Introducing Dan Chapman, AKA Dante. Dan is the newest member of the team here at DHS. Dan is working as a camera operator on all our motion projects, and helping out with post/media management. He comes to us from Orlando,Fl and Full Sail University. We love working with Dan, and we really love having a camera operator that we can call Dante.

Here is a link to my interview in Pop Photo this month I am incredably excited to be part of this and deeply humbled that they chose me to be interviewed.

What I really hope is that from this more people will be making movies. So many people are intimidated by the process, and it really does not have to be that hard. Yes, once you get into splitting feeds, video villages, follow focus motors and the lot, it can be complex. But you can make a very nice professional quality movie with these little cameras with out all that. This is my message in the interview, just point the camera and shoot. Its not so hard. Isn’t that how we started taking photos?

There is a huge amount of information out there. For me, my day starts each and every morning with an email from Planet 5D. Mitch does a great job of searching the web for interesting developments and videos. I am happy to support them. If you are only going to look at one site, it is Planet 5D. They collect information from all over the world and post it. From there, if I see anything interesting, directors, gear, or videos, I drill down to find out more. I can honestly say, that if not for that site and for Shane’s site, I would not being doing what I do today.

Next comes my RSS feed: A Photo Editor, Canon Rumors, PDN pulse, Shane Hurlbut, ProLost, The Creators Project, Heather Morton Art buyer, Chase Jarvis, Philip Bloom, Nowness, Gizmodo, Vincent LaForet. These sites and the people who write have all been my teachers. They put their hearts into letting all of us know what they do, and I am deeply grateful to them. If there is anything that needs more investigation, I do it. The RSS list is constantly changing. I want to keep changing the people I read so that I don’t get too much of any one persons KoolAid. Because, we all have our own special KoolAid if you know what I mean.

If there is something that I want to know even more about, I send an email to the person. Almost never has someone not returned one of my questions. I love connecting to other creators. These connections are fantastic resource. I now have a pretty good network of professionals out there that I can send a question to.

I also read American Cinematographer. I highly recommend reading every word and save every issue. This is a magazine about the real giants. Even though I probably won’t have a 100 strong camera dept any time soon, it is great to read exactly how movies are made by people who are the best in the world at it. My copies look like porcupines with post-it notes sticking out all over them.

Books: In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch. DV Rebels Guide by Stu Maschwitz, Apple Pro Training Series on Final Cut and Color are the basics. Every book I read, I make notes in. My memory may not be so great, but I have an annotated library to back it up.

To me this is not work. In the words of my friend Jeff Hirsch at FotoCare ” It’s like springtime all over again”. I mean, how many chance in life do you get to re-invent yourself?

If you read this blog, you know my rap is always the same. Less is better. Don’t let technology stand in your way. Here is a picture of my cameraman Dante with our new rig working yesterday on a film we are doing. This is the deal: flag pole carry belt for a huge cost of 29 buckaroos. Small consumer monopod for another 30 big ones. It works great, and he is walking in sand, which ain’t easy.

I have a whole box of RedRock tinker toys. Yes they are useful for certain things, but this rig works better than any shoulder mount, chest mount that we have ever used. Something about the way it is tied into the body makes the movement super natural. Yes all you gear babies out there, we have used it with 4 inch rails and a follow focus. Works fine.

Hey Eagle Mountain Flag, could we do this thing in another color?

Photography, and to a greater degree, film making, are technology dependent art forms. When I get a piece of gear that feels good to me, I get excited. It makes me want to hold it and use it. New gear can lead to new points of view and new projects. Example, my new H3D and my Skateboard Diaries project. However, beware the pull of gear porn and the gear head. By gear porn, I mean the web sites that are constantly pushing every new widget that you must have, and how this will make you a better image maker.

Keep this fact in mind: If you are a working professional photographer or film maker, you are hired for your vision, your storytelling ability, and your ability to put those skills to work on demand. Gear heads can be hired, creative vision is much harder to come by, and thus worth much more. Steven Meisel didn’t come from a photographic background. He hired good assistants to help him with his vision. Gear is great, knowing the tools of your craft is important, but technical expertise can be hired, vision can not be out sourced.

