Jill and I are members of the TO Zoo. We went a couple of weeks ago and I filled up my DSLR and two film cameras. Today we went back and I took an old Nikon Coolpix L3 point & shoot we hadn’t yet unpacked from a storage box.

I figured that a P&S wasn’t going to be able to capture the kinds of images I’ve gotten used to shooting. I have tools for full-frame images already, and this isn’t one of them. That said, I taught myself the basics of composition using a P&S and I quite like them: they often come with a bunch of goofy imaging modes that no “serious” cameras bother with.

Jill’s Nikon, for example, has a setting which takes a burst of 16 photos and renders them in a 4×4 grid. I decided to play with that mode exclusively today — use the device for its unique properties rather than pining for better tech. Here’re some of my snaps:

I’m quite happy with these, particularly the hippos: the giraffe because I had a dream about psychedelic giraffes a couple of weeks ago, the birds because of the chaos, and the monkeys because they’re invisible. The wolves have a weird border too — the tree makes it look feathered and rough.

Lessons for composition: this kind of photography is all about rectilinear repetition. Keeping things centred, having lines continue through frames, and trying to obfuscate the frame “loop” points seems to lead to interesting results. All of these are also sequential in time — they’re little 16 frame digital films for consumption at-a-glance: cinemaspresso.

Here are some processed Vegas photos. I have more but want to hang onto them for a bit.

Via Mashable, some really effing cool animated gifs are being used in fashion photography:

Via BB (which, for some reason, Firefox is reporting as a forged site), a new lensing and sensor system which allows the photographer to pick the plane of focus in post, at the cost of lower-resolution imagery.

This is akin to the concept of shooting in raw format, which allows the photographer to reinterpret exposure data in post and to some extent re-light the image after the fact (though in that case there is no quality loss).

Clicking around the gallery (single click images to change focus) is a good exercise in the compositional use of the focal plane. Generally you want people’s eyes to be crystal-sharp and this (demo) interface isn’t good enough to ensure that — it’s roughly similar to an autofocus, which is aesthetically awful.

That said, it’s a nice addition to the toolbox. The images of reflections (and refractions?) through glass taught me something new about focus pulling.

The feature also makes the case, once again, for high megapixel counts — they are currently as meaningless as processor cycles to most users, and are similarly used as a more-is-better marketing metric — but this system drops effective resolution by something like two orders of magnitude in order to store more light data, making sensor depth important again.

Calling this lensing system an answer to “the focus problem” is misleading though — focus isn’t a problem, just a compositional element.

The actors we’ve been working with all year have graduated and are off into the world to do their thing, which includes huge amounts of self promotion. I just noticed that one of them is using one of my photographs, taken with my own equipment and on my own initiative, on her personal site, without my permission. So I stole it back:

It’s also been poorly cropped, or else the original is incorrectly composed (haven’t checked) — but at first I was actually pissed off! Somewhere along the process of learning to be an imagemaker I bought into the idea that I should get compensated for imagemaking. This forced me to confront my own hypocrisy: I steal intellectual property pretty much every day. I actually have my computer set to steal it automatically, whenever it’s turned on. I’m actually stealing some right now.

No one likes to confront their own hypocrisy! Talk about awkward.

I started to consider watermarking my photos, which in private life I think is effing weak. Perhaps best to calm down and realize that, in a sense, she’s pimping my work by pimping her own. I might ask for an image credit though… And try to sell her some web design consulting (and more shots from the set) while I’m at it. There’s always a win-win sales opportunity.

But yeah: I used to have less-than-no sympathy for the other side of piracy. But now… It’s personal.

Got some shots on a visit to Production Services Toronto, a rental house servicing Canadian productions. Here’re some cam-shots, starting with the famous RED. As pictured (with after-market mods) this runs approx $30k:

And here’s it’s back-facing control pad:

Here’s the ARRI Alexa, ARRI’s answer to the RED. As pictured this runs approx $60k:

The Alexa “only” shoots 2k in 4:2:2 at maximum whereas the RED shoots 4k in 4:4:4, so has bigger resolution and a more spacious gamut. However, when the RED goes into the field it goes along with a full backup. The Alexa is ruggedized, and so doesn’t fail as often — thus the equipment ends up costing the same, but the RED comes with a built-in budget randomizer.

The Alexa also has, arguably, better optics, and Herzog hates the RED’s boot times.

Here is the camera test I just shot with a Canon 7D in video mode using Philip Bloom’s suggested settings and color grading by my buddy Brady. I am planning on “going rogue” and shooting my film on this camera, despite specific professorial instructions not to:

It is extremely difficult to focus these correctly, but also extremely fun to play with the focal plane. I uploaded a 1080p version, so see if you can click through and get that — watch the leather jacket in the foreground!

The beauty of photography, as Marshall McLuhan points out in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, is in delving deeply into particular moments in time. Henri Cartier-Bresson called this “the decisive moment”.

With advanced cameras, like the one used to shoot this, we can explore moments that, while apparent to our eyes, pass too quickly for close examination.

Film-video adds a dimension of variable time to photography, allowing us to explore perceptual “frame rates” far higher than the ~30-60 FPS which we naturally experience. It allows us to get closer and closer to the maximum “frame rate” of the universe — the infinite now of imperceptible direct reality — the difference in time between a photon being “here” and being “there” — the instant in which “will” becomes “is” becomes “was” — a liminal space existing inside and wholly apart from the day-to-day — a forced mindfulness practice — faster that the speed of sense-system nerve firing, faster than its inherent delay — an irreducible analog explored digitally, like a poet trying to describe direct experience in an insufficient human language — what André Bazin might have called “a record of The Face of God”, or Caveh Zahedi “The Holy Moment”.

Lady Gaga is the Chief Creative Officer of Polaroid.

Let’s take a moment to deconstruct that rather-complex piece of information. Yes, there is still a Polaroid. Yes, the Lady Gaga. Yes, in the executive suite, presumably to turn around the retro-dead brand.

I hate CES, but I think you understand why this story caught my eye. Now that we’ve eased into the context, here’s the salient point: Gaga has designed a new Polaroid system called the GL line (“Gray Label”).

It’s made up of three products: a Polaroid-esque digital camera with a built-in printer, the GL30; a standalone photo printer, the GL10; and a pair of massive sunglasses (pictured, via BB — apparently the captured images project outwards?) with a built-in digital camera, GL20. Supposedly they’ll eventually be made aware of social networking services.

This has kitsch niche written all over it. Hopefully it outlives Polaroid. Basic question: who still prints photos? I do it because I’m a photo geek.

Gotta make a comment on the business side of this too: music celebs are implicitly assuming the role of audiophiles and lending their brands to things like headphones and sound systems. 50 did it with some new wireless phones at CES, Gaga is doing it with earbud jewelry, and Dre (correct me if wrong) was first on the scene endorsing Monster phones and laptops. Or was it George Lucas with THX?

Anyway, it’s great business. I love to see artists getting paid. Still, could Clooney sell a television with the pitch: “Next time you’re watching one of my films, make sure you can see my winning smile in the highest possible quality.”

Or did George Takei beat him to it?

(via CNN)

Via BB, Bill Durgin does effing amazing photographic character studies.

Extreme flexibility is one of my hobby horses.