After a year of using the Hoodman HoodLoupe as my viewfinder on the Canon 5D Mark II I was able to scrape together some cash to purchase what many people consider to be the gold standard for DSLR viewfinders: the Zacuto Z-Finder. Continuing my long tradition of ill-timed purchases, Zacuto released not one, but two new versions of the finder a couple of weeks after I purchased mine but I’m not bitter…

I’ve had the opportunity to use the finder in a number of settings. A majority of my work is shooting business videos and currently the 5D is my go to camera for b-roll. I’ve also used it to shoot live concert footage, which required me to be moving around a lot and working quickly to get critical focus on shot after shot.

I also used the finder to do a variety of outdoor shoots, both video and photography. When Live View arrived with my 40D I never really considered its value until I discovered the 5x magnification feature when doing sone landscape work. Ever since I’ve been a big fan of Live View as part of my composition process for certain types of images.

Here are a few notes you may find of value…

The newer finders have changed the mounting scheme, but my version affixes itself to the LCD cover glass with a strong adhesive.  They say it will pop off cleanly if needed.  (We’ll see about that.)  The result is that you get a piece of plastic that creates a little window shade over the LCD and creates a small “traffic problem” around the control buttons.  You can still get them, but not as easily as before.  I wear glasses (which we’ll talk about in a minute) and the mount bumps into my optics when I’m using the regular viewfinder.  Nothing serious, but you know its there.

As a myopic photographer and, getting up in age, I’ve been wearing progressive lenses for a few years now. My current prescription is apparently just outside the error bars of what Zacuto considers normal vision, so I had to order a set of extension plates — essentially spacers that stack on the finder body.  You can see them here:

The extension plates work as advertised, but they carry a small penalty that I need to develop a workaround for.  The plates attach via friction — they snap into the existing viewfinder body.   Whenever you design something to join together solely with friction there is a natural affinity to which joint will break first.  In my case, when I remove the viewfinder the extension plates stay with the camera and not the viewfinder (see below) and this, frankly, sucks.

So I’m going to end up either taping or gluing the extension plates to the viewfinder body so that they stay with it and not the camera because they simply get in the way when they stay attached to the camera.

Here is, as far as I’m concerned, a mandatory addition to what Zacuto provides with the viewfinder:

It’s just a short bit of elastic cording tied to the finder and a loop for the camera strap. But man, oh, man is it important.

I only had the viewfinder a few hours in the field when it took its first dive to the ground.  When traveling around on a tripod, especially when out in the field, I heave the whole camera/lens/tripod over my shoulder and invariably it will rotate unexpectedly and I will bump the viewfinder on the way up or down.

So I quickly rigged up a safety line, made from elastic cord, that keeps the errant viewfinder relatively attached to the camera.  I use OpTech camera straps, so it is very easy to attach/unattach the elastic when needed.

The photo to the right shows the safety system in practice.

I originally rigged this up because of my woes when walking through the woods with the rig, but I quickly discovered that when I am working with the camera on a shoot I may accidentally bump the viewfinder more than I think I should and this little 10 cent piece of elastic has probably saved the viewfinder from damage and has certainly prevented it from ending up in a river (yes I bumped it once while setting up the camera while standing in running water).

[Note: The Z-Finder comes with a lanyard / neck strap -- but I just can't work that way...  so it's not as if Zacuto hadn't thought of this problem entirely -- their solution just doesn't fit my work style.   I suspect they will produce something similar to what I'm using in the future and charge $25 for it.]

The elastic is also just long enough that I can stow the viewfinder next to the camera in my bag and keep everything attached to each other so it goes in and out of the bag easily (that’s the 5D at the bottom of the photo):

The new generation of the Zacuto finders have coatings that prevent or deter fogging.  I think this feature I will miss because I certainly have had my share of fogging situations and I haven’t even had a chance to use it in the colder months.  I’m hoping that Catcrap will help, but I’m not going to bet the farm on that.   (To be fair, my glasses fog up just as badly so I’m pretty much screwed either way..)

As to the performance, it works very well.  I’m able to use the viewfinder as a point of contact, greatly improving the camera stability for handheld shooting.   The eyepiece is very comfortable, even with glasses.   The rubber eyepiece attracts dust and dirt, so if you are in the field you’ll want to pay attention to what’s building up on it — again especially if you are mashing your eyeglasses against it.   Fortunately the eyepiece easily detaches and can be quickly washed/rinsed.

I have to admit that with the addition of this viewfinder I actually prefer using it over the optical viewfinder — for certain types of shooting.  The ability to have the histogram displayed live along with composition lines, 5x and 10x magnification, and other data is pretty cool — and they can be made to disappear with the push of a button.   As the resolution of the rear-panel displays inevitably increases I can see how electronic viewfinders may well rival the optical ones — particularly for the more contemplative shooting styles.

The Z-Finder is now part of my standard field kit and I’m looking forward to purchasing another mounting bracket for the 7D.  Much to my chagrin the Zacuto mounting plate and the Hoodman HoodLoupe are exactly the same size so the opportunity to “soft dock” the HoodLoupe on the Zacuto plate is lost.  Maybe I’ll rig some sort of  adapter — you can do anything with gaffer’s tape, right?

Here are a few more photos of the Zacuto Z-Finder and the Hoodman HoodLoupe for comparison:

Related posts:

1. The Hoodman HoodLoupe
2. Quiet Concert Photography Techniques
3. Stone Mountain LIVE – August 2009

Somewhere around this time is Earth Day… maybe it’s today.   Frankly, for me, every day is Earth Day so I’m not all that juiced about designating a particular day for it — but it’s blatantly obvious that I’m not in the majority of how people think about and treat this planet, so calling attention to it is a good thing.