There has been considerable discussion of the Zeiss ZE lenses used for motion and stills on Canon bodies. I have tested most all of the Zeiss ZE line, and have compared them to the Canon lenses and to Nikon mounted on a Canon. Here is the bottom line: When I shot a big stills ad job 2 weeks ago I had all the various glass there to use, and after about 10 shots it became obvious, use the Canon lenses. The Zeiss, even if the beep focus worked well, which it absolutely does not, is just too slow to work and too tiring on my eyes. Keep it simple, use the Canons on a Canon body.

I had a chance to see Shane Hurlbuts short film made for Canon and shot with their lenses. It looked great on a big screen. That settles that. If you are a total gear head and must have the Zeiss cinema primes, go ahead and spend the 25k. But for me, it is going to be all Canon all the time. As to the Nikons, as much as I love the 50 1.2, which is the best 50 still lens ever made, it will not focus accurately in focus confirmation mode on a Canon. In live view, it is great, but from now on, I am going to keep it simple and just use the Canon glass.

For all of us, myself included, we need to focus on what we do best: tell stories. Anything that interferes with that has to go. If you are puzzling over which piece of glass to use, bring less, use zooms, or only bring 3 or 4 primes. Stop with the insanity of the Franken-Cameras and get on with tell the story. As the brilliant Ed Kashi told me “All that gear gets between my heart and my subject and I couldn’t work like that”. Well said Ed.

I had the good fortune to be sitting next to Ed Kashi at the Blend Images spring workshop. More on Ed later. What I want to mention is something he said in passing about how when he shoots video how hard it is on his body. That he gets himself in some uncomfortable position then has to hold it for minutes at a time. As a side note, Ed is in excellent shape, and this is not a criticism of him in any way. If you did what Ed did, and you went to the places did, anything less than excellent health would lead to an early demise. Check his work and you will see what I mean.

Your body is your tripod, it is your fundimental support rig.. If you can’t move smoothly, or steadily, you won’t be able to move the camera to where it needs to be, and there will be problems. I have heard it said that the biggest contribution that a photographer can make to a shoot is his enthusiasm and energy. But what if he can’t bring it because he/she has not been taking care of themselves?

This is such a critical and so often minimized factor. What happens if your knees are sore and you can’t bring the camera down to where iot needs to be to get the shot? What if the shot is from a tree limb and you are too out of shape to get into the tree? Don’t you think this is going to have an impact on your career?

Advertising shoots remind me of something out of “All That Jazz”, its show time! Personally, if I know I have a big ad gig, I purposely rest the preceding couple of days. Think of the great climber Anatoli Boukreev in Everest basecamp. He would rest the week before the climb, critized for loofing, when he was in fact recharging his body.

The thing is, if the body goes, the career goes. Are you ready to sit in a chair next to a tripod with a remote in your hand? No way. Eat as healthy as you possibly can. Research health and how to be healthy as least as much as you research anything else. Exercise every day. Sleep as much as you can. I do yoga, swimming, surfing, skiing, Gold’s Gym, Exhale, everything I can and a 3 or 4 day ad job still kicks my ass. If your body is not at peak health you will not be able to perform at your peak level. You need to take this seriously.

The iPhone is poorly named. It is not a phone. It is a lot of other things: text device, web bowser, emailer, music player, app money pit. But it is not a phone. And the problem is not ATT, as the Apple propagandists would have you think. The problem is the iPhone. My wife is also on ATT, and her Blackberry does not drop calls, it doesn’t have problems connecting. She had an iPhone for 2 weeks and got rid of it because, imagine this, she wanted to talk on it. The unreliability of voice communication on the iPhione is to the point that I no longer make calls on it if I can help it. Why bother, the call is guaranteed to drop. In an example of technology changing our behavior, I text more, email more, and use a land line if I can. This lack of reliable mobile telephony is so pervasive that there isn’t even any need to apologize any more for the cutoffs. The other person immediately understand what is going on and a conversation restarts as if there had been no interruption.

Perhaps this is really about another transformnation that is happening, the acceptance of technology as a method of degrading experience. MP3s are a far cry from the musicalicity of records, but we trade the quality of experience for the potential of quantity. The web has visual content galore, but it is not the same as a magazine. Now the lack of telephony is abstrating the way we socially interact. I am not sure where this is going, or perhaps this is just spasm of luditism, but I feel like we being conned.

