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What is a professional? In order to be a professional at a trade you just need to perform that trade for a living. Not a difficult concept, but we also assume that person is trained and experienced. When you hire a professional to perform their trade you are expecting a knowledgeable and career oriented person to come and perform the task admirably.
But what is an amateur? If you hired an amateur to perform something you wouldn’t expect the same craftsmanship you would get from a professional right? This is notion that is true in society, and for good reason. An amateur according to the societal definition is untrained at best, or someone who does not merit pay for their work at worst. Why would we expect the professional level work from an amateur then?
Because the word amateur does not mean what society has turned it into. Amateur translates roughly from French as “Lover of”. So calling yourself an amateur photographer, while yes, does not deem you a credible hire, should speak volumes for your passion in that field. But to call yourself an amateur photographer should not rule out that you are also a professional photographer.That doesn’t sound right though, does it?
Why would you call yourself an amateur if you are a professional? This is something that really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Society puts little to no value on passion. You can get things done without passion, people perform jobs and functions in the average workplace.
If you put greater value on doing something because you love it over the pursuit of money, you will fall into a minority in society. But in that minority group have some of the greatest peers.
But what happens when people are passionate about their work? Society doesn’t see this as a normal function for work so it must be difficult to work outside the norm. But in fact, these people are generally the first ones that come to mind when we think of successful professionals. People like Steve Jobs and Walt Disney, both passionate entrepreneurs who forged ahead to CREATE industries in fields where there was none before.
An amateur’s passion is not what prevents them being a professional, it’s the inexperience that the word carries. Being passionate should only open doors. Being an amateur shouldn’t mean you can’t be a professional, it just means you don’t hate your job.
Feathered cropping tricks for Premiere CS6! Those of us from FCP7 find these features far less intuitive and easy to find, so I'll probably need to reference this often.
With Apple's victory in the courts today, I remember some of my favorite TedTalks in relation to copyright and patents.
Larry Lessig: Creativity is being strangled by the law. Larry speaks on the nature of culture returning to a "read write" culture.
Kirby Ferguson, creator of the Everything in the Remix series. Talks about the culture of embracing fair use.
These may not directly apply in the case of Apple v Samsung, but copyright is something creators on all level have to deal with. It's there to protect investment and creativity. As filmmakers we license music for our use and as filmmakers we don't want people stealing our films.
We need to appreciate the work of others and respect it as we hope our work is respected. It's a two way street.
On a similar note, Chase Jarvis is hosting a cjLive episode with Larry Lessig talking about creative rights and creative commons, this Wednesday, August 29th.
A masterful visual effects artist shares his way of using smoke and mirrors to create what the audience wants to see.
I remember seeing Titanic submarine scene as a kid and being blown away and convinced it had to be fake just because it couldn't possibly be real. I'm twice as blown away seeing how the illusion and reality were intercut.
Nice example of how a polarizer can change your image straight out of the camera by Christian Mairitsch. No photoshop, same settings in-camera. Click image for non-GIF high resolution version.
You can see the polarization falling off on the right side of the sky very suddenly, caused by a combination of the rotating element in polarizers, and the angle of the sun in relation to the photograph. This example shows how it creates that vibrancy of color and reflections, but also how it can add distracting graduated appearance on skies and other elements.
Concerns, Rumors, Peanut Gallery:
- If it's same/similar sensor to NEX5n, it's probably going to lack the low light capability of the FS100 or 700.
- If it encodes/scales similar to NEX5n & VG20, it's going have less moire and aliasing than 5D2 and 7D, but probably more than FS100/700.
- The Sony HXR-FMU128 only lists up to 24mbps recording. I have no first hand knowledge of the recorder, but does this mean you should use the other 3 options for highest recording quality? Or will 28mbps be possible on the FMU128?
- I assume LCD is comparable to FS100/700 offering, but placed in a rational location finally. (Confirmed, same LCD, similar EVF)
- The lens hood is gunna be a pain in the ass with a variND filter, so it looks like that will be removed readily.
- Price is preliminary around £2700-3000, or $3350 USD. With the 18-200. So far, US market is being charged a bit of a premium, at $4500!
Obligatory marketing video with some nasty frame-blending...
There are a lot of artists out there willing to license their songs for productions. Most of us rely on the same resources though due to time/money constraints of licensing tracks from artists individually.
I'm gunna keep pooling individual artists/resources I find that have either Creative Commons or have expressed willingness to license in some other way.
First up is Aperire. Great atmospheric rock with lots of moody elements, long tracks with slow builds and epic instrumentals. The musician has expressed willingness to offer it free to filmmakers on reddit. It is currently licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.
