Check out this old school Macintosh Classic II with a working version of Adobe Photoshop 1.0! At the Photoshop World Expo Adobe had a working version of every single Photoshop release since the beginning and each one was running on the appropriate Macintosh hardware of that time. It was very interesting to see the progression of the technology in both hardware and software and I think it was a clever way to celebrate their 20th anniversary.

Day two and three were filled with plenty more classes offering a wealth of information not just on photoshop, but some of the other applications in the Adobe suite, as well as some generic photography classes. All of which, were being taught by the worlds leading professionals in each field. It was a huge learning experience and I only hope I can make it back for another one next year.

Here are some pictures from the event…

So my brain is hurting from the information overload but by the time I get back to Australia I should be on top of things and I think I will have a lot more to bring to my own workshops back home.  I will reveal the dates of my upcoming workshops soon.

I didn’t get much of a chance to check out all of Vegas, but I’m heading back there soon so I will take some cool pictures then.

B.

What a huge first day, and it isn’t even over yet! The training has finished for the day but there are still some activities to take part in. Personally, I am going to be attending the After Party @ the House of Blues located in the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino which is also where I’m staying.  Before we get to that though, you can probably notice from the photo above there was a KISS theme for the opening keynote and it was hilarious. The entire keynote presentation was really well done and it was good to hear from some Adobe head-honchos.

Attended some really good classes including Calvin Hollywood and Russell Brown’s presentation where I was also napping a few Behind The Scenes pictures for Calvin. The classroom was packed out which was great! I took a bunch of pictures which I will post probably tomorrow in another blog post.

So the after party looks to be a very interesting night with some food and drink provided and a chance to meet a few more people from this great event. I’ll check back in and finish this post when I get back…

…. few hours go by…. then a few more ….

Well I was going to finish this post off once I returned from the after party to wrap up day one, however things didn’t quite go to plan. I just got back to my hotel room and its 6:30am the following day, but what a night! I guess that’s the effect of Vegas for you! So with my travel buddy Natalie, and Calvin Hollywood we attended the after party as planned and it was great! The food was actually pretty tasty and we were able to get a few free drinks!  Plus Scott Kelby and the gang put on a fun performance with their band that rocked the house. It was really interesting to meet a few more people such as the great Wacoom staff, which by the way sold me on a new Wacom Intuos4 tablet. Met some other great folks including a young budding photographer Jake Peterson (yes, son of legendary wildlife photographer; Moose) and Im really enjoying some of his aviation photography work, check out his blog here. Also had a nice chat with photoshop guru Matt Kloskowski and I met Nick Saglimbeni from Slickforce Studios too.  So after the after party, lets just say things started getting a little bit messy and i’ll leave it at that. Now when is the best time to gamble? When you’re completely intoxicated of course! So a couple of us were off to the Luxor poker tables to have a bit of a gamble. Against all odds and what you might think, it actually turned out to be a good idea! I doubled up on my money!

More from me in the coming days direct from Photoshop World in Las vegas.

B.

So I will touch down in Los Angeles this afternoon at 5:10pm L.A. time, which will be well into Tuesday for you Aussies. I will be keeping my blog up to date and my facebook and twitter will be going ballistic with updates and photos, and I rekon I’ll manage a few videos too.

I have some amazing fun photohoots lined up on my trip which I cant wait for you all to see, including one lucky spot helping alongside the talented Calvin Hollywood who is actually an insturctor at Photoshop World this year. It will be a great experience to meet Calvin and everyone else at the event and I look forward to soaking up as much as I can because there will be a serious amount of talent there. It’s going to be so much fun.

Once I’m done in L.A and Vegas I will be heading back down under to Sydney where I have some more hot photoshoots planned! Then come the end of September, its back to Perth, and back to work.

Stay tuned folks and Happy Shooting.

B.

The lightning photo is one I took in the early years of my photography with a entry level Canon 300D camera and a kit lens. It’s a good picture to show people that you don’t need a fancy camera to produce great images! It’s an amazing picture that I have been dying to use for so long, and here was my chance! The end result looks great and we all love it. Now lets talk about how I did it!