I know I am, supposed to love Apple. They make some great products and I happen to own quite a few of them. The iPhone is a wondrous device, it just isn’t a phone. Which makes me question the iPad. I know it is supposed to save the publishing world, and I hope it does. But without Flash, I don’t see how that is going to happen. Why would I buy something that doesn’t run the software that is necessary to few the vast majority of motion content on the web. Hello, like The New York Times? I don’t get it. If Apple had put a real OS on it, and had felt less threatened by the possibility of non-Apple approved Flash programs, then they would have an extraordinary device. But for now, I don’t get it. Maybe I will once I hold one.

I have read on 2 seperate site this week that Canon is rumoured to be making the 1DSIV with Raw video. Wow! That would seal the deal for Canon as the premier small camera platform. The biggest problem I have with the 5D is the h.264 compression. We all deal with it, but to have RAW, would be awesome, well not so awesome if you are the RED ONE company. Add to this that Zeiss anounced that will be releasing a set of cinema primes for for EOS/PL mounts, and you have a huge step forward in HDSLR film making. The speed at which these developments are arriving is stunning. It feels like something has tipped, as Malcom Gladwell would say.

The next thing I would love to see would be Canon releasing cinema lenses for their own cameras. They have the best technology out there, they just need to apply it. That Zeiss, with 20 year old technology can steal the show from them is a bit amusing. But, it is just a matter of time. Canon has fantastic IS, they have great autofocus, they make wonderful cinema lenses for super 16 ( The Hurt Locker was shot with them), they just need to make put all the pieces together and release some killer glass.

Absolutely the best chicken satay in the eastern hemisphere. And the locals loved the RedRock rig.

Before this current trip to Asia, I tested a number of ND filters with my Minolta Color Meter. I have 2,3,6,10 stop glass multi coated B+W neutral density filters in 58 and 78 mm sizes. I have step up/ down rings to 72, 67 and 55mm, which covers most of my lenses. For my beloved Zeiss 21 2.8, which is a 82mm front, I have a Hoya 3 stop ND and a Vari ND filter. My tests show that there is essentially no color shift with the B+W multicoated glass. I tested each of the BW filters, and the max color deflection was 100k, with most of them having no deflection at all. The Hoya was 400k and +2 green. The Fader ND was a shocking 1000k and +5 green. My 77mm SingRay showed 500k and +2 green. Bob at Singray explained that the 500k shift was intentional to offset the inherent blue cast in polarizers, which is something I had not heard of before.

The meter I use when shooting motion is the color meter, not an exposure meter. I check the exposure in the viewfinder, and only if I am unsure, do we pull out the light meter. The color however gets checked for each and every shot. I have found that color correction with h.264 is not something that is forgiving. We try as best we can to nail the look in camera. When I use the Singray, I have to compensate for the color shift by reading 500k up from where I want to be which adds an unnecessary layer of confusion that I would rather not have.

When shooting the Vari ND vs no filter, the color shift is strongly apparent. Ugly. The SingRay is not as bad, but the shift is still apparent. This says nothing of the flare that I get when shooting backlit, which completely obviates the Zeiss ability to hold shadow detail. Practically speaking, I find myself using the Singray on my 24-70 zoom only when I am in a situation of fast changing light conditions. After all, a yellowish green cast is better than not getting any shot at all. But, this is only when I have to work very fast, like today hand held on the back of a motorcycle racing down rice paddies. I think out of all the shots we did in 3 weeks, the SingRay was used maybe twice.

This is my assistant Robert with the doorway dolly getting the timing of the move dialed in. I can’t reveal yet what we were shooting, as it has yet to be posted and published by the magazine, however I can tell you this was one of the most personally moving stories I have ever done- but more on that when I can show you the results.

