Young Executive

This weekend we organized a test shoot with a fantastic model by the name of Eric Stackpole to try out some new corporate looks.  A "test shoot" allows us the chance to work with new talent and try out some concepts without jeopardizing a client project.

For this shoot we were trying to capture the unique qualities of a Silicon Valley tech company.  The Bay Area has a unique style of business when compared to other metropolitan areas and we wanted to capture that style.  The Bay Area, a hot spot for technology game-changers like Apple, Twitter, and Facebook, has a very casual approach to business.

Eric is a great example of today's high-tech workforce - young, creative, and smart - and he did a great job by giving us the energy of a young entrepreneur.  HP was gracious enough to allow us to shoot in the lobby of their newly acquired Palm building in Sunnyvale which was the perfect venue for a high-tech, corporate look.

See the whole set on our Flickr page.

Time-Lapse Workflow

Shooting time-lapse footage is a lot of fun and a great way to compress time into short video clips but it's not without it's challenges.  We've spent a lot of time shooting time-lapse and made plenty of mistakes in the process. For example, it took three separate trips to the Christmas in the Park event to get the footage you see above.  To get the best possible quality from our footage we also tried four different workflow methods to finally find the best solution.  If you're interested in shooting time-lapse footage, here are our recommendations on getting the best quality out of your workflow.

THE BASICS
If you're new to time-lapse we suggest you head over to our friends at Photojojo who've created a nice guide to get you started.  Once you're comfortable with the basic steps needed to shoot a time-lapse and you've purchased your Intervalometer, we've created a time chart to help you determine your interval time.  The next step is to determine your image format.

CAPTURE FORMAT

Determining your image capture format can be a tricky decision because your image format may affect your interval time.  We ran into this problem quite a few times with frustrating results.  Your choices are basically RAW or JPG.  We always prefer to shoot RAW because it gives us the full resolution of our sensor which in turn gives us the greater quality final image.  The problem with RAW however is that some cameras cannot process a RAW file quickly enough to allow a 2 second interval time for example.  We found that our Canon 1Ds could only shoot 1 RAW image every 4 seconds without filling the buffer.  Remember we need to shoot 100's of frames to create one 24fps video clip so if your camera buffer fills up after 24 frames then you won't be able to complete your entire sequence.  RAW files are also much larger and will quickly fill your storage card which cause a lot of headaches. We choose not to shoot JPG, even though our camera will process a JPG image much faster and the file sizes are significantly smaller, because it doesn't give us the quality or latitude in post-production.  A JPG image is rendered in-camera and cannot be adjusted later without degrading the image.  We found the perfect solution in the sRAW format.  sRAW is a relatively new image format which is based on RAW.  The file is identical to RAW only 1/4 the resolution and 1/2 the file size.  To produce 1080p time-lapse videos, sRAW is the way to go!


DETERMINING EXPOSURE
This step is the most crucial and most difficult step of the entire process.  Because of the fact that a time-lapse sequence takes place over a certain duration of time, you will have to deal with the fact that your ambient light and color will change.  What you're trying to do here is reduce the amount of flicker you get when you assemble your footage.  If your camera settings change (even slightly) during the image capture, you'll get a really annoying flicker effect when you playback the video sequence.  The first thing we recommend using is a custom white balance.  Pull out your neutral gray or white card and take the time to create a custom white balance for your sequence.  This is even more important for night sequences.  We found the WB presets in Canon cameras to really suck at night so we always use a custom WB setting when shooting at night.  Setting your exposure will be a creative choice so while we can't help you determine your exposure, we can give you some tips.

1. We suggest setting your camera to Manual mode but if you choose to use an automatic meter, use Aperture priority so that the camera changes shutter speed and not your aperture.
2. If you can tie your spot meter mode to your auto-focus point, do it!  Then set your AF point to a fixed position of your scene that the camera can meter on without too much interference.  This will hopefully provide a consistent exposure and not have your exposure jumping around to much during the sequence.
3. When shooting at night be sure to shield your eyepiece from any stray light that might enter from say your LCD monitor.  This stray light can throw off your meter reading slightly and give you a wrong exposure setting.

Our last tip has to do with focus.  ALWAYS set your camera to shoot in manual focus.  This is the first thing that will severely screw up your sequence as your images have a different focus point from image to image.  Remember the MOST important thing to keep in mind is to create a consistent environment that changes as little as possible from shot to shot.  

