Daniel Sheehy

I've always liked this site for lens info... http://photozone.de/all-tests I'm a bit wary of that kenrockwell site.. he makes some absolute value judgements on issues that are really subjective and depend a lot on the individual user... eg: ".. the ergonomics and handling of the Canons are inferior to Nikon.." ..?? :huh:

It would indeed be red, but would it be RED? :unsure:

It'll work for your cable, there is no restriction to this method based on the size of the cable... I mean, hey, if it works for 3-phase power and multi-core audio, it'll work for anything. :) The fact that you have several cables zip-tied together won't affect it.

Over-under. It may not make you look like a 'BAMF', but it'll be good for your cable... and time saving only comes with practice.

I don't disagree with you, I personally believe that anything, any idea, any belief, any theory should be open to review, criticism and testing... if it's true, it'll stand. I am fascinated though by the fact that this religious debate, like you said, just won't go away. You'd think if the issues were clear, we'd have sorted this one out a few thousand years ago. Instead, we've been to the moon and back, landed or crashed multi million dollar probes on various remote planets, launched the first known orbiting glue gun, figured out some fantastic new ways to kill each other and just as spectacular ways to repair each other.. but we are still arguing about this thing called God.

It would seem, that scientifically speaking, until Evolution, ID or Creation can actually be disproved, they must all be allowed as possible explanations for the presence of life on Earth... it is not sufficient to simply prove that species evolve, one must demonstrate (by disproving all other possibilities) that Evolution is the only way for life to exist on Earth.

That raises an interesting point.. does the existence of a 'God' need to be proven? How does one do that? Does the existence of said celestial being need to be dis-proven? Is it even possible to do that?! I think the reason we're all still debating this issue (insert your preferred number of years since man was capable of thought here) years later implies to me that the existence of God can neither be proven, nor dis-proven using conventional logic. This would explain why some put their faith in the existence of God, other's put their faith only in what they can see/hear/prove/disprove and other's stake their faith on the idea that there is no God... either way, we're all demonstrating a fair amount of faith.. :) To me personally, the idea that life is completely driven by blind chance, and that there is nothing more to life than what we experience here and now, makes it all sounds utterly pointless. So I need / want to believe there is more to life, that there is a God of some sort, because I need to believe that life has meaning beyond survival of the fittest.

You can either use large capacity cards and change them at pre-calculated intervals, or you could shoot straight to a HDD. This depends on how long the event you're recording is. If it's a matter of hours, then cards should be fine. If you're thinking weeks, you might want to look at shooting straight to HDD tethered to a small computer and intervalometer. The intervals, as Ralph noted, have a huge effect on the final look. So you might want to test several options first. It's a combination of the interval between frames, and how long the shutter stays open when recording the frame, that shape the final look. A slow shutter speed will help smooth out the final clip. A high shutter speed will give you a series of nice clear images, but it will tend to stutter when run into a sequence. The place to start might be to decide how long you need the finished, compressed sequence to be, and then calculate the number of frames and the required intervals backwards from that, testing a variety of shutter speeds along the way.

Ahh.. but that is where you are wrong. Watch a carpenter wielding a hammer, and compare that to a novice with the same ($20) hammer. The difference is never in the tools, it's always in the user. Buying a hammer doesn't make you a carpenter, buying a digital camera (with full '35mm' rig) doesn't make you a film maker. Show me what you've made and my first reaction will be to the quality, rather than to the tools. Simply being able to afford the tool is a good first step. But it remains just that, a first step.

I was just looking at that thread. :) I have to say, I like the modular idea very much. Still put off by the 'evangelistic' advertising model... but that's just a personal taste. It will be very interesting to see how this works.

There are several possibilities: - It was a faulty tape. Have you looked under the lid at the beginning of the tape? I wonder if the tape might be creased or have a crinkle on one side of the reel.. If the tape reel was poorly wound and one edge got nicked, this could explain the periodic drop outs. - The recording heads (inspite of the fact that you cleaned them) picked up a bit of dust or oxide and then threw it off later. No real way to check this.. you just have to clean the heads again and hope. - The deck playback heads are dirty. But if the drop outs are present in the same places no matter what deck you play it on, then this is probably not the problem.

I had the rain jacket on. After the game ended, there was a single hit, right over the audio / TC / menu switches panel... It's probably fair to assume that the camera will get hit at some stage.

The lens is not the only issue you want to consider. You don't exactly want a paint ball striking anywhere directly on, or even terribly near the camera body either. It won't cause physical damage, but the paint sprays everywhere at a high velocity.. and there are an awful lot of places the paint could get in where you don't want it. (toggle switches, audio and power connections) You might want to consider using some sort of weather jacket as well.

For available light, in that sort of contrasty location, they look pretty good. If you wanted to narrow down the depth of field, using ND and opening up the iris would have worked... assuming you had sufficient levels. You might have had difficulty getting that to work in the interiors. A very handy tool on shoots like this is a couple of collapsible, double sided reflectors. They could have just helped lift the levels in a couple of the interior / heavily shaded shots you were worried about. The only thing that stood out to me was the fact that, with the frames you've shown, you seem to be crossing the line occasionally when you move in for your CU's, but that could be deliberate..?