So here’s my Earth Day post…  These are my Epson 2200 printer cartridges.  I’ve had my printer for 8 years now and I’ve never tossed a printer cartridge and, as you can see, I’ve gone through a few.   I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but tossing them in the waste stream wasn’t going to be part of my printing workflow.

Starting this year I’m bringing 10 cartridges a month to Staples where they will help recycle the little devils.  Staples pays you $3 per cartridge, so that’s $30/month for me to purchase new inks.

If you print a lot, please find a way to recycle your consumables — whether it be through Staples or likely a dozen other ways.  Simply tossing them into the wastebasket isn’t helping anyone.

Oh, and if you want to go a step further, consider using GreenPix paper from Red River Paper.  This is a photographic paper made from recycled stock and works really well.  I’ve printed notecards on it for many years now and feel better that these items, which typically aren’t hung on walls, at least are on their second life through the consumer system — and might be on their way to a third.

You can do this and a hundred other reduce/reuse/recycle things in your life for whatever reasons float your boat.  Mine are in the background of the photograph above – my wife, my grandson, and the river they are paddling on.

Related posts:

1. 2010 Earth Day Parade
2. Earth Day – Concord, MA
3. Why we’re buying an iPad – Part 2

Last year I had the privilege of speaking at Baypath College about authenticity of photographic images, particularly in relation to nature / conservation photography.   Part of the talk was devoted to showing how any photograph is an interpretation of the photographer — the image has an intent: informational, documentary, pictorial, and equivalent  (the latter coined by Minor White).  The challenge for the photographer is to use composition and tonalities to express one of those intents.  The primary technical hurdle of the photographer is dealing with different dynamic ranges of the steps along the way to the viewer’s eye: nature, camera sensor/film, editing, and finally the print (or screen).   One of the more interesting tools that digital photography has made simpler to use is “high dynamic range” (HDR) photography, where one extends the dynamic range of the camera’s sensor by capturing multiple images at different exposures and then combining them into a single image.   Whether or not you do this at the capture side, there remains the problem of showing this image to the viewer – typically on media that has a much smaller dynamic range — so the photographer must “compress” this wider image into a smaller space.  This process is generally known as “tone mapping” –  you old-schoolers can think of it as “dodging and burning on steroids”.

While visiting the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge (outside of Savannah Georgia) last year I came upon a scene that I knew would work well with HDR photography, so I did some exposures with that intent. I also took a few standard exposures looking to maximize the dynamic range of my camera. The multiple-exposure nature of HDR photography today has an inherent weakness whenever there is motion in the image you wish to not record. In this case there was a slight breeze and the leaves on the trees were moving between frames enough to really destroy the feeling I was looking for. This left me with a carefully exposed single RAW image to work with:

I processed it with Lightroom in my typical fashion: lowered the exposure slightly to bring in the highlights, raised the black point to 27 to get the contrast, bumped up clarity and vibrance for midtone punch and this was the result:

OK, but not great. The “feel” of the road and the foliage isn’t there. Oh well…

One of the blogs I follow (and highly recommend) is the Digital Photography School, particularly the “Tips and Tutorials” RSS feed.  There is a constant flow of ideas there and a few weeks ago there was an article on creating a particular very stylized look to portraits using Lightroom.  The results, for me, enters that slippery space between photographic and painting and way outside the comfort zone of what I consider my style of photography.  But I understood what Lightroom was being coerced into doing for the artist.

The great thing about this technique is that it simply uses standard Lightroom development settings, but in an extreme way — creating portraits like the one to the right of my grandson. (Sorry Damien, I needed an example.)

Using Lightroom to push images to the edge like this has its pitfalls.  The nature of the changes means that you can create some nasty artifacts and color shifts that detract from the final image (you might note some pretty ugly halos along the right side of Damien’s head and sweatshirt).  But it certainly is easy enough to try once in a while on images that you think might work.

Here’s the essence of the technique: push recovery,  fill, clarity, and vibrance very high, bring black point up to restore contrast, adjust exposure as needed, and then lower saturation to bring things closer to reality.  The settings are highly dependent on the starting image so there’s really no way to make a good develop preset for this.  On the other hand it only takes 10 seconds to get the sliders into the approximate positions to assess the image.

The settings on the right are the ones I used to transform the RAW Savannah NWR file (the second image in this posting) to the (near) final form you see at the top of the post.  (That final image includes a Lightroom local adjustment to the road to increase lower brightness and increase contrast just a bit.)

What I realized is that this technique ramps up Lightroom’s normally subtle tone-mapping skills so that it can be used to create images that have that “HDR” feel to them by deeply compressing the dark and light tones closer to the midtones.  When you start with a well-exposed RAW image, and the content of that image cooperates, the results can be quite interesting.

I’ve been using a more subtle version of this technique in a number of the “power of water” images I’ve posted here recently.  The ability to tease out the subtle glows that I see when I’m actually there taking the image has been quite gratifying.

