Jul 28 2010

Love Your Family, Be Wary of Your HD-DSLR

Category: In-Camera Techniques, Multimedia & Video, Technology InsightsEthan G. Salwen @ 4:43 pm

Since writing last night about a blog post by Gail Mooney, she’s written two more, and also done some major reporting Down Under for her “Opening Our Eyes” documentary project. Go Mooney!

Here are two key lessons I take away from Mooney’s “The Importance of ‘Family’” and “The Hard Part About Working with DSLRs”, both of which I encourage you to read — gaining insights from both Mooney’s Humane Side as well as her Tech-Nerdy Side:

• Family matters more than anything. So keep on building, loving and appreciating your “family,” even if these people are not related by blood.

As Mooney says of a young homeless man helped by the Oasis project: “His wants are simple – to love and be loved. How very basic and yet so tragic that being part of a family seems so out of reach for so many.”

• HD-DSLR cameras are not the best tools for recording video for making movies. HD-DSLRs are a major pain for capturing video, so (at least for now) for the best, most hassle free video-only shooting we’re better of with HD video cameras.

As Mooney says: “Yes, the visual [of HD-DSLRs] is stunning but I can’t help but think how many moments I may have missed that I probably would have gotten if I had been shooting with a video camera.”

Let’s go to the video. . .

To honor both family and not capturing video on HD-DSLRs — I used my measly Canon G9 — I share a home movie I made a year-and-a-half ago. Back then these wackos were just the wacky family of my girlfriend. But now, with the wedding set for January, these wackos are my family, too. Yes!

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Jul 27 2010

It’s Making Movies, Stupid!

Category: Creative Process, Multimedia & Video, Technology InsightsEthan G. Salwen @ 6:17 pm

“After 11 years of shooting motion and over 30 years of shooting still images, my mind seamlessly makes the switch a hundred times a day between thinking and seeing in ‘moments in time’ or ‘time in motion’”, Gail Mooney shared yesterday in “True Convergence with the DSLR Cameras,” a great blog post from her “Journeys of a Hybrid.” Mooney speaks of how photographers new to video tend to get consumed by the technical challenges and “forget that they need to think and shoot differently when shooting video.”

This is something that I have been struggling with in my very initial steps into video and multimedia. I notice that I either shoot all stills or all motion. My mind is not only not switch seamlessly, it’s hardly switching at all. And when I am in video mode, I hardly know what I’m doing. And why should I? While I’ve been making still images for 20 years, I’ve only played around with multimedia a tiny bit over the past year. How would I know how to make a movie?

To make a movie. That’s the real challenge of photographers “moving into motion”: embracing video capture, as well as audio capture, as well as the editing these element together, or even “just” editing still images and sound into multimedia pieces. This “move making” factor might seem incredibly obvious, but I think few of us really realize this.

Maybe you realize this. But if you do, do you really realize this?

I ask because I recently finished up a 4,000-word article sharing photographers’ insights on embracing video and multimedia and, as good as the article is — I’ll share it with you when I have the PDF — I think I fail to communicate this obvious-subtle idea: Moving into motion is all about making movies, and making movies is hard.

Because of all the TV programs and movies we consume, we have a sense of how movies work, which is great. But, just as casual photographers Continue reading “It’s Making Movies, Stupid!”

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Jun 04 2010

Learning Multimedia and Video On the Job

Category: Business & Marketing, Creative ProcessEthan G. Salwen @ 1:33 pm

“The way I learn the best is just to do stuff,” Wu said. “So I will just take an assignment and learn along the way.”

This thought from Tony Wu came near the end of my post yesterday, and I thought I better elaborate on it, both for the sake of clarity and to fend off the likes of Gail Mooney, a photographer who has spent years mastering video and multimedia and who has told me more than once (understandably) that she gets very irritated by photographers (and clients) who downplay the difficulty of creating video and multimedia.

Where did I learn to photograph on a train at high altitude? Um, that would be, on a train at high altitude. (Nearing 15,023, heading between Lima and Huancayo, Peru.)

Where did I learn to photograph on a train at high altitude? Um, that would be, on a train at high altitude. (Nearing 15,023 ft., heading to Huancayo, Peru, from Lima.)

Tony Wu is as conscientious of his professionalism and the difficulties of creating multimedia as Mooney. Also, to be clear, this was just one brief thought from him in a very long conversation. Wu didn’t make a big point of the idea that photographers should take on new challenges while on the job. However, I will.

I don’t think it goes against best professional practices to suggest that on-the-job learning should be a critical strategy embraced by still photographers venturing into multimedia. As Wu suggests, why not go out an get jobs that require a slightly higher level of expertise?

