The GH5 in VSL. First Up: The rationalization. Sure to be an interesting flight of fancy....

Ah. The "good old days" of shooting fill flash with film. We actually used light meters then....

I was pretty sure I'd get a lot of responses to my latest purchase along the lines of: "He needs an intervention." "Here we go again." "He's back into m4:3." "But wait, I thought you said Sony (Nikon, Canon, Leica) was best!?!" "It's just Gear Acquisition Syndrome." etc., etc.  But I was equally sure I could come up with at least one convincing rationale for my seemingly illogical purchase.

A few years ago, around 2013, I looked at the market for photography and made a few decisions. My read of the trajectory of paid photography was not optimistic. I saw evidence of financial decline in the actual profession that mirrored the slow down in the camera sales world. Not being anxious to ride the trend to the bottom without some sort of plan "B" I started looking around at options which could leverage the position I built in my market and also leverage many of the skills sets I'd learned over the years. While re-engaging with my advertising background seemed possible it was more of a long shot, in my mind, than ramping up my comfort level with video production and setting marketing goals to sell more video services. The benefit with this second choice is that I would get to play with technical toys (always a plus) and learn new things. If I played my cards right

So, which VSL reader had "July" as the anticipated tipping point month for a GH5 acquisition?

Was it the same wag who called the fz2500 a "gateway drug?" I was working on video files today and marveling at how great the files looked from the fz2500 camera. Then I grabbed some of the handheld video files I'd taken with the G85 and marveled at them. The next thing I knew I was driving up Mopac Expressway toward Precision Camera and Video with the intention of grabbing for the new gold ring of consumer video cameras; the GH5. It just came over me like sun stroke. But with far fewer ill effects.

As of 3:30 pm, CST, I am in possession of a GH5 and two extra Lumix batteries. I'm setting up the menus this evening and the daily reporting about the camera will most likely begin tomorrow. I have to shoot some stuff first.

Here's how the reporting will go: Part one = The big rationale.  Part two: All the stuff I like about the camera and the files I get from it.  Part three: The stuff that bugs me.

Since the temperature hit 104(f) at the house today and the "feels like" temperature was closer to 108(f) I wonder if the purchase was a subliminal response. You know, buying a camera that isn't prone to shut down from overheating.....

So far it's almost exactly like the GH4s I used to own only with a much more complex menu and a much more robust video feature set. More tomorrow....

I tried to put into words the "personality" of some older lenses I was using; maybe photos are worth thousands of inaccurate words...

Yesterday, in a blog I wrote, I was trying to describe the difference in the look and visual "personality" of a set of older Olympus Pen FT lenses. Lenses from the late 1960s and early 1970s. As I swam this morning I wondered to myself, "Why talk about it? Just show some images!" So here are a dozen images from the shoot I did on Tues. evening at a Zach rehearsal of "Million Dollar Quartet." They were shot in a 16:9 aspect ratio so I can slip them into video without cropping. All shot with a Panasonic G85 camera and mostly with the 60mm f1.5 and 40mm f1.4 lenses. 

These were not made as "standalone" images for public relations or marketing but I'm sharing them here so you can see what I mean when I talk about a "rounded" sort of sharpness or a richer color palette. I guess it's all subjective. I hope Google's Blogger doesn't compress these in a ham-fisted fashion. Ah well, back to the edit...

Two interesting shoots done nearly back to back.

Portrait of Sarah shot years ago on film.

Works comes in with no particular pattern. On Saturday afternoon I videotaped four interviews with the four musical leads for the musical/play, "Million Dollar Quartet." I liked each of the interviews and on each one we shot with a second camera to get different angles, but even so I knew I needed some interesting shots to use as "cutaways" for those (numerous) times when I need to cover over visually obvious edits in the program. I also needed to get interview footage of the director who was unable to make it by for his session on Saturday. I cleared yesterday afternoon/evening with the stage manager (48 hour notice needs to be given to equity actors when we schedule media shoots) and showed up with an assortment of cameras with which to capture stage shots in rehearsal, along with the lights and microphone I'd need to capture the missing interview.

