The Anatomy of a fun summer project.

Poor Ben.  He's going to be a junior in high school next year and he was looking forward to a few more days of sleeping in until cross country practice started again.  But around the headquarters of the Visual Science Lab it just doesn't play out that way.  I roused him at 7 am this morning because I was on a vital mission and I needed his help.  Today was the day we photographed 140 members of the dynamic, Rollingwood Waves Summer League Swim Team.  Our mission was to make a portrait of each swimmer individually, with the pool in the background, and then to make group shots of each age group: 6 and under,  7 and 8,  9 and 10, and the elusive 11 and overs.

I'd spent days planning our strategy.  We created a sign up form and asked everyone to be sure and pay on the day of the shoot.  The sign-up form had the swimmers name big across the top and then asked for all the pertinent information.  In a nod to the digital age and endless sharing, we also asked for an e-mail address to which we will send a digital copy of each swimmer's portrait for their family to use.

Ben and I ate microwaved breakfast tacos made by our good friends at H.E.B. We brushed our teeth, patted the dog on the head, said goodbye to Belinda and headed out to put the last few bags into the extreme performance Honda Element (I'm okay with leaving stands and sandbags and even lights in the car overnight but not the cameras.  Not the really good stuff) and we headed to the pool.  The drive felt strangely familiar until I reminded myself that I'd done this drive six days a week for the last 15 years..

I decided to set up two different "stations" a few yards apart at the pool.  One station would be for the individual portraits and one station would be for the overall age group shots.  Our portrait station was lit with an Elinchrom Ranger RX AS battery powered strobe system.  I used an 18 inch beauty dish on one head and a 28 inch beauty dish on the other head.  The pack was set to a little more than half power with the distribution being 66% to the main light (22 inch) on the left and 33% into the fill light (28 inch) just over my right shoulder and up.  Both modifiers were covered with white diffusion covers we call, "socks."  The metered exposure was 1/250th of a second @f8 with sunlight in the background and an ISO of 100.

Each age group practices at a specific time.  We knew from our own experience of Ben having been on the Rollingwood Waves that the youngest swimmers, who swim first, would start arriving around 8:15 am, and we'd need to do their group shot right at 8:55 before they hopped into the crystal clear, eighty degree water and started working like Michael Phelps and Natalie Coughlin.

Ben and a parent volunteer took the filled in forms from the parents and checked off payment info.  Ben was strict with anyone who forgot to bring their forms and payment.  He's learning the lessons of capitalism early on.  The kids would line up and when it was their turn to be photographed they would hold their form up, with their name emblazoned big across the top, for the first shot.  This gave me a reference frame for each child so I'll be able to deliver their images to the right folder a week from now.

I took as many photographs as it took to get a nice smile from each of the kids.  Ben kept a close watch to make sure the flashes were firing and also ran interference between me and parents who had pressing questions.

Once we hit 8:55 we gathered all of the kids for the big age group shot, which also includes the coaches.  We arranged them all over a long picnic table, along the bench which faced the camera and, when necessary we added a row sitting cross-legged in the front.  We lit this set up with one Profoto Acute 600b pack at full power, blasting happy photons through an Elinchrom modifier called a large Varistar.  Fancy name for a 41 inch shoot through umbrella with a black on the outside/silver on the inside backing.  It's a fast and easy to use modifier.

I used Flash Wave 2 radio triggers on both stations so all I needed to do was walk between the two stations, set up the kids and coaches and make the images.  Last year I only brought one lighting system and I spent the morning moving it, and two sandbags, back and forth between the two shooting stations.  That always necessitates a couple of test frames at each location.  And it's a pain in the butt to hoist the stand and two twenty  pound sandbags and move them around.

Ben was on his game today. He headed down the big hill to the basketball courts and volleyball court a couple minutes before each group shot to round up "strays" and make sure everyone got into the shots.  He whisked all the paper work and checks into folders and got them into the car before he came back to help tear down gear and he was great with all of the kids.

I shot everything with one camera and one lens.  No.  It was not an OMD.  It was a Sony a77 with the 16-50mm kit lens on the front.  It's sharp and sassy, and the electronic viewfinder is amazing.  It's fun to watch the in-camera lens correction straighten and de-vignette each image as it comes up for review in the finder.  I could also tell immediately each time we lost a frame to a blink.  No need to put the camera down from my face and chimp it.  Seeing the boo-boo in the finder meant I could keep on shooting till we got the right look.  If you stop to chimp at waist level the kids think they're done with their part and they start to wander off.  Fun when technology makes my job easier.

We finished up the project with a group shot of the oldest kids and Ben was about to start breaking stuff down when I stopped him.  "Let's give it ten minutes.  There's always some parent that come screaming in late asking if we can't please include their kiddo."  And sure enough, a small crop of them filtered in, breathless in the next ten minutes to see if we could accomodate them.  We were pleased to.  Customer service always seems to be appreciated.