Yesterday I started wandering through my Lightroom catalog looking for other candidate images where this technique might work well. (I admit it: once you have new hammer, you start looking around for nails.) The Savannah NWR image was one of my first “victims”.  That I was able to produce a final image from a single RAW file that rivaled the multiple-exposure HDR image I created was inspiring.   This portrait of True West and a Maynard Christmas Parade photos show the technique’s results pretty well.   If you place your mouse cursor over the image it should show you the “traditional” interpretation of the images:

Lightroom develop settings for the True West photo: recovery 85, fill 67, black 36, clarity +85, vibrance +69, saturation -46.  For the fire truck: recovery 81, fill 80, black 48, clarity +20, vibrance +60, saturation -35.

Another set of images called out for this technique – my LRRS motorcycle racing images taken last spring and summer.  Once again this experience of shooting these racing machines has opened up another set of skills for me as a photographer.  To be able to take these straight documentary photographs and, with the right combination of exposure and tone-mapping, transform them into something that has a different emotional feel to it is great and I’m looking forward to sharing them with my racing friends.  Here’s an example of applying this technique to some race images (again, the mouseover trick works with this image too):

Lightroom settings: exposure -1/4 stop, recovery 64, fill 92, black 68, clarity +85, vibrance +50, saturation -17.

I liked it so much that I created a small gallery of LRRS images using this technique: http://events.dmg-photography.com/2009-lrrs-reloaded

Only a fraction of the images will respond positively to this technique.  I’m sure if you purchase Photomatix or play with Photoshop all day, it is possible to produce similar and, likely, better images.  But the immediacy of doing this in Lightroom inside of 30 seconds and knowing if there’s likely to be a new great image buried inside that existing photograph is just too cool for words.  All done without changing the essential content of the images.  Art meets authenticity.  I love it.

Related posts:

1. Exploiting a RAW file’s dynamic range
2. More Lightroom 2 goodies: Camera Profiles
3. Another Lightroom Tip: Out Damn Spot!

Our iPad 3G is on order.  Yes, I was one of those 40-60,000 people who ordered one within the first few hours it was made available for pre-sale.   We opted for the 3G version for reasons explained in an earlier posting.

Here is the other reason we’re getting an iPad.  Despite electing to receive as many bills and other financial transactions electronically, despite signing up for electronic newsletters, despite signing up with 41pounds.org, despite cutting back on a number of subscriptions, we are still awash in paper.

I’m sorry, with the imminent arrival of a moderately ubiquitous digital media device (the iPad), paper is now on my s&^%$-list (except when in the service of art or crafts).  Watercolors on paper. Great.  Origami.  Fantastic.  Photographic prints.  Of course!  But magazines, books, catalogs, etc. and various printed items of general impermanence — no more.

If you want to sell me a magazine subscription, it had better be electronic, because there’s not a chance I’ll be handing you money otherwise.  I’m happy to pay the same amount of money, but as long as I’m getting the same content, I’m in.

If you (the publishers) want to cling to the notion that paper is superior to screens, that the tactile feel, the serendipity and convenience of paper is too important to pass up — have a good time appealing to your market but I’m no longer in it.   (I don’t disagree with any of those points, but whatever weight they had in my decision to subscribe or purchase your product in the past, they now count AGAINST YOU.)

The history-loving part of me mourns the loss of these marvelous artifacts of our cultural heritage, but I’ll bet if you were to check on the blogs 500 years ago the loss of illustrated manuscripts to the printing press had similar mournings.   I just can’t stand the side-effect of this technological advancement: a weekly foot-high stack of paper I don’t want, didn’t ask for, or don’t need any more.  Enough.

In this particular part of my life, bits beat atoms.

Related posts:

1. Why we’re buying an iPad

There are three perspectives at play here:

1) Media consumption in our home;

2) Business portfolio; and

3) Laptop “replacement” for Betsy.

We know we’re not the average household.  We have 2 (rather old) MacBook Pro’s that hang out around the house.  We have an Apple TV hooked up to our HDTV in the living room.  And we already own an “iPad Nano” (I have an iPod Touch) so we’ve already experienced some of the possibilities the iPad promises when it comes to applications such as the Apple TV Remote and the basic apps like email and Safari.

Lets look at each of our planned uses for the “magical” iPad

Media Consumption

We’ve been waiting for this type of device to augment our living room media experience.  We own and heavily use our Apple TV and I’m hoping that it won’t be too long before the two play together (more on this later).  While we have Comcast cable, it’s not like what most people consider cable.  We have the $13/month option that essentially gives us the “over the air” channels plus public access (a whopping 18 channels and only 8 of them are HD).  This is a long-winded way of saying we don’t consume a lot of television. While it only tallies up to maybe an hour a day at best, video podcasts are an increasing part of television time — we prefer to watch EarthTouch and GeekBrief.tv in HD on our television.  There are a fair number of video podcasts I’ve never seen on a computer screen — it wouldn’t even occur to me to try them that way.

I’m looking forward to having an interface that not only provides us with a nice web browser for looking up stuff during shows, but also something that integrates with the Apple TV.   It would be great to have a nice console for browsing the Apple TV podcasts, searching YouTube, finding photos, etc.  and “throwing” them up on the television as a way of sharing them in the room.  (It’s a slight disappointment that the iPad doesn’t have an IR port to turn it into a remote control for the TV itself, but that’s admitted a bit of a kludge at best.)

Having something hanging around on the coffee table that lets us casually check email, twitter, browse the web, and control the Apple TV will be a most welcome addition to the household.  I was slightly surprised that it didn’t have a camera — it would make a great iChat / Skype device — but such improvements are, perhaps, inevitable.  The only downside is we can see is that, unlike the “iPad nano”, hiding it from the grandson will be much, much harder.