Motivated light - light which has 'motivation' or a reason for it's placement / use. [ie. a lamp in shot, the sun, moon, car lights etc] Key - as you've already said, the main or primary light source. Fill - light used to lower contrast in the image by filling in some of the shadow areas left by the key light. The use of the back light is always debated here, it boils down to taste and motivation. What does the script need? A back light might be clearly motivated by the location or story, or it may be used without motivation to provide separation between foreground and background elements. The lights are named according to the function they perform, not physical location. So you could key a character with a back light.. for example as in the shot you described from Terminal. This is then balanced out with fill light to enable the character's face to be seen (as per your desription).. or not, if a silhouette is desired.

If it's at all possible, David's suggestion of bouncing an overhead source off the podium top is a good one. I've had to try the bounced podium light scenario before (news / doco situation where I couldn't light anything extra) and the podium light just isn't enough.

Start with a wide shot to set up the reveal around the tree and let him start walking. If you then cut in to a MS or even MCU of him walking, you can use that to compress the action and when you go back to a wider shot showing what it is he has found, you can have moved him the 50 odd feet away without the audience realising he hasn't really walked for long enough. You can also use a CU of the feet walking through frame to chop a bit of distance out. [Only if it suits your script/style etc.] The other option is to rethink your reasons as to why he needs to walk so far before he comes upon whatever it is he finds... Can he do this sooner/closer to the tree?

I always knew it as the 'on' side and the 'off' side... same side as camera being the 'on' side (or dumb side as Paul described), and the opposite side to camera being the 'off'. Personally I prefer the key light on the 'off' side, but that might just because I think it looks less like news footage lit with a sun-gun. ;)

Many DSLR's actually don't have a shutter any more.. they do however retain the reflex mirror, which feeds the viewfinder and protects the sensor. The Single Lens Reflex system was a solution to a uniquely film based problem - how do you preview exactly what's going to fall on the capture medium, when the medium requires developing before you can see anything..? Given the improvements in live view, combined with better resolution LCD's, I think the optical viewfinder is likely to be phased out of DSLRs... and the viewfinder will simply be a high resolution LCD screen previewing the sensor. On the other hand it would be nice if Digital SLR manufacturers would stop compromising on their DSLR mirror mechanisms! I personally like the optical viewfinder, but it's frustrating to have the mirror fail.. who ever had a mechanical failure after only 100,000 clicks with a film SLR's?! My old Pentax K1000 was wearing out in all sorts of places, but the original shutter / mirror mechanism was still in great shape.

The whole point is to pass light through the steam / vapour / smoke... and keep it from washing all over elements behind. It's easiest done using a back light.. given that you have less worry with where spill ends up, as it usually isn't visible to the camera. Front lighting it would be a whole lot trickier since you have to consider what the light passing through the steam etc will also hit. Either way, the greater the contrast between the steam / smoke and whatever is behind it, the clearer the effect.

To return to the original question of the topic.. It's an issue I've thought about often. And one I've actually recently acted on. I resigned and migrated to Australia after 5 years doing news, advertising and documentary camera work. In addition to working as a lighting cameraman, I was a stills photographer doing everything from product photography to corporate portraiture to concerts. But after 5 years I realised that I didn't particularly enjoy working in advertising, that I didn't really want to go back to work for an under resourced TV station and that though I really enjoyed doing photography, I wanted to do projects that actually interested me. So I bought a digital SLR, quit my job and moved to another country to study Engineering, with the hope of working in the renewable energy sector some time in the future.. I'm currently waiting to hear which (if any) Uni will take me, and in the mean time I'm working part time crewing for a sound engineer in Brisbane, with an eye on freelance photography (once my camera comes back from Canon Sydney..). I'll be 30 by the time I graduate, but it's never too late to start doing what interests you. A good friend of mine didn't discover his passion in life till he was at least 50, and he'd done it ALL by then - hiking the Himalayas, cycling from Germany down to India, commercial and military diving, flying, sailing, diplomatic postings and engineering. Now he lives a quiet life as a pearl carver in a quiet corner of Fiji. So long as we remain passionate, it doesn't really matter what we do. :)

A mattbox with a polariser and set of ND's would serve you well.

Throw some light through the glass.. back, side, whatever. It makes the beer glow in the glass. Have lots of product, glasses and cleaning materials on hand... you usually can't recycle drink product between shots. Remember, it's important that the product looks the way you / client want it to, so if you have to dilute it / add things to it / or otherwise bastardise the beer to make it look right, go for it! We used to 'adjust' C0ke to make it glow the right way.. ;)

Wait.. we have a ratings system? What are we rating on.. style, entertainment value, laughs generated per post..? I'd better head over and give Phil a 5 for his ability to distil wit and sarcasm into a single biting line! All kidding aside; it's a meaningless gimmick mate, I wouldn't read anything into it. :)

Once you take the view that you [or your group or whatever] have been wronged and that needs to be set right before you can progress, you're doomed to failure from the start. I grew up in a country where positive discrimination was institutionalised... and I can tell you that it doesn't work. If you put your head down and are willing to work hard for what you want, no one can stop you. If you take the view that you are entitled to some sort of assistance simply because you are [insert favourite cause here], you don't have the right mindset to actually achieve anything, even if you are given all the help in the world! While I can understand the reasoning behind these affirmative action / positive discrimination schemes.. I feel they ultimately often cause more harm and division than they're worth. Yes, some very talented people do get breaks under these systems but in the long run, I have doubts about their effectiveness. If you want a scheme to help talented but underprivileged film makers, make it applicable to all talented but underprivileged film makers.. does it really matter what language they dream in or where they sleep at night?