photography
Red Sky Reunion – 2012
Thanks to Shannon Kalkstein we had a great Red Sky Interactive reunion of sorts at Grumpy’s in San Francisco – our traditional watering hole literally in the shadow of Red Sky’s old building at 921 Front Street (the old Goody-Silverstein building, amazingly still standing).
After almost 15 years, it felt like we had just walked out of the office next door: everyone is still doing great work, still fired up, all look fabulous.
It was great to hear how far most have traveled, and grown, and – in a couple of cases – sired (very handsome) offspring: hopefully all budding designers, strategists, creatives.
More New Glass
Absolutely buried with work these days but I did reward myself with a new lens this week: one I’ve been eyeing for a long time. The more motion graphics work I’ve been doing in After Effects and C4D have had me scrambling to find textures and materials appropriate for specific projects. Instead of feeding money to the stock houses (especially for video, which gets expensive) a good macro lens can be a god-send. And the Canon 100mm EF L Macro is easily one of the best out there (you get what you pay for).
Haven’t had time to really push it yet – e.g. on tripod or macro video – but I present here my very first shot with this thing out of the box.… Read the rest
7D Test
Not much down time here lately, but with what little I have I’ve been working out all of the details of round-tripping HD video between a host of tools: Final Cut, After Effects, SoundTrack, Compressor, etc. Also working with ProRes for transcoding for the first time which is pretty amazing.
click for video
This short is one of those tests. Shot with a Canon 7D using an EFS 17-55 zoom, Manfrotto tripod with fluid head mount. (I’ll put that to use later …;-)
(Update: Wow, lot’s of iPad users out there already … thanks for pointing this out. If you’re here on an iPad, Vimeo has not released the embed code for iPad video playback.… Read the rest
New Glass
I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to decide on a new walk-around camera/lens setup, for both stills and HD video, but I finally pulled the trigger. (Thanks to my patient wife who allowed me to dip into my allowance)
Went with the Canon EOS 7d – body only – with the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM zoom lens.
Looks like a great, portable, flexible setup. If anyone has any comments (the photo / video crowd is easily one of the most opinionated I’ve seen, outside of the politicos) fire away. And yes, I know it’s not full-frame…… Read the rest
Bit of a Milestone …
For those of you out there that are camera gearheads, you may or may not be aware of what many would consider to be a quiet milestone in the film production story.
On May 17 evidently the season finale of House will air on television. Not big news except for this: while House has – like many major television productions – been shot on 35 mm film, this season finale was shot in HD digital. But that’s still not the most interesting part: the episode was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II – a DSLR.
A camera that to most lay-people looks just like any other pro-sumer Canon or Nikon digital single lens reflex camera.… Read the rest
