SPL water housing, Canon 5DII, 17-40f4 @ f9, 1/500th, ISO800, copyright 2011 David Harry Stewart

SPL water housing, Canon 5DII, 17-40f4 @ f9, 1/500th, ISO800, copyright 2011 David Harry Stewart

-If you are working in a pool, and you want to be underwater, you need to weight yourself, otherwise you are going to float like a cork. After flayling about under water trying to get the angle I wanted, swimming with one hand while working the camera with the other hand, my producer got me a 10lb rock that I dropped into the front of my wetsuit. Not pretty, but an improvement. The other thing is, that unless you have the cold tolerance of a seal, you need a real wetsuit. Standing in even 75 degree water for any amount of time is going to get very uncomfortable.

-I had a crappy 8 year old mask which made the pool shoot more of a Helen Keller experience. Get a mask that fits, get a low volumn free diving type and take care of it.

-Under water even in a super clean pool is a low contrast envirnoment. We happened to do our test on the one day in a hundred when it was cloudy on the east side of LA. The pool shots look Dr Doom without all that sparkle we normally get from sun+water surface.

-When we used the housing at the waterfall, the camera had a lot of issues with autofocusing with all the water spray on the front element. I should say that the camera I was using was a 5DII, which has the worst autofocus of any of my cameras. I am pretty sure a 7D, 1D or a Nikon D700 would be a better choice of body to use.

- The housing is not so great for doing anything other than actual water photos. At the water fall, there was an hour hike in, a couple of rapels, and then a final super stetchy ladder decent into the river bed. We left everything on top of the final pitch expect the housing/camera/lens combo. But getting not so super clean water on the front element of the housing gives my spendy setup the image quality of a Diana. We ended up roping all the gear down into the canyon. For any photos that were not actually involving spray, we used a non housed 1DIII.

-The housing controls and the LCD viewing are a bit tough to work with. There are buttons and controls of aperature, shutter speed, and video, but that is about it. No mode change or review buttons. I set the review to always on, but looking at it through the glass of the housing was not so easy. Looking through the view finder window I couldn’t see the meter, so all exposure adjustment needed that LCD screen. Another Helen Keller moment.

-But most of the problems I had were related to me not being used to what I was doing. In the end I ordered up a SPLASH housing for a 7D with a button for image review. The possiblitities of where the water housing could take me was just too much to resist.

SPL water housing

This is sort of my localism version of traveling to some far away exotic place for a novel and stimulating experience to get you creatively going again. Without stretching this riff out any farther, I can say that I take better pictures with my new glasses than without, and it is not because my vision is that much better. It is because I am looking harder, I am seeing more carefully, my world is more visual and less physical than without them. Basically, with glasses I see in a new way, which has me taking pictures with gusto, and that is something that makes me very happy.

ASA 800, 1/200 sec, f4, 60mm on a 24-70 zoom

What: Adult Dodgeball,

Where: Various neighborhood rec centers around the east side of LA

Why: I take photos for the fun of it, sometimes I get paid.

How: Flash on camera, combined with a key light coming from the back or side. My assistant is on the far side of the gym going side to side following the camera moves, holding a monopod with a flash head on it. Keep it simple.

Gear: Canon 1DS III, 24-70 zoom, 550EZ flash, Pocket Wizards, Quantum Q Flash w/turbo battery. The Qflash has 1/4 CTO on it.

Soundscape: Loud. Think bar juke box: ACDC, Stones, Bowie

The first round was done journalistically, but after taking a couple of direct hits to the camera from one of the 16 balls that are in play, I learned that some kind of control would be a good idea. The later photos are more setup, although they are still playing for real.

Here is the entire series.

Huge thanks to Erik and the other folks World Dodgeball Society who were great in helping me do this series. For those so inclined, check out playing in one of their leagues. Super nice, super fun, co-ed, you get to wear silly outfits and throw grade school rubber balls at each other, then go out for beers with the whole gang. What’s not to like?

Nikon D700, 35mm f2, ASA 1000, 1/60th, f11, Copyright 2011 David Harry Stewart

I remember working on a big ad job in the 80s talking with the CD about how they did their last shoot. They had hired a full film crew, shooting super 35. They ran the camera all day and then pulled frames out for the ads. THEY WERE NOT EVEN SHOOTING FOR A COMMERCIAL! This was of course in the time of virtually unlimited budgets and massive waste. Think MadMen. The problem according to the CD, aside from the hundreds of thousands of dollars of film stock, was the month it took them to edit all that into 4 or 5 single frames.