Matt Jeppsen over at FreshDV is starting a series of blog posts on the Ziess Contax lenses. I highly recommend reading it, even if you decide you don’t need Zeiss Contax, it’s still good insight on the ramification on lens choices.
Part 1 is online now, I’ll update when the rest come online.
Professional Photography - A Distinct Step Towards Reinvention
I want to premise this post with recap of historical events.
1825 - Nicéphore Niépce invents the 'modern' camera and takes the first known photograph.
1861 - Patent for the first internal single-lens reflex camera filed in the UK
1884 - George Eastman replaces photographic plates with film
1897 - First folding pocket camera introduced.
1908 - Gabriel Lippman introduces color film
1908 - Olympics are held in London for the first time.
1936 - First 35mm SLR becomes available
1970s - Auto-focus becomes available
1990 - First commercially available digital camera.
1997 - Camera phones come into existance.
2007 - iPhone released
2012 - London Olympics photography coverage is done via an iPhone 4S.
Maybe a little melodramatic, but I have been passionate about the way tools are changing how we work, and how they are also becoming less of a consideration. 20 years ago, if you asked any cinematographer or photographer if they thought they'd be shooting digital professionally, they would have laughed.
Dan Chung is at the Olympics as a photographer and journalist, his tools include an iPhone, a clip-on lens, and Canon binoculars. With that he is shooting and liveblogging the games for the Guardian. And the cheeky '@DSLRinformer' is doing a damn good job showing that talent and experience outweighs the benefits of an 800mm lens and a DSLR.
At the 1908 London Olympics, action photography during events was barely capable. Motion blur was a reality inescapable except with the best equipment. Some dedicated and presumedly experienced photographers captured those games with the tools they had available to them.
Fast-forward 104 years and things have changed tremendously. I'd bet if every cell phone at the event uploaded every picture they took, we could see every moment of the Olympics through a crowd-sourced real-time feed. Not only is it commonplace for every image captured at the 2012 Olympics to be digital, it's now being done on multifunctional consumer devices, not just professional digital equipment.
In great contrast, some photographers are paying homage to historical traditions of Olympic photography. Using 100 yr old glass and a 4x5 field camera, photojournalist Jay L. Clendenin shot Olympians in a way reminiscent of Olympics held a century ago.
The capabilities of creating a quality image are no longer limited to the best of gear, it's now limited by the creative vision you have. Whether your goal is historical portraits, or immediate distribution to an audience, your compromises are aesthetic choices you can attain.
The implications of this shift in accessibility are boundless. Perhaps at the next Olympics apps like Vyclone will have advanced to the point where I can be livestreaming a crowdsourced version of the event. Instead of using NBC's livestream, I'll be tuned into 100 different cameras and choosing the perspective I want. That may seem like science-fiction, but many of the realities of today would have seemed like science-fiction just a few years ago.
If there is one lesson Dan Chung can teach shooters with his live blog at the Olympics, I think it's this: Hard work, experience, and talent will get you better results than mountain of gear.
FStoppers found this fantastic BTS for the original Lord of the Rings film. Here's what they had to say:
In Lord Of The Rings the Hobbits, who are supposed to be very small, are required to interact with much larger humans. I always assumed they did this by recording each actor separately and then combining them in post but I was very wrong. By using a telephoto lens and very small aperture that produced a long depth of field, they could place the actors on different focal planes and keep them both sharp. With some incredible set design they could fool the viewer even while the camera was in motion.
While incredibly creative, these moving forced perspective shots were part of why I really didn’t enjoy Lord of the Rings. It’s like watching a funhouse mirror trying to be a normal mirror, it seems just slightly off as the space around the characters seems warped and dream-like.
But the technical feat of accomplishing this is awesome and shows how much that film was 'engineered' to create the reality that was in the original books.
This is a beginner-to-intermediate look at Thunderbolt storage options. If you are a Mac user and looking to get into high capacity and performance storage, there are some things you need to know.
WD My Book Studio II - 4TB/$330 & 6TB/$430 - Includes 2x FW800, eSata, and USB 2.0
WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo - 4TB/$500 & 6TB/$600 - ONLY 2x THUNDERBOLT
$170 more for the same size storage, with less IO options, no measurable performance difference!
G-Raid - 4TB/$300 & 8TB/$700 - Includes 2x FW800, eSata, and USB 2.0
G-Raid Thunderbolt - 4TB/$620 & 8TB/$854 - ONLY 2x THUNDERBOLT
4TB version is $320 more for the same size storage, with less IO options, no measurable performance difference! Only $154 more in the 8TB flavor, the best bargain of the bunch by comparison.