Business Portfolio

I maintain a portfolio in my “iPad Nano” (my iPod Touch).  I have both photography and video portfolios along with examples of TurnHere style videos and family photographs. It is fantastic to have a high-quality and interactive portfolio in my pocket at all times. It comes out in a variety of social situations and always impresses people.

But in a planned business situation, calling on a potential customer or sitting with an existing customer, the 2×4 inch iPod/iPhone screen is simply too limiting to display and discuss my work and a laptop isn’t something that you easily can hand back and forth with a client. I fully expect that there will be custom applications for photographers and other media creators that will provide a great portfolio experience for both the photographer and their customers.

While the Safari browser on the iPod Touch and iPhone is pretty impressive, I still find it awkward to use for any type of interactive web sites (e.g., filling out forms, etc.)   I’m expecting the iPad to be at least passable for that type of activity (not sure I’ll be writing long blog articles with it though).  Coupled with the 3G wireless capability I can access forms and book gigs while at a client’s place of business or show them example videos in context of a similar business.  The best way to sell video is with video.

Which brings me to why we’re currently planning to purchase the 3G version of the iPad.   I currently pay Verizon $30/month for my data plan for my Blackberry.  That’s a lot of money for not a lot of value (to me).  While having email delivered to my pocket is handy, its not critical to my day-to-day life.  Most of the time I’m near a Wi-Fi and my iPod Touch has a far better email app than my Blackberry (I should note that my Blackberry is easily 4 years old at this point).  By converting my Verizon phone to just a plain cellphone I can potentially cut my monthly wireless data costs by half if I’m able to stay under the 250MB limit.  Even if I end up with the $30/mo plan it’ll be a wash dollar-wise and I’ll get a significant improvement in its utility to my business.  For those times when I need email on the road I’ll bring along the iPad (assuming I can get ahold of it — see the next section).

I’ll admit that my situation may be unique, but I think its an interesting sign of the times for how wireless providers are being transformed by Apple and Google into service providers not unlike ISPs.  We plug whatever device we want into the wireless network and pay for the bandwidth.  No 2-year contracts.  Dollars for bits.  And with the increasing density of Wi-Fi hotspots in restaurants, libraries, and other public areas the need for 3G access all the time keeps getting nibbled at.

Laptop Replacement

My wife, Betsy, has been waiting for the iPad for about 4 years.  She uses a old hand-me-down 15″ G4 MacBook Pro.  She reads email; plays Solitaire; writes the occasional letter/document; and occasionally surfs the web for shopping or booking a hotel room.  She’s been bugging me for years for the 12″ MacBook Pro.

She also attends a bunch of meetings and having the email and documents in electronic form would be preferable to printing them.  She occasionally takes notes at these meetings.

She hates lugging the laptop around and therefore it rarely leaves the house.  It is way overkill for anything she does day-to-day.  We’re anticipating that the iPad use model, perhaps paired with a Bluetooth keyboard once in a while, will take care of 80%+ of her daily computing needs.

I couldn’t part with my MacBook Pro.  It is an integral part of my photographic workflow.  Lightroom has burned a considerable amount of processor time the past few years and I occasionally use Final Cut Pro there too.  There’s over 100 gigabytes of photos and video on the disk.  I use Dropbox to sync numerous documents and files between my laptop and my office system.

There are millions of people like me.  There are millions of people like Betsy.  The iPad cannot replace a laptop, but there are plenty of people that have a laptop that really don’t need or even want one.  I can’t say at this point whether there’s enough capability in the iPad to make Betsy’s MacBook laptop obsolete, but we’re going to give it a try.

Summary

In 1991 I read an article in Scientific American written by Mark Weiser in which he envisioned what pervasive (or ubiquitous) computing would look like in the 21st century.  It made quite an impression on me.  Weiser and his team at PARC created prototype pads, tabs, and boards — intelligent devices that were tailored to specific uses rather than trying to be general-purpose computing platforms.

We have tabs today in the form of active badges and keyless automobile access. The iPod Touch, if it was a lot cheaper, might be an early example of a something between a high-end tab (an intelligent post-it note) and a pad,  a “scrap computer” that lies around the house ready to be used in a number of ways.  The iPad will inch closer to the capabilities that were envisioned in that article, although there won’t be a bunch of them hanging around the house anytime soon.  Boards exist mostly in corporate settings, but put a multitouch interface on the front of my HDTV and you’ll have a residential version of the PARC boards in the article.  (Microsoft’s “Surface” can likely trace its pedigree to the PARC board prototypes.)

Ever since I read that article I’ve been waiting for that type of computing to become mainstream.  My Palm Tungsten C, with its Wi-Fi capabilities, gave me my first taste of what Weiser’s dream might look like back in 2003.   Sadly Mark Weiser passed away in 1999, a few years before his vision became practical, but now we’re into the second decade of the 21st century and with the iPad we’ll inch a bit closer to true pervasive computing.  We’ll go along for the ride.

Related posts:

1. Why we’re buying an iPad – Part 2
2. When an old friend’s memory starts to fade…
3. First cut of a nature video short

Today’s digital SLR cameras are splendid image-making tools.  They are insanely well-crafted machines, but that have a serious flaw when pursuing certain types of photography… they are frickin’ noisy.

Back in the “good old days” I had a couple of rangefinder cameras which had leaf shutters.  When you made an exposure there was the faintest click as the shutter mechanism tripped.   Along come SLRs with a large mirror and mechanics to move it in an out of the way in a fraction of a second and, not surprisingly, accompanied by what is affectionately known in photography circles as the “mirror slap” sound.

