The HPA Tech Retreat is an annual gathering in the desert east of Los Angeles (in a posh resort, mind you; it’s not like we’re out sitting in the hot sun among the Joshua trees) where film and TV industry…
The annual Consumer Electronics Show, held early in January each year in Las Vegas, is an event I try to attend about every other year. The exhibit floor is huge, spilling out of all four halls of the Las Vegas…
How do you make a light look soft yet cut it as if it were hard? By using a light that’s both hard and soft at the same time, of course. A director recently sent me a reference image and…
The butterflies that I stop and look at are usually very large and made of grid cloth. Here’s what I use overhead in daylight exteriors, and when. Making actors look good outdoors can be really difficult. When possible I try…
Ever wonder how a company’s background and philosophy affects product development? Let me tell you a little something about Arri and Alexa… I’m a geek. I read cinematography, videography and color textbooks for fun. I’m awful at math so I…
To summarize my early years in the dark ages, it went like this… I never did find myself surrounded by beautiful models taking their clothes off. But my career path did take me down the next best road: sports. I was fortunate enough to work for the United States Ski Team and many other good clients. By the time my still cameras became Digital SLRs, I ran the photo department at a NASCAR race track for five years. So I went around the world a few times and scratched out a living. All in all, a pretty good ride, but the winds of change were blowing. Batteries were replacing brains and technology was compensating for a lack of talent. The sky wasn’t falling but the day rates were. It was time to change or die. Extinction was not going to happen to me.
For those looking at alternative options to Sony’s SXS Pro Plus cards (recommended for best performance on the F5/F55) fortunately as of the October version 2.0 firmware release Sony added support for the Sony XQD memory card format. Not only…
Accessories don’t get no respect. Zacuto’s Z-Finder EVF is a perfect example: it’s a dinky little 3.2″, 800×480 LCD monitor in a lumpy plastic case that looks like something RED’s mechanical designers would make if they worked for Fisher-Price. To…
Still photographers love histograms. Cinematographers hate them. Here’s why our world is so different from theirs in this regard… This is a normal histogram, pulled from Resolve 10. Histograms count pixels, nothing more, and they only tell us how many…
Years ago I turned a low-end SD camera into a pinhole device by covering the lens port with black wrap and poking a hole in it. I decided to try again with a much higher-end camera. Here’s what happened… In…