This is my favourite lighting setup that I like to use. It’s a 3 light setup. 2 strobes behind your subject at roughly 45 degree angles, which are the strobes with softboxes attached in this image to the left. Ideally I would like to use strip boxes which is a thin tall softbox, but I don’t own any of those so I used these softboxes. I tried using bare strobes without any modifiers but I found I much preferred the light from the softbox. It seemed to wrap around the subject much better. Then the third light is an overhead beauty dish lighting the subject from the front. The key to this lighting setup if you want to create drama is to setup the beauty dish to only provide fill light. You want those rim lights to be the main lights, and just a tiny bit of fill to bring up the detail in the face. I think I broke my own rule and had a little too much power running through it for this shot, but that’s ok we got what we wanted.

With the help of photoshop these days you don’t need to shoot on a green screen or in a studio of any kind. Extracting people off a background can be fairly easy especially when you light your subject in a certain way such as this one.  For this extraction I used a basic selection of Michael (subject) and then refined it using the refine edge tool. Then I converted the selection into a mask and did any further touch ups by simply painting with a white or black brush. Now that Michael is extracted, I simply placed him onto a Layer above my Lightning layer. I had already applied a gradient of colour to my lightning shot. You can see the bit of red and orange I added to give it a bit more drama. Once it was together, I simply sprinkled some more fairy dust on the photo and tweaked it up a little bit, including desaturating it a bit and bumping up the contrast and ta-daaa! Here is our finished product.

Anyway, another happy customer. Keep up the good work Michael. Check out the insane car audio installations and achievements Michael has made on his website here: www.soundsxplosive.com.au

Happy Shooting,

B.

So here you go, 5 Tip for Shooting Video with your HDDSLR Camera after the jump….

1. KISS – Keep is Steady Stupid! (har-har)

The number one thing every single person that has ever used a video camera for the first time will do, is record 100% pure shakey footage. I’m talking about handheld filming of course. Maybe not everyone but its pretty typical that you will and it is excruciatingly painful to watch. Even as still photographers with years of experience keeping it steady for a picture, you can still produce some terrible video. You absolutely MUST understand how important it is to keep your camera steady. Even when you think you are keeping it steady, you probably aren’t.

It IS possible to hand hold the camera when shooting video but you really need to be concious about what you’re doing. Keep the camera close to your body and have a firm grip on it. I usually hold it right up to my eye using a Zacuto Z-Finder or a Hoodman Loupe for an extra point of contact to stabilise things, just how you would taking a still. Don’t hold the camera out with outstretched arms because you are losing control of the camera out there and its much more unstable. That means you at a much higher risk of getting shakey footage.  If you are going to move the camera at all while recording hand-held, make it very small subtle movements, and do it SLOWLY!  You should know exactly what movements you are going to make before you make them and be absolutely sure to keep that motion steady and keep your subject in the frame. The movement needs to flow and be graceful. This all depends what your shooting of course, but it’s a good tip as a general rule.

2. Keep your feet grounded!

Bit of an extension to the first tip. If you start walking with the camera your footage is going turn into a rugged rollercoaster ride. Sure you can smooth some of it out in post production but if you’re reading this post I’ve got a feeling you haven’t a clue how to do that yet anyway.

If you are lucky enough to have Image Stabilised lenses (or Vibration Reduction for you Nikon folk) then you can try turning it on for hand held footage. It’s not really designed for shooting video and if you play with it you will notice that. It can fight your movements a bit sometimes but depending what you’re filming it can be a good help. If you’re shooting behind the scenes its great. If you’re shooting a film, then you might be looking to turn it off. Experiment, know what it does, and see if it works for you.

If you aren’t wanting to move the camera put it on a tripod, or as they call them in the film world… sticks. There’s a whole new language to learn in moving pictures.

3. Setup for the shot Before you record.

Set the exposure you want, set the white balance, set the focal length, work out your composition, stabilise your stance/position, grab your focus and THEN hit the record button. You don’t want to ever be changing any of those things while recording because I can guarantee you its going to muck up your video. You should be 100% focussed on exactly what you are recording. You don’t want to have to look for a button or be changing settings when recording as its going to introduce camera shake to your video or stuff it up in a number of other ways. You want to be sure you have everything correct before you record anything anyway.