Seagate GoFlex Portable Thunderbolt 1TB - $260
Seagate Backup Plus Portable USB 3.0 1TB - $100
$160 more, or 160% more! Granted, this is against the lowly USB 3.0 model, but USB 3.0 isn't a slouch IO. You probably won't notice a difference in regular use since the 1TB drive is probably 5400rpm. I won't be buying any Seagate drives anymore so someone else will have to test this. Only one thunderbolt IO, so no daisy-chaining with this dog.
Long story short, you are paying a premium to remove universally available IO ports, and replace them with 2 that are only available on the latest Mac hardware (BUT NONE OF THE MAC PROS). This may be okay in many situations, but if this drive is going to be used anywhere other than YOUR Mac, you might be setting yourself up for a missed connection and a headache. I can't afford to not be able to plug into a Mac Pro or even a PC when the need arises.
The WD and G-Tech drives are both RAID set-ups, meaning they each contain 2 hard drives working together, with 2 standard flavors. RAID 0 has data stripped across both drives, getting the maximum storage space and faster R/W speeds. RAID 1 has data mirrored so if one drive fails, no data is lost, and it takes a performance hit as it writing and reading between the drives for constant redundancy. Here is the thing, RAID 0 is DANGEROUS! It might be faster but if one drive fails, you are chasing ALL your data right to an expensive forensic fancy place to recover it. Use RAID 1 if you have important data, or back it up regularly.
I have both G-Tech and WD in non-Thunderbolt format and had the opportunity to test the thunderbolt version of the WD.
Both the WD and G-Tech perform similarly in RAID 1 & 0 configurations, G-Tech beat it out by only a small margin. They were all throttled by FW800 but seemed unhindered by the 3gbps of eSATA. G-Raid was pushing 2Gbps in RAID 0, the rest between 1-1.5Gbps.
The WD Thunderbolt Duo in RAID 0 performed less than 2Gbps R/W at sustained transfer, well within the reach of eSATA's 3Gbps realm. It did however outperform the actual speed I was getting with my Studio II via eSATA (by about than 20-30mbps). So I'd venture to guess the G-Raid would fair slightly better, but still within the technical reach of eSATA. Basically, you aren't going to get 10Gbps just because your IO can deliver it. That is the important fact to remember, a standard RAID 1/0 configuration with HDDs will probably never exceed 3Gbps. Still an excess of what most users needs are however.
Now, you have a Macbook, iMac, or Mac Mini and you don't want to be stuck with FW800 if you know it's the bottleneck (I never get more than ~500mbps out of FW800). You don't have to shell out upwards of $160 per drive just to squeeze that performance! There are now IO hubs available and coming soon to alleviate this very need.
Currently available - LaCie eSATA Hub - $199 - An awkward little brick by Lacie, it's the best product LaCie's ever made if you ask me. With 2x Thunderbolt and 2x eSATA IOs, you can connect 2 drives via eSATA to your thunderbolt-equipped Mac and daisy-chain out to a monitor or other thunderbolt device without a hitch. I have this and love it, I might be getting another soon and I'm realizing that my only complaint is terrible external design. It's not stackable, or even logically designed, it's tall and thin like Lacie hard drives, which are built like haphazard dominos. But for few more bucks over the thunderbolt version, you can get the standard model w/ esata and have a highly functional system with space for another drive later.
Coming Soon (Sept. Release) - Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock - $399 - While a bit pricer than the LaCie option, Belkin has made this a full-service docking platform with IOs up-the-wazoo! You get 2 Thunderbolt, one eSATA, 3 USB 3.0, Audio line in and out, FW800, HDMI, and Gigabit ethernet! Those 3 USB 3.0 ports are handy for anyone with a USB 2.0 Mac and is constantly getting thumb drives or USB hard drives that are most often 3.0 nowadays. One eSATA is kind of skimpy but it's better than none, and the HDMI is a nicer bonus. And it still has Thunderbolt daisy-chaining so you can keep using that port!
Also, Apple just released their Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter for $29. This is probably going to be a need to own solution for Retina MBP owners that need fast way to use their old (and new) firewire hard drives that have USB 2.0 and eSATA, but no thunderbolt. It's a small dongle so it's worth having if you need a fast solution.
This was all an in-depth way of showing that Thunderbolt has lots of options coming it's way, but right now you need to focus on the actual return on investment with Thunderbolt peripherals. If that little-to-no actual speed improvement in these drives is worth it to you, go for it, but be aware that the loss of IO options really locks you into a format not widely accessible just yet.
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