The play celebrates an actual event, an evening in the 1950's (December 4, 1956) when four musical talents all met in an unplanned session at Sun Studios and played together. The musicians were: Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. 

I got to the theater around 3:30 in the afternoon and grabbed an

A quick note about providing all of my Sony A7xx, RX10xx and Panasonic fz2500 with instant dual card slots.

The argument generally revolves around shooting a "ONCE IN A LIFETIME" "MISSION CRITICAL" event or person or launch. How can one be a professional videographer using cameras with ONLY one SD card slot? ( I wonder how the old guys got two Beta SP tapes crammed into a single Betacam.....).

I can't help photographers who want to shoot raw still images with fault tolerant redundancy but I can help all the hapless Sony and Panasonic (not counting the new GH5...) owners who feel helpless and vulnerable shooting only to their one bare and rickety internal SD card!

If you shoot with an Atomos Ninja Flame or the Shogun model of external video recorder you can default to 8-bit capture and send video to both the camera card and the recorder's SSD. You'll have the back-up video you've been pining for over the years along with the bonus of having a great monitor. 

Problem solved. At least for video. Might even be a hack to record still images on your external recorder. I haven't looked into that yet. Growth market for Atomos?

A Few Thoughts About Shooting Green Screen.

West Texas Rest Stop. 

I'm resistant to shooting "off the cuff" green screen for clients. Like anyone not directly in our business clients tend to have a simplified view of the technique required to do it well. We use green screens in order to easily drop out the green background behind a subject and replace the background with a different image. Compositing is so easy in still photography now that one rarely even needs to bother with a green (or blue) screen but video comes at you at 30 frames a second and it would be more than a little time consuming to go into each frame and do selections, etc. so green screen is still standard if you want to layer in a different background behind a person or object in video. 

Like everything there is a right way to shoot green screen and a wrong way. The wrong way is to set up a green background without lighting and hope that available light and luck will get you a clean enough background to composite. It kinda works but requires a lot of post production masking to deal with variations in tone and color that make automated background drop outs tough.

I've done half-assed green screen in the past with reasonable results but I'm shooting a big video project tomorrow for a larger ad agency. It's mostly green screen and I wanted to understand the best way to do the work and what kinds of things to watch out for. Nobody likes having to make excuses

A Short, Celebratory Note: Another Mile Stone.

Barton Springs Pool. My new Monday morning habit.

1/8th mile long. Temperature +/- 70 degrees.

A great training pool for distance swimming.

Not too crowded at 6 am. 

The counter on the VSL blog just clicked over the 23,000,000 mark. That's a count of page views which happen here on the site. The Google counter for all reads (RSS, etc.) now exceeds 90,000,000. I'm pretty happy with either metric. I use the 23,000,000 for analytical purposes. 

We've shared over 3,000 posts in the last eight years. We're in the middle of a slow motion embrace of video but I still consider myself a photographer. The core audience I write for is fellow photographers.

I appreciate all the loyal readers I've gotten comments and e-mails from over the years and look forward to many more. 

Occasionally I put up little Amazon ads but I've made it a rule not to ask for donations, not to do Kickstarter campaigns and not to work as a shill for any manufacturers. I hope you know that the writing comes from my honest opinions about trends and photo-philosophy, and my discussions about gear derive from my having purchased said gear and pressed it into use for my own commercial enterprise. Although I do reserve the right to discuss new gear that I don't own but find interesting enough to consider.....

Your only responsibilities as a reader are: To enjoy the writing. To share your knowledge and opinions in the comments. To comment with compassion to the author and to fellow readers. To disagree with me when I've run off course (but gently, gently). To share the blog with like minded friends. That's it. 

I hope you'll stick around for the next 3,000 posts and be part of the next 23,000,000 views. It's been a fun ride so far...