4. Move with your Hips!

Moving the camera correctly and smoothly can be an excellent technique which makes things more interesting for the viewer. When going for the smaller hand-held panning shots, use your arms less and your hips more. This will help keep you much more stable. You can get almost a metre out of a good hip pan with minimal arm movement. Its a basic movement where you shift your weight from one side to the other, while keeping the camera close to your body in the same position. Do a comparison at home by trying to get the same pan by using just your arms and then try it by using your hips. Much better right? If you have a battery pack, an external microphone and a heavy lens on the end then its going to be really hard to pan with your arms stretched out anyway. So keep it close to your body and use your hips. It’s a great tip.

5. Focus Focus Focus

With these new DSLR’s and their incredible shallow depths of field, and the fact its all manual, you really must be on the ball with your focus. There’s nothing worse than an out of focus image. Moving the focus ring around to achieve focus can be a real art, especially if your racking focus between different objects. Its something you will develop a “feel” for with experience.  The lenses for our HDDSLR cameras aren’t designed for video. They are designed to focus as fast as possible so we can shoot stills.  You will notice that it only takes a very small turn of the focus ring to change your focal point dramatically in the scene. This is something you have to be wary of. Just something you need to be aware of. Some people don’t even realise you have to focus manually with these HDDSLR cameras.

6. Use a Tripod

In the filmmaking world they are called sticks, but as a photographer you will know them as tripods. In order to guarentee a stable peice of footage without any camera shake  a tripod is a must.

7. Move The Camera!

Yes I can count, I’m just throwing in one more tip for you.  It’s already been suggested in the points above but I want to emphasise it. Move the camera! With films the techniques they use usually involve camera movement.

When panning, zooming or moving the camera in any other way, use slow, smooth, and deliberate motions. This will make your videos much more watchable.

That’ll do for now. This is pretty simple stuff but I know this will help some people. It’s not always applicable and sometimes you may even want to break the rules on purpose for a certain effect. I’ll go into more detail and I’ll post some technical bits and pieces about these new HDDSLR cameras soon too.

Happy filming!

B.

Ronan’s Escape, a short film by a close friend of mine A.J. Carter  (who is atually responsible for the very handy camera work in our latest glamour sensations video HERE) has just won another huge award over in the U.S. Ronan’s Escape picked up ‘Best International Short Film’ at the 6th annual Hollyshorts Films Festival, in Hollywood California.

Not so long ago the film also picked up the ‘Best Short Film’ award at the 2010 Sedona Film Festival in America too.  Not bad for a Perth film production eh? Yes thats right, lil ol’ Perth has the talent to do great things too.  

A massive congratulations to A.J and his sister Jennifer, Luke and everyone else involved in the film, it was such a deserved win and so good to know all that hard work, blood sweat and tears was all worth it.  I hope the film continues it success and I look forward to seeing the next project!

Check out A.J’s website and blog here: http://www.ajcarterfilms.com/ and of course the website for the award winning short film, http://www.ronansescape.com/

You can see all the red carpet action from the world premiere of the film  which was right here in Perth and thanks to yours truly. See the photos I snapped on the carpet here: http://www.brodiebutler.com/blog/2010/03/shooting-the-red-carpet-for-the-ronans-escape-world-premiere/

Glamour Sensations Perth 2010 – Hotel Photoshoot from Brodie Butler on Vimeo.

Ok folks here’s the second installment of Glamour Sensations Behind The Scenes videos. My blog is turning into a video blog the last few weeks, but I’m not hearing any complaints at all! It’s difficult finding the spare time to cut these videos together but I’ve been doing everything I can lately to get these done for you all to see. I rather like this one and I think you will too!

For those that don’t know Glamour Sensations was a huge glamour photography weekend in Perth held in March 2010. I invited Sydney based photographer Edward Hor to come over and between the two of us, we shot over 15 girls in three separate amazing locations over the space of a weekend. A lot of hard work went into it and we had a lot of fun!

Here are some of the photos I took from the weekend in an earlier blog post: http://www.brodiebutler.com/blog/2010/04/glamour-sensations-perth-2010-the-part-you-really-want-to-see/

Anyway enjoy the video then check out my other videos and subscribe to my vimeo channel here:http://vimeo.com/channels/brodiebutlerphotography

Credits:
Photography: Brodie Butler & Edward Hor
Video by: A.J. Carter (www.ajcarterfilms.com) Shot on 5DMKII
Editing: Brodie Butler
Assistants: Karl Pearce, Jay Wells
Make Up Artists: Priscilla Sue

Click to read on more and find out where you can hire gear in Perth!