For those of you attending rock concerts and other events that really should require ear protection (and I’ve been to plenty of them), the sound of your camera clicking away is not really an issue.  But when you are at an acoustic event (or in the woods with a wild animal) that mirror slap can be a real nuisance to both you and the people around you (who have paid good money to hear the artist perform, not listen to a camera).

Most of the time I simply refrain from taking images during quiet passages.  If I know the song and can anticipate a louder section, I might try to time the photo for that moment — acoustic camouflage if you will.

However I found a way to get back to the old days of a quiet click using the Live View feature on my Canon 40D and 5D Mark 2.   (This feature is available on numerous other DSLRs — I just happen to own those two.)   Live View uses the sensor and LCD rather than the optical viewfinder to see and compose an image.  There are numerous benefits and drawbacks to the Live View mode which are well-documented elsewhere, and perhaps I’ll write about them in the future (e.g., I use it frequent for landscape photography).  But for concert photography I’ve found the near silent operation of Live View to be simply a great tool.

There are a few constraints, but here is my technique:

1. For the Canon camera, go into Live View setup and select “Silent Shooting Mode 2″.  Mode 1 works too, but Mode 2 is even quieter and I recommend that.

2. Get into a stable position and use the optical viewfinder to focus and frame your subject.   This technique, admittedly, doesn’t work if your subject is moving around a lot, but then most quiet musical pieces aren’t normally accompanied by lots of motion.  You are focusing now because auto-focus isn’t available in Live View mode.

3. Bring the camera down low (under a table / below your knees / beneath a jacket) and engage the Live View.  There is a bit of sound associated with this, but if you time it right and keep the camera isolated from the room nobody is likely to hear it.  What you’ve done now is move the mirror sound from the shot to a time and place of your choosing.

4. Bring the camera back up to your shooting position.  You can no longer use the optical viewfinder, but the LCD will have the image showing.  Unless you have superhuman vision, you will not be able to clearly see the viewfinder because it’ll be too close.  You should be able to make out enough of the image to frame it.  Since you prefocused it, there’s no concern about that.

4. Wait for your moment, press the shutter button, and hold it down.  This will take the image.  In Mode 2 it is just a shutter release click – very subtle.  If you keep it in Mode 1 the shutter will reset.  While this is far quieter than the mirror slap, but a fair bit noisier than Mode 2.

5. Return your camera to below the table or wherever you can keep it isolated from the room.  Release the shutter button and the shutter mechanism resets.  Return to step 4 to take the next image.  Rinse and repeat.

6. When you are done taking images this way, keep the camera isolated and turn off Live View.  This returns the mirror to the normal position, with the requisite noise — but you can do this at the time of your choosing (like during the applause or when somebody’s cell phone starts ringing and everyone is looking at that person).

As you can see above, this works well for certain types of wildlife photography too.  :-)   There are plenty of variations on this theme: there’s nothing stopping you from composing and focusing in Live View mode, particularly if you have a tripod.

For this particular tutorial hearing is probably better than seeing, so I put together a quick audio clip of the different sound qualities.  Nothing scientific, but if you’ve never explored this feature of your camera here’s what it sounds like:

I hope you can see that using these features on your DSLR allows photographers to make great images without making a lot of noise.

Related posts:

1. Zacuto Z-Finder
2. The Hoodman HoodLoupe
3. Stone Mountain LIVE – August 2009

Many years ago we purchased our first set of kayaks.  No moving parts, just a watertight shell.   But after that purchase came the realization that “you’re gonna need accessories”…  Paddles, PFDs, dry bags, gloves.  It took several years before we could walk into an REI without avoiding a stroll through the paddling section.

Photography is no different.  The camera purchase itself is, quite often, the tip of the iceberg.  (For many years I’d tell folks that I had spent far more on lenses than camera bodies, although that balance is beginning to erode as my lens set is stable now but there’s a slow but steady march to upgrade the camera bodies.)    Camera accessories can go in a number of directions: lighting, stabilization, filters, remote controls, etc.  Add video to the mix and you have more lighting, microphones, matte boxes, monitors, and a wide range of stabilization options.  There are thick catalogs full of wonderful ideas waiting to empty your bank account.

I recently decided that to be competitive in video production I would need the ability to have some additional  ”camera moves” (providing movement within the frame) beyond the tilts and pans my fluid head could provide.  Professional rigging equipment costs a lot of money.  This isn’t a complaint: manufacturing equipment that performs at a high level of precision and is rugged costs money, but I have a limited equipment budget so I looked into some DIY portable dolly systems.   One that popped out at me is affectionately known as the “Zazaslider” (after the creator who posted the instructions for building it in the DVXuser forum). I’m not what you would call particularly skilled at building things, but this looked within my abilities so I gave it a try.   I won’t go into the construction details, those are outlined very well elsewhere, but I thought it would be fun to show my modifications, my plans, and a bit about how it is used.  First the rig:

Here’s the slider with my current camera mount, a Manfrotto HDV701 fluid head. My slider weighs in at 6.4 lbs, and the HDV701 head (with a Arca-Swiss quick release plate on the Bogen quick release plate) is 2.4 lbs – so I’m expecting it to stay under 9 lbs even with anticipated additions.

This is the bare slider.  The metal part is the primary piece, purchased from IGUS (just over the border in Rhode Island).  The DryLin W rail is 1 meter long and features a lubrication-free guide that provides a smooth and low-friction platform.