The lens is a 70-200 f4IS lens, set at f8-f16, depending on the color of the subject. I like that lens quite a bit. Sharp, fast focusing in autofocus mode, clearly not the case here, and light weight. We initially had a 2 stop ND on the lens, but decided we wanted the depth of field. The lights, which are out of frame are 1k, 650k and 150k tungsten frensels. There is a bit of fill coming from the light panel mounted on camera. Once we got going, we took the Marshal off the camera cheese plate and mounted it to the dolly. We found that balanced the camera better on the fluid head. One of the very tricky things on this set up, is that because we had very little room to work in, the camera is as close to the back wall as possible. Thus, all the focusing and framing are done in the Marshal, but the camera moves get reversed, which is a bit weird. I had wanted to do a pan plus a dolly move, but there no way I was going to attempt that from a reversed monitor.

When we were actually shooting, I walked with the dolly facing the subject and glanced at the monitor to check composition. We tried having me sit on the dolly and view the monitor, but we found that because I am pretty animated when working, the dolly shook, and thus the image was not stable.

We chose the doorway dolly, rather than lay track purely as a time savings. The floor was reasonably flat, of course the one dip was right in the middle of the dolly move, but rather than deal with track and all that ensues, we went with the simpler method. My feeling was that if I only had 6 hours to get footage, I would rather be spending it on running the camera than messing with dolly track. Whatever bump we hit seems to have been handled by the IS lens.

The subjects we were shooting were a bit twitchy, yea just a bit, so that focusing on the eyes became a real challange. We did some with the focus enhancement in the Marshal, but decided the safest way was with the 5x magnifier in the 5DII.

shutter 1/60
white balance 3300 as read from a hand held color meter
asa 650

Keep checking the blog, I should be able to post footage next week. If anyone has any questions please let me know, I would be happy to share.

This was one of the best feeling jobs I have done in years. Time Magazine was great about giving me all the support I could ask for. Feel great about the results, feel great about the dogs, feel great about the people I was working with. Here is the story of how these pictures came to be.

I received a call from Kira Pollack, photo editor at Time, whom I had often worked with when she was at The New York Times Magazine. She is one of the great ones, as anyone who comes out of the great Kathy Ryan photo dept. is. Kira says she has an interesting job and could I come in to talk about it. Rescued Fighting Dogs in St Louis, and the kicker, they need 75 portraits. Wow, a lot of pictures. My assistant and I immediately start doing light tests and background color tests on my Chihuahua, Nina. There were several issues to consider: What sort of background/lighting is going to look good on a grid of 75 dogs? The dogs being all different colors, what sort of lighting should we use? Having a potentially very dynamic subject, how should we light this so that motion is frozen and the light can be easily moved about to follow the dog? Most importantly, how can I show them with dignity? How can I bring their character into the photo?

The solution we came up with was a middle grey paper background. I had considered painting a wall and floor, fabric, or wood, but I figured we could get middle grey paper in St Louis, and if the dogs wreck it, we can pull down another section, and we wouldn’t be spending 1 entire day set building or set painting. A recent consideration to all travel jobs is the budget for the baggage. If it costs 50$ each way for a bag, and $100 each way for a heavy bag, times 5 bags, we are better off renting the gear on location. In St Louis, there is no way to get a Pro 7 pack. But we could get Dynalight 1000x packs, which I had last used 15 years ago. The issue for me was the flash duration, slow 1/600 sec and I knew we would be dealing with some active animals. Our solution was to use the Dynalights for some of the light, but the main light would come from a handheld overhead Canon 580EX attached to a Quantum and a Pocket Wizard that my assistant would hold in his hand and be able to harmonize with the dogs movement. The whole family of these Canon/ NIkon flashes emit their flash at super fast durations, and at a slightly cooler color temp than the studio flashes. I often use the pocket wizard/canon recipe outside with some gel when I need a portable backlit sun. Works great. As I read in Rob’s blog last week, ” A photographers job is problem solving” Exactly!

The first morning a problem came up. We only had one Quantum-580 EX setup. Dumb, but that is what super tight production budgets do. Something malfunctioned in the cord to EX connection and we had to have someone make a run to a local shop where thank god they had another exact setup. I have no excuse for why we didn’t dupe that set up, but we didn’t want to spend the extra $50/day. Everything else in my kit I have covered in duplicate as a minimum. Oh, well. Lost 2 very tense hours, but once we got the hand held synching properly we were on a roll. Dog moves right, Robert my assistant leans right. White dog, raise the light, black dog bring the light closer. Worked great.