POST PROCESSING
Here's another area where we learned quite a bit from trial and error.  Again, our goal was the absolute BEST quality output we could get published to Vimeo.com.  There are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of little decisions that play a part in the final output quality.  On one side of the spectrum you could easily shoot a sequence of JPG's, assemble them in Quicktime 7 Pro and export them using a simple preset and be perfectly happy with the results.  To get the best quality output however takes a little more work.  Our workflow goes something like this:

1. Import sRAW files into Lightroom for processing.  This step can be optional, but we find that processing RAW is easier in Lightroom than in Camera RAW.
2. Import the original RAW files into Adobe After Effects as an "image sequence".  When you do this, you will be shown the Camera RAW interface where you can choose to adjust your images using the standard RAW adjustment controls.  If you previously edited the images in Lightroom, you will see your adjustments in the Camera RAW dialog. Once you are done with the Camera RAW adjustments the images, After Effects will automatically assemble them into one "camera raw sequence".
3. Use After Effects to apply any motion, titles, or effects to your sequence.  We like to add music to our clips and we'll be honest, After Effects sucks at this!  We've tried to export our edited sequences into other programs that better handle music tracks and would always loose quality no matter what setting we used so we just live with After Effects and suffer through it.
4. Export your final composition using the following guidelines from Vimeo.  If you're using another site to host your video you should google what their compression guidelines are.  If you can't find their guidelines posted than switch to Vimeo!

The best advice we can give here is to keep working with your source files in the same application if possible.  Every time you have to export/import footage or convert footage to a different format you loose quality.  Keep your source footage as high resolution as possible during the workflow and only compress or convert it at the very last stage.  After Effects was the best application we found for their video compression algorithms.  We've heard good things about using Quicktime 7 Pro for compression as well.  

MORE RESOURCES

We hope you've learned a thing or two from our real-world failures and wasted hours of experimentation.  If you're looking for more information here are some resources that can help.

• LookyCreative - The Complete Timelapse Post-production Workflow
• Timescapes.org - Forum

Tether To An iPad Wirelessly

As with most photographers in the Bay Area we take a particular interest in new technology that promises to make life easier for us.  There have definitely been a few game changers lately - iPhone and iPad being two of them. But one product in particular, not only stands up to it's promise, it actually blew us away!

The Eye-Fi memory card is a standard looking Secure Digital memory card in a 4GB or 8GB configuration.  You stick it in your digital camera and it works the same as you would expect any SD card to work - storing files and all. The genius of the technology however is the Wi-Fi radio built into the card itself!  What this allows you to do is leverage an existing Wi-Fi network to wirelessly stream the photos from your camera to a desktop, laptop or yes... an iPad.

We ordered an Eye-Fi Connect X2 4GB card recently and wanted to see how useful it would be to shoot images to our iPad in a real-world, professional environment.  Would it be as cool as Lee Morris showed us in his FStoppers YouTube video? Would we be able to use it in the studio as a new proofing tool?  Let's find out!

The good news is the Eye-Fi card definitely performed as advertised and provided us with some nice "cool factor" points. The bad news is that it won't replace tethering to your workstation for professional studio shooting.

We purchased the basic Connect X2 card which gave us 4GB storage capacity and 802.11n wireless transfer speeds.  If you spend a little more you get other nice options like Geo Tagging and Direct Mode capability.  Eye-Fi recently announced that the Direct Mode feature will be available to ALL X2 cards with a firmware update sometime soon.  That'll be nice because what that will allow us to do is create a small 'virtual' network just between the card and the iPad instead of having to rely on an existing Wi-Fi network.

So how did it work?  Well before you can use the card you have to sign up for an Eye-Fi account and configure the card to work with an existing Wi-Fi network.  Apparently the network configurations are stored on the card so the cards have to be configured with the desktop software first.  The configuration was quick and simple enough however it must be done every time you change networks.  This could be a real pain if you plan on using public Wi-Fi networks.  Our recommendation on this is to bring your own wireless network.  We used an Apple Airport Express for this purpose.  You don't need an internet connection, just an active Wi-Fi network.

The partner in crime to this wireless solution is the ShutterSnitch app for iPad.  Neither Eye-Fi or Apple make an application for listening to the Eye-Fi card so that's where 2ndNature software filled the gap with their ShutterSnitch app for iPad and iPhone. It's a $15.99 purchase from the iTunes App Store but it's in version 2.0.2 now so apparently there's enough of a user base that 2ndNature keeps the app updated.  The app is simple in design and does what you expect.  You can create Collections and within the Collection you can view images, thumbnails and zoom in/out on images.  It even adds a few interesting features like alerts if your images don't match customized criteria like shutter speed or ISO.  Kinda neat!

Now here's the rub - It's slow!  We tried various configurations and found that if we shot anything other than Small JPG's it was painfully slow to transfer the images.  The transfers were consistent however and if the transfer lagged for any reason it was good about keeping in sync with what was shot.  Initially we were nervous that that ShutterSnitch was missing images but sure enough, every image shot was transferred eventually.  We used the card in the Canon 1d Mark III which contains a CF slot and SD slot and allows us to save different image sizes to each slot.  We were able to shoot RAW images to the CF slot and Small JPG's to the SD slot which would be transferred to the iPad.  It took 4-6 seconds on average to transfer an image wirelessly.