I had to drill and tap a 3/8″ hole for the mounting bolt.

The rail comes with predrilled holes, so I could put a 3/8″ tap in the center one for a mount point.

The rail needs a few basic tweaks to be useful.  The first is some nylon bushings tapped into the end that keeps the carriage from running off the rails.  That would be an expensive problem with a camera attached.  I added a couple of lightweight feet that are easily removed if needed (I need to give them a coat of paint).  I recently added a nylon screw to one end to help secure the carriage during transport.

My original foot was just a block, but after my first trip into the field with the slider I realized that if you want to perch this on top of a log, you need something that isn’t flat along the base, so a quick trip to the bandsaw was in order.

I tapped a 3/8″ hole so that my Gitzo G1321 leveling base can “simply” screw into the rail.  This works OK but makes setup a bit slow.  I plan to put a sturdy quick Arca Swiss or Bogen release plate there so I can more easily attach it to a tripod head.

And finally the full rig attached to my tripod.  The leveling base makes for quick work in setting up the slider.  While this configuration is fairly stable, it still requires additional support when extending the camera the full 1 meter length.

There are two basic moves you can do with the slider: dolly zoom (forward/backwards) or dolly sideways (truck/tracking shot).  Here is an example of a dolly zoom:

And here are two examples of a tracking shots (one on the tripod and one with just the slider):

The slider requires quite a bit of practice to use effectively.  I’ve also noted that the rail system’s tolerances are very close so if condensation builds up on the aluminum rails (say, by bringing it indoors when it is cold outside) it can bind up a bit.  I’ve used it in the rain and noted similar performance anomalies.  (A dolly rig based on roller wheels likely doesn’t have this issue.)

I’ve used this for commercial shoots and nature videos.  It is quite portable and definitely gets the job done for a very reasonable outlay (so far it has cost less than $200 for the parts and tools).

As I noted earlier I plan to add a quick release plate to make setup and teardown a bit easier.  I may add a second setscrew towards the center as it is awkward to set up with the carriage at one end (or add a brake to the carriage).

I’m also interested in finding a variable speed stepping motor so I can use the rail system to provide movement in time-lapse photographic projects.  I’ll be sure write about that when those pieces come together.   (First I have to add a follow-focus unit.)

I hope you found this tour of the slider useful.  You can find the same Igus technology used in some commercial sliders, so while this is a pretty simple DIY project it shares the strengths of a number of rigs costing a lot more.

Related posts:

1. Why a new camera? Why this one?
2. REALLY getting it right in the camera…
3. More Lightroom 2 goodies: Camera Profiles

A common phrase you’ll hear in articles about whether or not to keep digital photographs is that “disk space is cheap”.   Heck, I’ve said it to a number of people.  But something has bothered me about this statement.

Yes, disk space is cheap – but every time I need to buy drives I find myself spending about the same amount of money.  It’s cheap, but it’s not getting cheaper… Why is that?

Well one reason is that I’m shooting a lot more than I used to.  Here’s a plot of my (retained) image counts the past few years:

(and yes, that does mean that I shot almost as much in 2001 as the entire decade of the 90′s — technically 95 through 99, ’95 is when I started shooting with digital cameras).

So overall, pretty stable till the jump in 2008 when I switched to photography full-time, but 2009 wasn’t that much of an increase over 2008.   What is interesting, again in a geeky way, is how much storage those images consume (in gigabytes):

Not exactly the same graph is it?  The difference can be traced to technology changes — you are seeing the impact of me using a variety of cameras over the past 10 years and the sensor size (in megapixels) growing.  I started with 0.3-megapixel Kodak cameras, switched to a 3-megapixel Canon D30 in 2001, and continued upgrading from time to time over the years (10D, 1DMk2, 40D, and finally, for now, 5DMk2 in 2009 which shoots at 21 megapixels).

Fun fact: A single image from my 2009 Canon 5D Mark 2 consumes the same amount of disk space as 140 images from my 1999 Kodak DC260.

So while my image counts aren’t going up exponentially, my disk storage is because my cameras are generating larger files every time I press the shutter release button.  But this is where the “disk space is cheap” part comes in.  Here’s a graph of how many gigabytes a US dollar gets you (more or less):

This, as you can see, somewhat closely tracks my disk space usage graph, which also tracks to my impression of near constant expenditures on disks over the past decade.  To which my checking account can only say “thank goodness”.

So disk space is cheap – no doubt about that. But for the past 10 years the growth in sensor sizes in digital cameras has been almost a perfect match to the “density/dollar” ratio of disk drives.  This means that unless you haven’t upgraded your digital camera, disk space is cheap but it isn’t cheaper.

But, when it comes to the cost of storing your digital photographs, things are looking up for most owners of digital cameras.  The camera megapixel wars are pretty much over.  Sensor sizes are beginning to plateau as the technology now meets or greatly exceeds what folks really need in terms of image capture.  Disk densities continue to climb and so there’s a pretty good chance now that disk space will actually get cheaper for digital photographers.

That is unless, like me, they start shooting video too…

Related posts:

1. Editing Canon 5D Mark 2 footage – tools and timings
2. Starting a new year
3. Ospreys on the Assabet River

The Canon 5D Mark 2 (and the 7D and a fair number of current video-capable DSLRs) record the footage using the H.264 codec.  I’ll leave it to others far more qualified than I as to the merits and lack thereof of this decision by the manufacturers.  For owners of the cameras wishing to use them for video it means you have some work to do after you shoot.