I like using the 1DSIII for stills in studio. Very fast auto focus, solid dependable camera. I had it at 1/200 sec, f8-f16. For most of the shots we used a 70-200f4. I love that lens, excellent auto focus, and super sharp. When you have a revved up pit bull as a subject, it is all about speed of focus acquisition. Let me know if you have any questions, I would be happy to answer.

The idea here was sort of a play on words, how moving can I make a photograph? I hired an actress who could cry on command, which is a talent that absolutely mystifies me. I wanted her to go through a range of emotion from happy to sad, but for reasons that became clear once we started shooting, it is impossible to go quickly from happy to sad, but rather easy to go from sad to happy. I guess if one is a complete sociopath ……. but then that would also be problematic. So I let her get into severe sadness, which took her about 2 minutes, then had her go to happy. We reversed the direction in Final Cut, which if you look at the blinks, you will notice that something is up. I rather like it, an extra added unsettling bit. The shot was done with a 90TS with the focus on the eyes. My experience is that in motion work, many lenses work great that I would never dream of using in stills work for seeming to gimmicky. The entire shooting process lasted about 2 hours, and about 15 takes, after which everyone on set was exhausted. It is really quite powerful to cause then witness up close emotions like this.

The light is a 4 tube dim-able Kino to the right and a dimmed Starlight to the left. The lights in the background are the kitchen fluorescence. ASA 640, 60sec, f 4, 5000k.

Gear:
Canon 5D II set at ASA 600
90 mm ST lens
3 stop BW ND filter
Manfrotto 3051 tripod w/503 fluid head
Kino Flo 4 bulb w/gel
Marshall V-LCD-70P-HDMI monitor hot shoe mounted
StarLites 1000w on dimmers
Mac G5
Glyph Raid
Final Cut Studio
Compressor
Sorrenson Squeeze

Check this out. I have no idea what sort of camera shoots at that frame rate, but I would love to find out. Like did these guys get a loaner from NASA?

When shooting stills, at least in the current RAW world, the optical nature of the lens is not as critical as it once was. Back in the day of color trans film, back when one needed to really know how to work a light meter and a color meter, we used to pull 3 lenses of the same make and focal length and then test them for the best lens. Guess what, there was considerable variance. Pretty much everyone I knew then did the same, only the dumb dumbs were not testing before buying. That was before Photoshop and RAW, when lenses became a comodity. Thank god too, all those sleepless nights of waiting to see the clips from the lab and then hoping that the processing run was correctly judged, screw that. Gimme the RAW and let me sleep at night.

But now we have motion, which in terms of accuracy of exposure, color rendition and sharpness, it is rather similar to the old days of tranny film. Glass rules again. I saw Shane Halburt project 5DII footage on a 60ft screen that looked amazing, but it had PV glass on it. A whole other world. Those Canon lenses were never intended for this use. They are soft, flat although the colors really pop, and were designed to have the images imported into CS and massaged there. With stills, I want maximum information, which means a low contrast image. For motion, I want snap and detail, unless of course I don’t, then I want a choice.

For some excellent discussion of this, I recommend Shane’s blog. Also, Philip Bloom has some good information. But the mac daddy of lens reviews is Diglloyd. Yes, I paid up the $50, yes I am a nerd. If you really want to learn about lens bokeh ( that is the out of focus pattern of circles on a wide open lens) and other trivia, pay the man and learn. I found it fascinating. Excellent comparisons of the Zeiss, Canon and Nikon lenses for DSLRs. Fantastic pictorial examples and tons of data.

Here are a coupe of ways we use the Marshall. Sometimes I mount on the camera, in this case Robert clamped it onto the slider mount and I am using it to judge the speed of the tracking motion. I often use a Zacuto finder, but find with these sort of situations the Marshall works better for view while shooting. In the other image it is mounted next to the camera so that I can direct and also look at the image crop. Note the color strip on the side of then monitor. The Marshall does this really excellent false color exposure thing that is fantastic for judging exposure. It will also do a sharp line focus add screen, however I find that focus is better achieved with a Zacuto and 5x or 10x on the camera. If we are in studio, we always then take some footage, transcode to ProRes, and open up it up FC on the nice calibrated Eizo to see exactly what it looks like.

