Wow! It’s been an absolutely crazy ride these last few months. We’ve been swamped like never before, but I want to get back into the habit of sharing some of the things I’ve learned in my work, here on this blog. We’ll start with something simple.

Gear does not make a good photograph or movie, but the right tool for the job makes it a heck of a lot easier. I started using Think Tank products 18 months ago and love the design, quality and workmanship of these bags. We photoraphers/cinematographers carry tons of stuff with us to a shoot and it all needs to live somewhere. Hint: If everything has it’s specific place, when you’re packing up to leave a shoot you’ll notice what’s missing, just by having an empty spot in your bag.

“Facebook is a waste of time. I don’t need to know what you had for lunch today” is a common response that I hear when I speak with people about why I am involved in social media – hmmm, what did I have for lunch today … but back to the point of this post: I wanted to share with you how I got booked to shoot a video shoot from my facebook post in less than an hour.

I have been getting into shooting video over the last few months – you can check out some of my films on vimeo – and I have been seeing that there is a lot to learn from a photographers perspective. I purchased my first HDDSLR 3 months ago and got booked on my first paid video production last week, so I posted a blurb about editing this shoot on my facebook page.

I tagged my wife (the beautiful model in the photo) and left it at that. I also did not design the post to be anything special my comment on facebook merely read: “Spend most of the day editing a commercial movie project, while learning Adobe Premiere, incidentally the client was very happy with the rough cut :)”

That was late Thursday night (around 10:30 pm), I was ready to call it a night, take the dog for a walk and go to sleep. On that walk I get a comment on my facebook post – 24 minutes after uploading the screen shot – from one of my photography clients. I answered the post and that exchange ended with: “Hey….I got a movie project we should talk about ; )” at 11:23 pm, 43 minutes after my original facebook post. I called the next morning and we are looking at producing a series of half a dozen short movie clips for this client in May.

“So an existing client contacts you to shoot for him” you say, “big deal.” – but wait this is where the facebook story really starts getting interesting. A few months ago, my wife (remember the lovely lady from my video shoot :) sees a post on facebook from one of her friends, Katja, who had posted a few images of a recent job photographed for some yacht building company on location in the Bahamas – beautiful photographs by the way – anyway my wife sends a facebook friends request to the brand manager of this company, who accepts based on their mutual friend, the model Katja, with me so far? Good. Turns out that the brand manager is friends with one of my good friend Hugo, whom I have known since college, he is also one of my wife’s facebook friends – she knows him through me and Hugo showed up a mutual friend when my wife’s friend request got accepted by the brand manager. So I friend the brand manager as well and based on our mutual friend he accepts my friends request.

The beauty of facebook in this instance, is that a couple of total strangers in real life, get connected based on relationships that we all had with friends of each other:

Yes you are right, facebook does not replace old fashioned relationships. It is not a magical machine that provides work out of the blue, but in this instance it showed me a relationship that I had through an old college buddy, who is best friends with a brand manager, who hired a model that is friends with my wife.

And that’s how you get hired on facebook in 43 minutes.

I’ve been writing about an exciting project that I had the privilege of being a part or: a 5 day behind the scenes time-lapse and video shoot of the set up of Meridian Yacht’s ‘booth’ at the Miami International Boat Show 2011.

You’ve bee reading about all the planning that goes into a commercial time lapse project and I have also broken down how to pack for a multi-day photography assignment like this. I will post about the actual photography of this job, which is now been completed as well as how to put the whole project together, but in the mean time enjoy a short video trailer:

2. Pack it

Packing for the shoot

An overview

Now you know where you’re shooting from. You know how many shots your taken. You got the power and storage issues figured out. It’s time to pack. If you’re shooting a time-lapse sequence for fun, this will seem a little over the top just remember we’re talking about a commercial professional application. Redundancy is the name of the game, although I want to be able to walk into my time-lapse set up in one trip.

Everything I needed for this project fits on this one cart. I like this specific one, since it can double as a shooting table, once it’s unloaded.  I’ll go through each bag in detail with everything that’s in it, but here is the overview: slung over the back of the cart (on my back when I go to location) is my grip pack: extension cords, data cables, clamps, rigging gear, some snacks, coffee mug, velvet and black fabric – more on those later – gaffers tape, ect. They are packed in a old computer back pack, just in case I want to bring a computer to shoot the ‘B’ camera tethered as well. On the very bottom is my computer case that holds computer, hard drives, card reader, data cable, power supplies, … on top of that is my camera bag that holds cameras, lenses, CF cards, video cage, filters, moregrip gear, batteries, credentials, business cards, … behind that is my tripod (Bogen 3058 with a Gitzo Ballhead 1576) for the time-lapse ‘A’ camera and my sticks for the video work (Manfrotto 547 with 701 HDV fluid head).