H.264 is often referred to as “distribution codec” — in other words it is optimized for end display rather than other purposes.  Of interest to the photographer this translates to “it is really lousy for editing”.

Because of the preponderance of its use in DSLR (and other) cameras I’ll predict that future editing suites will start to ingest H.264 footage directly, perhaps converting it quietly to some intermediate format — but until that time you’ll want to do this yourself before you edit your clips.

For about the past year, when I have a set of 5D clips for editing I’ve been transcoding them to Apple ProRes.  This is a high quality codec that works well with the editing tools.  It also eats up disk space like they have shares in Seagate.  I’ve heard of some folks using the XDCAM codec with a fair degree of success.  I’ve heard plenty of other people say “disk space is cheap” (which it is), but it isn’t free and it adds up quickly.

On Macintosh there are two tools that I have tried and used and I thought I’d share a few bits about them.  I edit using Apple’s Final Cut Pro Studio, which includes a transcoding swiss army knife called “Compressor”.    If you don’t have the budget for FCP Studio (and, as you will see, even if you do) you should look at “MPEG Streamclip” which has a number of great features including the ever popular price tag of free.  There are numerous excellent tutorials on each of these tools — just google around.

I’ve been using Compressor to transcode my 5D footage to Apple ProRes 422 pretty regularly because it has a really cool feature: droplets.  You can create droplets that correspond to specific Compressor settings and destinations, then either drag the input files to the droplet (or control-click to open the file(s) with the droplet.  As Emeril says.. “Bam!”

With the most recent release of Final Cut Studio (FCP 7) Apple introduced some additions to the ProRes codecs.  Originally there were two variations, the normal or standard quality (at 147 Mbps) and the high quality codec (at 220 Mbps).  For most of us this roughly translates into taking a lot of disk space and taking up an enormous amount of disk space.  Unless you are producing a high-end film with lots of compositing (or have specific technical issues with the footage around grading) the HQ version was overkill.  For most of us, producing videos for the web or DVD, even the standard quality ProRes was over the top.  Enter ProRes 422 LT and ProRes 422 Proxy.  The LT codec tries to find a balance between quality and space at 102 Mbps while the ProRes Proxy dives down to 45Mbps and is suited for editing on laptops.  (Note that even at 45Mbps that’s 9X what Vimeo and YouTube HD are accepting videos at.)

I have yet to play with the Proxy codec extensively, but the LT codec looked very appealing and I wanted to explore some issues I had with the MPEG Streamclip program so I ran a few tests.   MPEG Streamclip has the reputation of being very fast – and in a few tests I was running I never saw this.  The devil being in the details of course.   I also noted a gamma shift in MPEG Streamclip footage which bothered me.  Again, it was worth looking at a bit closer.

First the “gamma shift” problem.  Here is the output of the same video clip transcoded by Compressor (on the left) and MPEG Streamclip (on the right) as displayed by Quicktime Player:

It’s pretty obvious that the MPEG Streamclip footage is darker.  Apparently this is caused by a small difference in the Quicktime file metadata.  Compressor adds a “gamma” tag that MPEG Streamclip does not.  The result is that Quicktime Player displays them differently.   Here’s the fun part: Final Cut Pro doesn’t look at this gamma tag, or does it differently.  The result is that the footage looks the same.  Here is a short Quicktime video of the same clip alternating between Compressor and MPEG Streamclip:

Maybe a more well-trained eye can spot a difference, but I can’t.  So when it comes to editing it appears to me that the resulting clips are equivalent.  Whew!

With quality out of the way, that leaves just space and time to consider.  I processed 16 5DMk2 H.264 clips totaling 7 minutes of footage and consuming 2GB of disk space.

Depending on the project I often try to save disk space by converting the footage from the native 1080p to 720p (times are min:sec):

To ProRes 422 LT 720p via Compressor: 12:44 and 2.3GB
To ProRes 422 LT 720p via MPEG Streamclip: 14:52 and 2.3GB

To ProRes 422 LT 1080p via Compressor: 17:17 and 4.5GB (2.2X original)
To ProRes 422 LT 1080p via MPEG Streamclip: 10:54 and 4.5GB

Kinda eye-popping counterintuitive results there.  If you want to save disk space by downsampling to 720p, use Compressor.  If you want fast conversions the use MPEG Streamclip with no resizing.

For disk space comparisons, the standard quality ProRes 422 at 1080p would take 6.9GB (3.5X original files, MPEG Streamclip transcoded them in 11:46) .

My test configuration was pretty mundane and this was not an attempt to get the best performance out of either tool, but rather to see how they performed “out of the box”.   Source and destination files were to the same drive (as you would on a laptop). Compressor has ways of using multiple systems to distribute the encoding and improve the performance.  MPEG Streamclip has the ability to run multiple transcodes at once.  If you have a lot of fast CPUs in your system, this can certainly help.  I have a quad-processor MacPro and neither program would drive the system to full CPU capacity.  By adding increasing the MPEG Streamclip to 2 simultaneous tasks I was able to trim some time off the transcoding and saw the system CPU utilization approach 80%.  Adding a 3rd task didn’t do anything to increase utilization.  Those of you with 8-CPU boxes would likely see a benefit from using these features to take advantage of parallelism in your system.