I am not entirely sure what to make of this, but it was an exceptionally bad week for the world of the electron over here at studio DHS. Saturday, a visiting art director accidentally smashes a 500 gig spinning Iomega HD to the floor. Wrecked. Tuesday my never failing super designed Glyph crooked. Weds, one of my G5s onboard 500 gig drives failed. Friday, in a spasm of elctro failure, a brand new Light Panel unit starts to bleat, then fails, followed by a program failure at Smug Mug, then all the electricity in Marina del Rey goes out. Wow, did somebody put a hex on me? None this was tragic. We triple backup everything- at least 2 working copies on connected drives, a third copy on night time backup drives that we store on the other side of the room, and all the still images get burned into a library of DVD. Just in case of a nuclear holocaust, once a month I send to my mom’s garage in Oregon a big drive with everything we did that month. I guess that makes 5 backups on everything. The Glyph is being replaced by the super apologetic people at Glyph tech support in upstate NY, the Light Panel is being replaced by Samy’s, and we popped in a new onboard drive to the sick G5 for a hundred bucks. I had to put out some serious coin for a pile of new G drives and a couple more Glyph raids, just to be sure. I have decided that since an art director smashing a working drive to the floor was never part of the backup contingency plan, nor was 3 drives failing in 3 days, that we need to add another layer of protection. I can not tell you how much I am looking forward to the ram based drives becoming price competitive

This little device is what has made using the 5DII as a movie camera possible for me. How Vince and the other pioneers were working without it astonishes me. Not only is the 3X magnifier a juicy view of the LCD, but it also helps me stabalize the camera by having a solid point of contact to my eye. Mostly, the camera just feels friendly, it feels like an extension of me when with the Zacuto. Love it. Even when I have a Marshal connected, the Zacuto is always on the back. Not to diss the competition to the Zacuto, but there is no comparison. That other device has now been turned into a very nice loupe for the Hassy HD3 screen.

Now this word of caution which should be filed under stupid human tricks. If you happen to be outside, and it happens to be sunny, and you additionally happen to have your back to the sun and the camera casually held at you side with the lens forward, you will burn holes in the LCD by magnifying the sun onto it. I know that sounds nuts, but I just came back from a job in Boise ID, where I let the client play with my baby and that is just what happened. I have 5 white burn marks on the LCD. The good thing is the fix is not heinously expensive. CPS will do it for about $200 and it takes them 3 days. Those guys rock. And my clients bill just went up by $200. I called Zacuto, who had never heard of such a nuttiness as someone actually having thier magnifier turned into a 6th grade science experiment on an unlucky and expensinve camera, but they generously are sending me a new plastic attachment square to go on the back after the CPS guys replace the LCD.

I have found that I need a partner on the equipment side who really knows what they are doing, a guy to equipment problem solve for me. For me that person is Jeff at Fotocare. Even though I am in LA most of the time these days, I would rather call Jeff in NYC, go over whatever my equipment issue de jour is and have him UPS the gear to me than deal with a local person. Not too say that there is a not a super cracker jack local gear supplier who could take care of me, I just like Jeff, I trust him, and so I deal with things long distance. For instance, I was having trouble figuring out the best way to mount my Marshal monitor. Jeff made several suggestions, sent them to me, I tried them out, and sent him back the ones I didn’t like. Jeff and I speak sometimes every day, because in this new world of moving image there is always something to figure out. And let’s face it, we are all working in a technology driven industry now. Its not like Canon vs Nikon, its much more than that silly discussion of years ago. Now I need all manner of widgets in order to make the process work, and if I don’t have all my ducks in a row, the system don’t work. Example, ND filters. Jeff was able to hook me up with BW 77 mm filters of 2,3,6 and 10 stops. That took some research on his part to dig them up, not much use for a 10 stop 77 mm ND in stills world, but with a 85 1.2 lens in daylight shooting motion, there sure is.
My plug is this, find a guy who knows his business and work with him. It will do you a world of good to have someone on the other end of the phone who you can really talk to. Let the amateur market deal with the online discount stores. I am a pro, my livelihood is at stake here, and I want somebody in the fight with me that I can count on.