So is it useful?  That depends on what you need.  It's fun for Art Directors to sit back in a comfy chair and review images at their leisure instead of hovering over your shoulder or the shoulder of your digital tech.  It's useful for lighting assistants or stylists to be able to review their work in almost real-time.  It's great for "chimping" while you setup because a 9" LCD is always better than a 3" LCD. Where this technology really shined for us was while shooting time-lapse images of San Francisco. When it was 40 degrees outside, we could monitor the camera from inside our warm car.

Ultimately this is just another tool in our toolbox and will come out when the tool is right for the job. I think what this technology does best is provide another window into the digital workflow.  It adds a new collaborative tool to the process where, during a shoot, the photographer and other creatives can gather around the screen and discuss in real-time how the shoot is progressing.  For us, anything that helps the creative process in this way is a great thing!

UPDATE: April 20, 2011

The guys at Eye-Fi have made their Connect X2 cards even BETTER!  They've added the "direct mode" feature available to all users of the X2 card via a firmware update.  This now gives us the ability to send photos from the camera to the iPad without an existing WiFi network.  Yes that's right, the card itself can now act as it's own wireless access point.  If there are no "remembered" WiFi networks in range the card will start it's own wireless network which the iPad can connect to and recieve images.  The new firmware update even extends the wireless range and improves the reliability.  

Location Equipment Kits

We often get asked about the kind of gear we shoot or the equipment we use on location so in response we thought we'd give you a sneak peak into our "black boxes".


THE DSLR KIT
Our DSLR kit is the most used kit in the group and the first one to get pulled out for a job. We're definitely a Canon shop. Our digital kit contains a full-frame 1d Mark I body for landscape and wide-angle shots and the 10fps 1d Mark III body for sports and timelapse shoots. If all things are equal, the quality of your image will come down to your choice of lens so our kit includes the Canon 70-200mm f4 L, the Canon 24-70mm f2.8 L, the incredible Canon 85mm f1.2 L and a Tamron Aspherical 17-35 f2.8 to round out the bunch. The rest of the kit includes a set of neutral density filters, Sekonic L-758dr light meter, spare batteries for both bodies, a set of 2-way radios for the crew, an intervalometer for shooting time-lapse, battery charger for the 1d Mark III, various trigger cables and my photographer credentials. This all comfortably fits into the Pelican 1510 watertight case.

THE MEDIUM FORMAT KIT 

As good as digital technology is these days, we still love to shoot film! When a job calls for medium format resolution we turn to film and our medium format kit which includes a Mamiya RZ67 Professional with a 150mm f3.5 portrait lens and 220 film back for studio work.  For location work where we need a more hand-holdable solution we use our Mamiya 645 Pro TL with winder grip, 80mm f2.8 and a 150mm f3.5 lenses. If you're curious how film fits into our digital workflow we bring our rolls to a local vendor for quick turnaround then scan the films through our Canon Canoscan 8800F film scanner. Our last camera in this kit is the Canon G10 with various lens attachments which we use for location scouting or anything that require a really small digital camera with manual control. This all fits into the Pelican 1500 watertight case.

THE LIGHTING KIT

When it came to lighting we made an investment in Paul Buff's Alien Bee lighting system. We found their feature/price ratio to be unbeatable and their customer support to be top notch! The contents of our lighting kit include 3 AB800 monolights with the standard 6" reflectors, an ABR800 Ring Light, a Canon 430EX Speedlight with a set of Gary Fong Lightsphere diffusers along with some various grip gear. We completed our Paul Buff system by selling our Pocket Wizards and buying the CyberSync wireless triggers and the CyberCommander control unit which we love! The CyberCommander allows me to control up to 16 individual lights right from my camera. For good measure we also threw our Bogen 3021 pro tripod into the frame as well. All of this gear fits nicely into the Pelican 1620 watertight trunk.

THE LIGHTSTANDS & MODIFIERS - The last bit of luggage we bring on locations contains all the other grip and light modifiers we might need. This kit consists of 6 air cushioned light stands with assorted clamps and grip, two Dynaphos silver umbrellas, one white Dynaphos shoot-through umbrella, two small Dynaphos softboxes, one Dynaphos 6-foot strip lightbox and a large Dynaphos octobank. Our favorite light modifiers (which aren't pictured) are the 5-in-1 reflector disc by Dynaphos and two Paul Buff 22" High-Output Beauty Dishes.


So there you have it! That's a little bit of what it takes, in terms of equipment, to produce quality photographs on location.