I just sent a batch of 3400 images to my freelance photo editors KidsWithCandy, from a friends wedding I shot the other day. I said give me the 30 best and then the 300 best. I got 20 and 200 as there were not that many really great images. Of those 20 images were some that I hadn’t noticed in my run through, which makes for a very interesting collaboration. It makes me a better photographer by having someone else see the great images I took, but overlooked which didn’t match my intentions.

Now imagine what happens if I were to send them say 4 hours of 60 frames/second super high res video and said edit this into 20 images? Then the creative decision of the decisive moment gets shifted to the PE. But you say this is already the case with film editors. Yes, and no. The film editor is concerned with gesture, expression and framing, but is more concerned with how do the images montage in a time line. A still image is looked at and studied by the viewer for a longer period of time, which makes it is a totally different animal.

I just read over at VL’s blog about the new Red Cam which essential does what I am describing. Of course, what VL doesn’t mention is that to use one of those cameras and manage all that data one generally needs a person to work the computer, another to operate the camera functions such as focus, and a third to actually frame and move it. Not to mention a lot of gear and electricity. I take well his point though that this is the beginning of something.

Which brings me to the PE. It would seem to me, that having the eye and the skill to be able to make those decisive moment decisions is going to be a whole new career opportunity. For those of us who make the images, we are not going to have the time to go through all that footage frame by frame. We are going to have to rely on a PE that we trust to do that for us, at least bring it down to the 200 or so images that we, the agencies and the magazines can look at. It would not surprise me at all to see a new line item on estimates for a PE, just like there is a line item for post.

Note to SVA students. Being an image maker in a few years may have nothing to do with touching a camera.

Terry Richardson once said, if the picture is happening and you are not ready, you loose. Or as wonderful Otto Bell once said ” You have got to be in it to win it”. In other words, if you gear ain’t ready to shoot, you just lost a possibly great photo. I hate when that happens.

Courtesy of my great digital tech Taylor Jones of Texas Grip, I got turned on to the Nickel Zinc rechargeable battery. These things are just awesome, and best of all, I don’t have to feel like a creep for throwing dead batteries into the trash. This past weekend I shot some pics at a friends wedding In KC, and used these for the first time. On a Nikon D700 with a SB-800 flash, ASA 1000, I was shooting at f11 all night, over 1300 images on the same set of batteries and they were not close to slowing down. They would power the flash as fast as the Nikon could fire. Amazing.

If one were so inclined, as I sometimes am, one could just chase someone around shooting off 20-30 photos as fast as you wanted with no flash delay. How great is that? I mean the decisive moment is wonderful, but you never know when there will be another one of those 1/2 second away that you need to catch. Know what I mean?

On Saturday I tried a new iPhone 4 on ATT. The 4 means generation 4 of the phone, not that it works on 4G, which seems like a point of confusion. After 24 hours of use, I found that the data, browser and apps worked significantly better. However the voice function was still awful. Having 4 bars, when I initiated a call, the phone would just sit for 30 seconds before actually putting the call through. Call me old fashioned, but I really enjoy my phone being a workable phone.

The next day I signed up for an iPhone 4 on Verizon. There were some issues porting the data over using iTunes. Apple Care tells me that because it is essentially an entirely different phone, not all the data will port. The main problems I found were with the text message history and the Facebook App, not a deal breaker. Overall its function was very good. The data was quick, and what is really nice is that the phone actually works as one would expect. Make a call, place a call. Wow, how modern.

The whole bit about not being able to talk and surf the web on Verizon is a brilliant advertising point for ATT, but in practice, is something I have never actually wanted to do. Probably because on ATT it is so difficult to use the phone at all.

If you want a great phone for text, email and voice, get a Blackberry. Rock solid, works pretty much anywhere on the planet, never fails. If you are more visual, don’t plan on using it on a GSM network (Europe), the iPhone 4 on Verizon would be my pick. FYI, when we work in Europe, we find it is better to buy a few cheap phones with pay by the minute plans for the duration of the production than to go with US based phones and international calling plans.

What I want to tell everyone about today are a couple of Apps that I have been using. Most of my work is location, so things like weather and the direction of the sun are are always the first things I want to know when we start the tech scout.

The first App is Sun Seeker. This one has been around for a while, a lot of people use it, but it is worth mentioning because it is so great. Basically, if you put it in 3d mode, you can see on a picture of your set with the direction of the sun supper imposed on it. I have an older iPhone 3, and probably due to my abuse of the phone, the internal gyro widget seems to be a bit off. If needing to know exactly what time the sun is going to clear a specific tree is critical, check it using at least 2 different phones. On my job last week, my iPhone was off about 10 degrees while the locations scouts phone was pretty right on.