It’s Not All About the Gear…
Before I go on I just wanted to make it clear that I beleive you, as  photographers should focus less on the equipment you have and more on taking great pictures. Cameras dont take photographs, people do. I don’t want to appear as one of these arty types so I’ll leave it at that, it’s just that  I know a lot of people go out and waste their money on all the best gear for the wrong reasons. A great quote that used to get around from my competitive golfing days was… “All the gear and no idea”.  It’s only natural though that as you progress with your photography career you are going to want to upgrade your gear and expand your equipment inventory.

So you can’t afford that fancy new camera that you want, you cant afford the location lighting that you really need for the shots you want to take, or you cant afford that telephoto F2.8 lens that you drool over… Well theres a solution. Hire it!

Pro’s Do it!
People I have spoken to were not actually aware they could hire all the gear they could think of, and not break the bank.   Professionals will often hire gear because even for them it’s expensive to own everything, and you don’t always need certain items all the time. In fact on large productions like film sets and the like, equipment like cameras & lighting etc are almost always hired.  I still hire a lot of gear to this day depending on my assignments, and I think as I continue to grow and continue to raise the bar I will always be hiring additional gear and trying out new products.  Hiring is a great way to test-drive the gear out before you buy it, should you actually want to do that.  

Where Can I Hire gear?
In Perth W.A, I hire all my gear from Camera Electronic (www.cameraelectronic.com.au).  They have an entire showroom floor arsenal of camera equipment. They really do have just about everything you could need.  They carry all your major camera brands like Canon, Nikon, Hasselblad, Pentax and they stock more accessory brands than you have probably heard of.  You can hire out anything from as small as memory cards, all the way through bodies, lenses, tripods and up to powerful location lighting kits like Profoto and Elinchrom systems. I’ve made use of just about all of those things. The best part is its very affordable to hire gear, even if it is only for a day or a weekend. Just make sure you make good use of it.  Did I mention they have Hasselblads for hire? They do.  They are also starting to cater for all you HDDSLR video nutts out there like me. They currently stock microphones, Hoodman accessories,  Zacuto rigs, a merlin stedicam and I’m told a lot more coming soon! 

So don’t let me hear you complaining any more that you cant afford the gear you want.  Don’t let the price tag get in the way of you shooting what you want to shoot and the way you want to shoot it. Get out and hire the gear, and save the dollars as fast as you can to buy it!

Happy shooting.

B.

Glamour Sensations Perth 2010 – Yacht Photoshoot from Brodie Butler on Vimeo.

Yes another video! I had some free time last week and I finally got around to spending some time in the editing booth. Here is one of three behind the scenes videos from our Glamour Sensations weekend back in march. You can see some of the photos I took on a previous blog post here: http://www.brodiebutler.com/blog/2010/04/glamour-sensations-perth-2010-the-part-you-really-want-to-see/

This is the weekend that I invited Sydney Photographer Edward Hor (.com) to come over and shoot with me, and we managed to sign up about 15+ girls to join us. What an intense weekend! Anyway enjoy the video then check out my other videos and subscribe to my vimeo channel here: http://vimeo.com/channels/brodiebutlerphotography

Credits:
Photography: Brodie Butler & Edward Hor
Video by: A.J. Carter (www.ajcarterfilms.com) Shot on 5DMKII
Editing: Brodie Butler
Assistants: Karl Pearce, Jay Wells
Make Up Artists: Megan Clarke, Kierina Gaston
Sara for organising the yacht!

Brodie Butler BTS: Twin Turbo VE Commodore feat. Melissa Byrne from Brodie Butler on Vimeo.

Here’s the latest behind the scenes video from yours truly, featuring Melissa Byrne the AutoX Bikini Competition Winner complimenting Greg Brown’s Twin Turbo VE GTS – the first VE in Australia to run a 9-second pass!

This video just shows a little sneak peek behind the scenes at our photoshoot and shows off a few of images so check it out!  It’s a good little video to watch if your a photographer trying to learn, and its certainly a good eye-candy video!

The video was shot on a Canon 7D and we had the Rode Videomic attached if I remember correctly. Then I cut the video in Final Cut Pro.

Thanks to:
Karl Pearce for taking the video.
Jay Wells for his assistance on the day.
Melissa Byrne for being our lovely model.

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