When I got back to the studio and finished meeting with the plumber I downloaded the card and sequestered it's 900 images onto two hard drives and two sets of DVD's.  Now I need to go thru and pick the best individual shot of each swimmer and the best group shot of each age group, have them printed and then stuck into presentation folders.  We'll deliver them back to the pool next week.

Not the most glamorous job in the world but pretty fun and very satisfying.  After Ben and I packed everything up in the car we headed for our favorite Chinese restaurant, Lotus Hunan and had a well deserved lunch.  First thing out of Ben's mouth?  "Dad, I thought of a few things we could try next year to make this run better..."  I listened.

Now comes the back end of the job.  But once I saw that we had great stuff on every swimmer and we had four backups in place I kicked back and took a break. I love it when stuff works out.

Kirk's Website.

Does anyone remember Super-8 movie film?

When I was working in the advertising business as the creative director of mid-sized agency in a mid-sized town we shot a fair number of television commercials and hired people to shoot industrial films.  The commercials were almost always done on 35mm movie film or Super-16 mm film.  We'd moved out of the dark ages by the time I started and once the footage was shot it would be color timed and converted to one inch or two inch videotape.  The really low budget stuff was shot on video.  But then something kind of wacky happened.

Film production went through its own Instagram Fad a couple of decades ago.  Suddenly everything got retro'd and degraded and grainy and choppy.  The culprit (or hero, depending on which side of the trend you embraced) was the re-embracing of what had been an amateur tool and re-inventing that tool as a professional style.  The vehicle of the new look was the Super8 camera buckled up with Super8 film.  Most of us liked it grainy and silvery so we chose Tri-X or maybe Plus-X black and white emulsions.  People who liked living on the edge used Kodachrome or Ektachrome color emulsions.

Since just about every company in the universe had stopped making Super-8 movie cameras years before the resurrection the race among auteurs and professionals in the moving picture market was to find and acquire the best of the best Super-8 cameras.  No other way to do it right.

This was my rig of choice.  A Nikon R10 Super with an f1.4 Cine Nikkor lens on the front.  It could shoot forward or reverse, you could sync high speed flash and you could synchronize sound with an outboard Nagra or Stellavox audio recorder.  You'll note that the camera had a stepped, motorized zoom control as well as manual zoom control with a grip stick for smoother zooms.

We got a ton of use out of this camera. And we did a lot of projects. I'd leave the house in the morning and my camera bag would be equally weighted between double "A" batteries and film cartridges. (Mostly Tri-X).  While I like shooting locked down on a fluid head tripod the style of the day was a jerky, hand held style that would have made the Jason Bourne DP happy.

There was one project I wrote and directed that really showed off the artistic capabilities of the R10 Super and contrasted it with the smooth color of Sony BetaCam video. It was an industrial film, custom made to be played at a MacWorld Expo back in the early 1990's.  In those days computer memory was expensive and computers without enough ram were dreadfully slow.  Our client, TechnologyWorks made memory and specialized in making the kind of memory that Apple MacIntosh computers liked to play with.  

Our premise was to start the film in color with footage of people looking bored and waiting for their computers to process important graphics jobs.  We'd cut to angry bosses looking at their watches and then to close ups of ticking clocks (slowed down) and back to beautiful designers looking frustrated and beautiful.  All of this waiting and frustration was film in grainy, handheld black and white on the R10 Super using black and white Tri-X.

Once the new memory was installed everything became more real. And that meant smooth, lush colors, camera moves on tracks or on fluid head tripods and really clean, happy lighting.

All of the Super8 film was developed, taped together and then run through a telecine machine that would convert the film, frame by frame, to 3/4 inch videotape so it could be included in the post production.  The film was a success. Our main model was egregiously cute.  The effects all worked and the grainy, jumpy black and white footage at the front two minutes of the piece attracted a huge crowd of Mac-Groovers wherever and whenever we showed it. And the film got used for several years.  Most importantly, I got paid. 

The R in R10 Super calls out a feature which allowed the user to rewind part of the film and shoot on it again for special effects. Nikon patented this.  The "10" in the name referred to the 10X Cine Zoom that the camera was built around.  The R10 Super 8 was the zenith of movie products for Nikon but sadly it was also the last of the breed for that company as video quickly started to take the place of film for family movies and low budget projects.

I came across my camera in a closet this morning.  It's been years since I fired it up and ran film through it but I was at least prescient enough to have taken the batteries out of the camera when I stored it.

I've worked on projects in 16mm and 35mm but Super 8 is my favorite because of its minimalist profile.  I'm rehabbing the camera this week and ordering some Super 8 just for fun.  I'd be curious to know how many of the VSL readers have had parallel interests in making movies and short films and how many have worked with Super8.  It's really a cool part of the evolution of multi-media.  And according to friends in the film business Super 8 is still going strong, with yearly film festivals and the use of Super8 for effect in TV commercials.  What a crazy career I've had so far...

Final fact:  In 1971 the airlines started showing in flight movies with Super8 film projectors.  Before 1971 all in flight movies were shown on 16mm film.  Amazing.