I mentioned ProRes 422 Proxy and I think I will dig into this a bit more.  It has a data rate of 45Mbps.  The Canon 5D Mark 2 with the current firmware clocks in around 38Mbps – but I don’t know if this is an apples to apples comparison.  MPEG Streamclip transcoded the test files to ProRes Proxy at 720p in about 14 minutes and the resulting files were just 1.1GB (half of the original) and the full 1080p transcode took about 10 minutes and the resulting files were 2.2GB (slightly larger than the originals).  I, quite honestly, didn’t see much of a difference between the full ProRes standard quality and the Proxy transcoded files with the 5D footage, so this deserves a bit more investigation to understand exactly what kinds of scenes are being compromised.  If the typical delivery is going to be 720p web video (or an SD DVD) and you are doing minimal grading and editing, using the ProRes Proxy format may turn out to be a perfect editing format and you can always reconnect to higher quality versions (standard or LT) if you need them.  Certainly something worth investigating further.

Related posts:

1. First cut of a nature video short
2. Assabet River Video – Canon 5D Mark II Test
3. Three Stone Mountain LIVE videos

When I do an event shoot I take a LOT of pictures – (often) hundreds to (occasionally) thousands of them.  When I post galleries I edit them down to to a small fraction of the day’s captures and then I whittle it down to a handful of personal favorites for a blog posting.  My editing process involves several passes of the photographs: the first pass involves deleting bad frames (badly blown or out-of-focus exposures, test shots of the ground) — you know, utter garbage.  And I really delete them.   The subsequent phases involve various forms of rating and have a lot to do with the particular event and why I was there and what kind of story I’m trying to tell with the images.

The bottom line is that a LOT of photos end up on the proverbial cutting room floor.   Wouldn’t it be nice if I could use them all without inducing eye-clawing boredom on the viewer’s part?   Well, here’s my quick attempt at such a thing — let me know what you think.   758 images in 100 seconds…

(Also available on YouTube HD)

Technical stuff:

I originally approached this using a new feature of Lightroom 3 (Beta) that allows exporting of slideshows in H.264 video.   This is a really cool feature and I will certainly make use of it for certain projects.  (It is also a slick way to easily produce more traditional time-lapse videos directly from Lightroom.)   As with most things there are tradeoffs and the drawback of this direct-from-Lightroom technique is one of performance and flexibility.  It takes a LONG time for Lightroom to generate the video and when you are done you may find that you wanted a different pacing — and then you’ll end up generating it again.

The bulk of the time was spent tuning the images in Lightroom.  In a normal edit I only spend time fine-tuning the looks of the selected images, but in this case all of them needed some level of processing.   Fortunately I shoot in manual mode so the input exposures are pretty consistent.  This means that I can apply the same corrections to large sets of images at a time using the Synchronize tools in Lightroom.  I even created a few Develop Presets along the way to make this even easier for the shoot.  The emphasis was on creating groups of similarly exposed images so that the video levels wouldn’t be jumping too far out of whack. There are a couple of ways of approaching this, but in my case I created a separate Lightroom catalog with just this shoot in it — so the edits of my selects didn’t affect the edits for the video.   I could have also achieved the same result with a collection of virtual copies and may well do this in the future because it allows me to keep both end-products in the same catalog.

I used the same Slideshow capability in Lightroom, but opted to generate JPEG images instead.   (This output option is plain to see Lightroom 2, but you have to press the Option (Alt on PC’s) key in the new Lightroom 3 interface.)  For this video I selected the output size 1280×720 to match the 720p HD frame size.  Lightroom took almost an hour to generate the 758 frames on my 4-processor MacPro.  From there I open the images as an Image Sequence in Quicktime Pro and  select a frame rate.  10 frames per second happens to be close to the burst rate of my Canon 1DMk2 camera so the jump sequences almost play in “real time” and the pacing for the rest of the images is pleasingly frenetic.   The important part here is that if I didn’t like the frame rate choosing a different one and previewing it takes a few seconds rather than hours.

It is important to note that the use of Lightroom’s Slideshow feature is important to the success of this workflow.  If you chose to simply export the images they would end up being different sizes (unless you used identical cropping on every single one of them) and they also would not be sized for a video frame.   If the generated images are not identical in terms of aspect and resolution they will not be included in the Quicktime image sequence.  Using the Slideshow option allows you to generate consistently sized image frames with whatever background you want to use.

After generating the frames in Lightroom and rendering them as an image sequence with Quicktime Pro, I imported the video file as a clip into Final Cut Pro where I added the titles and credits and then added the soundtrack (thank you Duke!).  Once I had the music there I realized it might be fun to break up the video a bit to correspond to the music.   This is a creative process where you can absolutely go overboard.  Since this video was meant to be just a fun use of “excess” images I tried to keep it simple.  I then added the titles and credits and then uploaded it to the YouTubes…

I did some basic color grading in Final Cut, keeping the images coming out of Lightroom pretty basic.  I edit video in a different gamma than photographs (1.8 versus 2.2) so it is better to send Final Cut “flat” images and work the final result from within the video editing suite.

I thought the result was pretty cool and tells the story of the event in a unique and entertaining way.  I’ll likely alter my shooting slightly to enhance the results of future videos.  What I would normally consider gratuitous shots can now form the basis of short stop-action sequences.  Yet another tool in the story-telling kit.

—–

My thanks to Duke Levine for his permission to use his music in my blog videos.  If you like what you hear, visit Duke Levine’s MySpace page and pick up one of his albums.

Photos from the Harmony Halloween Horse Show can be found at: events.dmg-photography.com

Related posts:

1. 2009 Harmony Horse Stables Halloween Show
2. Halloween Horse Show: countering some horror lighting conditions with Lightroom
3. Harmony Spring Horse Show