Professional Photography IS On-The-Job Training

Continue reading “Learning Multimedia and Video On the Job”

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May 27 2010

How I Made Them Dance the Tango

Category: Creative Process, In-Camera Techniques, Multimedia & Video, Workflow & DAMEthan G. Salwen @ 2:50 pm

AfterCapture Blog_100527_How Dance_1On Monday I shared my tango-dancing salt and pepper shakers. How did I produce this short? Basically, I hit record on my Canon G9, set to the time-lapse video mode, and then moved my characters around like a madman — for a little more than a half hour. That’s about it.

That said, I’ll now share the some specifics of my time-lapse-stop-motion video creation workflow, as I think it is interesting. I also think that my little piece is successful because, although I started it simply to play around with technology, I ended up focusing on a story. This kept me focused, gave me motivation both to create and share, and gives my piece any value that it may have.

My Time-Lapse-Stop-Motion Experience

After finishing watching the original “Clash of the Titans” movie earlier in the day, I was pretty eager to play with stop-motion, which is something that I have never done, but which I’ve been dying to try since, well, probably about the first time I saw “Clash,” nearly 30 years ago.

While I had never tried stop motion, I’ve been recording all kinds of time-lapse movies since getting my G9 and discovering this wonderful feature. So before I went through the trouble of making a stop-motion movie, I decided to use this feature — recording a still every two seconds — to get a sense of what a stop-motion piece would look like.

Quickly setting up my camera on a tripod on the kitchen table and hitting “record,” and moving the objects at hand around, I ended up with this:

Pretty cool!, I thought.

Obviously the hairy hands aren’t supposed to show up in a stop-motion movie, but I loved the potential. So. . . Continue reading “How I Made Them Dance the Tango”

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Dec 16 2009

Journalism, In Our Own Words

Category: Multimedia & Video, ViewpointEthan G. Salwen @ 5:38 am

ACOF_09121609_Jobless_1This is powerful stuff, and you might not be able to watch it. It’s really hard to take. And there’s no blood, no violence, no propaganda, no aggressive attitudes, no politically sensitive topics addressed. It’s just a handful of Americans talking honestly and directly into their webcams about their own joblessness.

I feel sad, frustrated and helpless when I watch the eight videos presented in “The Jobless, In Their Own Words, published on Monday by “The New York Times” as a follow up to their recent poll, “Poll Reveals Trauma of Joblessness in the U.S.”

They videos make me feel sad, but they also get me thinking.

The videos make me think of a whole new influence of modern communications on traditional journalism that I had not considered: The ability to create a whole new kind of documentary or journalistic reportage that is informed by more honest and less filtered content from subjects.

You would think that the blogosphere and YouTube would have Continue reading “Journalism, In Our Own Words”

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Jul 06 2009

Leaning Forward into Storytelling

Category: Books, Multimedia & VideoEthan G. Salwen @ 10:37 am

The Lean Forward MomentPhotographers are storytellers. Storytelling is about creating change. Visual storytelling requires creating visual change in a way that advances a story. (This I just picked up from Norman Hollyn, but we’ll get to him in a second.) Let me go on. . .

In moviemaking, something called a “logline” is used to describe a scene in a way that allows the moviemaker to focus on how to best tell the story of that scene in relation to the overall movie (which, it turns out, can also be defined by a logline).
Continue reading “Leaning Forward into Storytelling”

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Mar 30 2009

Photographers Can Go Script Frenzy, Too!

Category: Creative Process, Online ResourcesEthan G. Salwen @ 5:52 am

ACMF_NG_033Following are some inspirational ideas for photographers who have a “nagging feeling that there’s a script inside you that may never get out.” That’s right, April is the month of Script Frenzy!, an annual event with no fees (and no pressure of awards) geared to help people get those nagging scripts out of their systems — whether feature movies, stage plays, short films, TV commercials or even graphic novels.

The point of Script Frenzy! is to help creative people engage in Continue reading “Photographers Can Go Script Frenzy, Too!”

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Feb 06 2009

Engaging, Relevant Insights Into Video Compression

Category: Books, Technology InsightsEthan G. Salwen @ 11:26 am

ACMF_NG_012Real World Video Compression” sounded pretty boring to me, even though I’ve started playing around with video, and even though I’m pretty excited about the convergence of still and motion.

Written by compressionist extraordinaire Andy Beach, “Real World Video Compression” is a surprising delight and utterly relevant to still-focused picture professionals—from movie-making photographs to office-bound photo assistants prepping Flash movies of still images for the Web.

The reason that Beach deserves such big-time, hats-off applause is because Continue reading “Engaging, Relevant Insights Into Video Compression”

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