Photo Chick: Reflectors and Light Tents

A while back, producing for youtube.com meant it really didn't matter what your original looked like: published it would like kinda crappy. Now they've added that "watch in high quality" link, and suddenly videos can look reasonably good. Not pristine, but not that bad.

Here's a video I helped with. It's part one of three. It includes Shirley, the world's most fantastic mannequin head.

Words About Pictures

On Friday, went into the studio to record a discussion about digital photography. We're now at the point where the outcome of film-versus-digital has been decided, so the more mature questions arise: what's actually different? has the role of the photographer changed? the function of the photograph? photography's place in society?

More on this topic soon....

And Some Good News

It turns out there's an upside to the pipe bursting and flooding my desk: there's now an appropriate habitat for a ceiling cat.

Some Bad News

After returning from Toronto, the week went well enough, with a few minor glitches here and there. For example, at one of my jobs a pipe burst and completely soaked my desk and two computers.

Podcast on Street Photography

New York Institute of Photography has posted a podcast in which I talk on and on about street photography.

Podcast About Lenses

New York Institute of Photography posted a podcast where I talk about Inexpensive Lenses For Your DSLR.

Yet Jerry Springer Still Hasn't Called

Today New York Institute of Photography posted a podcast about me.

The Online Audience

The video I made for NYIP on the recent Photo Contest has passed 2,000 views. It's a strange thing: 100 views a day doesn't seem like very much, until you realize that the Internet is on and available every day, 24 hours. So the first few days, you shrug. A few hundred.

If a video keeps going, however, soon the views are in the thousands. While that won't compare to broadcast audiences, it can be a significant number of people.

So the question becomes: what's the goal? I expect the screening tonight for "12th and 3rd in Brooklyn" will be a medium-sized audience. Is that better? Worse? Just different?

Cast Photo

Last Friday, I shot a little video aimed at YouTube.com. That's the cast, above.

The strange thing is, shooting that sort of piece is really all documentary production technique. I used a Canon GL1 with a little BeachTek adapter underneath it. A wireless body microphone and a clip on lavalier microphone were cabled into the BeachTek, one to the left channel and one to the right. Half was shot on a tripod, the rest following the actors around.

The thing is, fiction film is really documenting acting that happens in front of the camera, isn't it?

New NYIP Video

Here's a new video I made for the New York Institute of Photography.

The logistics were:

shot with Canon GL1, using natural light until the day faded away (then a little tungsten bounce light was added to brighten the room a bit)

each contest judge was recorded with a lapel lavalier microphone, then the general judging was done with the built-in camera microphone

the piece was edited, minor goofs were fixed and especially sound clean up done (since it was in a room where it would have been terrible to turn off the air conditioner)

and a pristine H264 format MPEG 4 file was exported (with some experimenting, a very very clean output was produced with a file about 42MB in filesize)

this was then uploaded to YouTube.com -- where they have special elves that make it look very poorly compressed -- and totally low-resolution whenever there's a cross dissolve or a fade-out-fade-in dissolve

More on fixing those "minor goofs" later.

A Nine on the Shirl-ometer

This? This is Shirley. She's been photographed by thousands.

She's recently gone into retirement (though most say she's kept her looks after all these years) and I'm considering doing a short documentary on her career.

If you've worked with Shirley, send me an email. If you've dated Shirley, send me an anonymous email. Or just post a comment.

Photo Chick, Episode One

The Photo Chick explains how to avoid flash overexposure.