox with a 3/4 stop front diffuser. You'll notice our black Westcott FastFlag running interference between the fill light and the left side of the set. We wanted to keep as much light as possible off the black.

Amy Smoothing the Sand Before a Take.

The view above gives you an idea of how our light ended up looking for the slow motion sequences. You can get away with a harder light on video since your subject is in constant motion.

Chris operates the ten foot jib. 

On Tuesday morning we broke out the ten foot jib and assembled it. The jib comes packed in pieces in rigid travel cases and sometimes feels as though it requires a degree in mechanical engineering for assembly. Fortunately Chris had the foresight to ask the rental house here in Austin (GEAR) to show him the set up procedure, and while they took him through the steps he documented each one on his iPhone. Major plus for us. We stuck the Sony F 55 on one end and just about 90 pounds of counterweights on the other end. Along with the internal slider weight we were able to achieve a totally neutral balance. You could operate the whole rig with one finger (if you were brave enough to do so with a camera that's more expensive than my car at the other end...)

The Camera at the end of the ten foot jib. Chris was as smooth an operator on his first go around as I've seen with seasoned pros.

I'm a real baby where safety and expensive gear are concerned so you can see in the image above that I've insisted on safety tethering the camera unit to the super-structure of the jib. I didn't want the camera to come loose and fall on Amy or into the sand pile. It never budged but I'm paranoid enough to think that something might have happened if I'd had the hubris NOT to tether the camera.  The purple cord is to the LCD monitor at the back of the jib that allows Chris to move the massive arm with assurance.

Amy during a take with sand falling and camera moving smoothly.

Chris operating the boom while monitoring the frame in the small monitor on the end of the arm.

While we had missteps and false starts and issues with every imaginable part of the project Chris and Amy were able to problem solve, resolve and move on with the performance and filming with a discipline and endurance that was astounding. I saw a lot of the footage as we were shooting and lighting and I'm very excited about the project. I can hardly wait for the weeks it will take to edit, and then edit some more, and then finally put it into a form I can watch from head to tail. I already know it will be amazing. Chris has definitely stepped up to the creative challenge of high production motion and made some great art. One showing at the right agency and he'll be moving into the role of director in no time.

I was happy to be a small part of the crew. It made me think. It made me work with some new passion and it made me reflect. That's a lot to get in return for volunteering.

 I love this last shot because it shows off the use of the boom (jib) and divides the frame in a nice, offset diagonal with the triangle of the slightly offset hangar door echoing the white glow of the hot light on the set. Note the black flag to the side of the soft box to keep light off the black set wall. Note also the equipment case that gives Chris a safe spot to "land" the jib between shots. It all seems so cool.

P.S. All of my "behind the scenes" shots were made with the Samsung NX 300 camera and kit lens.