The second app is the one I am really excited about. It’s called Radar Scope. Last week I was sitting in the motor home, it is pissing rain outside and myself and the production crew are having a pow wow about what to do. I wanted to know hour by hour what the weather was going to be at an exact location. In cases like this, weather.com is useless. Chance of rain 30% when it looks like it is time to start ark building is really not going to cut it. The suggestion was made to look at the local TV weather babe’s radar map to see if we could get a better idea. ( I am fascinated by the outfits of TV weather babes. A strange sub-cult which needs further semiotic study). My assisant Franscico pulls out his phone and introduces us to Radar Scope. Basically it is a real time weather radar. In 5 minutes everyone in that meeting had purchased the App for their own phone. At $10 it is an amazing value considering that making the wrong weather call could cost 100k that day. If you are like me, you probably have no idea what base reflectivity or storm velocity are. The web site for the app is very good at explaining all this and if you are so inclined, and you have the cleavage, it may give you a shot at being the new weather babe. Or not.

I have a ton of semi-useless apps on my phone, which have enriched Apple and temporarily entertained me. These two are keepers though. I can’t imagine ever going out on job and not having these. Give me a shout if anyone has any apps that they are loving. Would love to know.

The expected way of working these days is that images show up on a computer screen as they are being shot so that agency and client stay involved in the process. For the photographer, this is good and bad. It is good in that everyone can see what we are doing and we can go forward as a team. It is bad because it slows down the camera, it tethers me to a station, and I can’t quickly review on the LCD back what I am shooting. All of this drives me a bit nuts, especially how it slows down the already slow Canon buffer. I want to be able to shoot the picture when it is happening from where I decide at that moment to be.

On this job the setup for the Canons was to shoot with a couple of matched sets of 1DSIII bodies and lenses, one with a transmitter one without. The body with the transmitter has a card in both the CF slot and the SD slot. As the images are shot, we transmit the small jpegs from the SD to a laptop with Capture One Pro. The laptop is linked to an iPad where the jpegs come up full screen even before they come up on the laptop. This is genius. I am able to see what I am doing in almost real time while the agency stays fully involved. I can page through the iPad to see the shots I did previously. The buffer still gets hit, but not nearly as bad as with the tether setup. The second body comes in when the buffer backs up. The assistant stands next to me and when he sees the frame counter hit zero, he hands me the second matched body and lens, and I keep going but only to card. We could do 2 bodies both with transmitters but that would require 2 laptops, which seems like a bit much to manage. So we alternate between bodies when I need to really work fast. If we are only doing a frame every second or so, which is how it is if we have the Pro 7s cranked up, then I will just use the one body with the transmitter. The RAWs are downloaded off of the 16 gig cards every so often, archived in LR and duped to 3 external drives

The new version of Hassy Phocus works in a similar way with the iPad, albeit tethered. I like the H3D 31 because it has the fastest frame rate and for the type of work I do has more resolution than anyone would ever need. We used it with a 120 macro, which is an awesome lens. We tethered it to a new iMac with Phocus. As the images are shot, they came up on an iPad which was mounted to a stand just to my right. I could see almost instantly what I have just shot and see it on a nice big 1080 iPad screen. I can even touch squeeze the screen to zoom in. Love it. The years of squinting to see the screen at the capture station on the other side of the studio are over. One complaint about the Hassy is that I enjoy using the grip strap that attaches to the base. If I have one of those big lenses on, it really helps stabilize the camera. The problem is that with the grip strap on, we can’t use a Tetherlock on the base, which means there is a very good chance that as I hop around the studio, the camera will loose connection to the computer and we will have to do a restart. Buzz kill if there ever was one. So I tend to end up grumbling and choosing the Tetherlock over the grip and end up with a bruised middle finger on my right hand.

One thing to keep in mind when you start upping the complexity in digital capture is that you have to have a digital tech who really knows what they are doing. Using a combination of Capture One Pro, LR and Phocus, all on location, with the array of cards, cameras, hard drives and files is not for the meek. Losing or corrupting files is not an option. You need someone who really knows what they are doing and can do it fast and under pressure. My jobs involve 2 or 3 hours of set up followed by 15 minutes of very intense shooting. Locations have a time limit, shoot productions have schedules, and there is no room for fussing around with wires and connections during crunch time. Your digital tech needs to be rock solid.