The dolly is one I picked up at Home Depot a while ago, I like it because it folds into a table once you got all your gear off the dolly:

The camera bag

Over the course of many years of professional photography you accumulate a bunch of little tools, tricks and hacks that end up living in your camera bag. I took a bunch of them out for this assignment, like radio slaves, flash meter, sync cords, … As you’ll see there is a lot of gear that comes on a shoot with me, so I love my camera bag (ThinkTank AirportInternational 2.0). It’s a rolling case that fits on an international flight as hand luggage at least what dimensions are concerned. Now if someone could make it fit the weight restrictions too … but that’s another story. This case has no issues rolling, even if it’s fully loaded. It also features a lock on the case and a cable lock to secure the case to a stationary object.

Here is the case open and packed. Remember that there is a second 5D that lives here, but it’s being used to photograph the images for this blog post.

Let’s go through some of the gear that came with me. Much of this is personal preference, this is my kit, use this example to build your own.

Cameras:

Two Canon 5D Mk II’s. Awesome video camera and still camera. We shot one for the stills in the time lapses and one for all the ‘B’ roll – video and time-lapse.

I used my Canon 5D to shoot some stills and behind the scenes photos. This particular job had 3 cameras going.

Extra batteries and chargers. 8 camera batteries, 3 chargers.

Canon on camera speed light – never left the bag. That was there just in case I needed it for some of the still images.

Lenses:

Canon 24-70 mm 2.8 L. Most of the video was shot on this lens as well as all the ‘B’ roll time-lapse.

Canon 24-105 mm 4.0 L. The lens for the ‘A’ camera’s time-lapse. Focus and zoom got taped once we got the camera set.

Canon 100 mm 2.8 macro. I love this lens, but it never came out of the bag.

Canon 70-200 mm 4.0 L. Love the Image Stabilisation on this lens for shooting video.

Mamiya 500 mm 8.0 mirror lens. Just a fun lens to have. It’s big and heavy.

Mamiya 70 mm 2.8. Never left the bag. The Mamiya lenses are attached with a mechanical adapter.

Filters:

Lee ND 3 gradated filter

Circular polarizing filter

LightCraft Fader – essential for shooting video out doors. Unless you want no shallow depth of field – but then why are you shooting a MkII?

Canon lens hoods and Lee compendium. Use them. ‘nough said.

Grip:

Manfrotto Magic arm with Super Clamp and camera plattform. If you hang your camera 40 feet over a concrete floor, you want to be sure that your support does not fail. So are you really gonna trust that $10.- deal you got on Ebay? The arm preformed flawlessly. It articulates to where you want it and then locks down solidly with one big knob.

The white fabric next to the lens shades is a rain coat for the camera and lens – it lives in my bag and only comes out when it needs to protect the camera. The black bag next to it is the raincoat for the Camera Bag that comes with the rolling case (thank you ThinkTank!).

Flashlight. Grey balance card. White balance card. Business cards. Press Pass. Credentials for all access at show.

Video:

Zacuto Z-finder. You’ll want one to pull focus. Get the anti-fog version – or upgrade to it. You’ll need it.

Follow Focus. Essential for smooth focus pulls. More an art than a science. Don’t forget the wet erase marker for marking the points your pulling to and from.

Easom Cage. Protects the camera and follow focus assembly, allows you to attach audio recorders, monitors, ect. to the rig. The other great design detail is that the camera plattform and the tripod plate move independently from each other so you can balance the camera on sticks for pans and tilts.

The computer case

I love these cases – I have a few of them. This one (Hardigg’s storm case) is like a armored briefcase for your laptop. I also have a shock mounted rack case for the bigger shoots, but again – that’s another story …

These guys are basically bomb proof – well at least water proof and crush proof they do an awesome job protecting your fragile electronics. I like these because of their unique latch design – they don’t bust your knuckles like other cases. Like the photo bag, there are a lot of little details in the case that get added over the years.

Computer:

Mac Book Pro with a 2.53 MhZ processor, 4 GB of RAM and a fast 320 GB harddrive.

We also used a Mac Book Air as the computer that the ‘A’ camera was tethered to.

Harddrives:

1.5TB drive in a Wiebetech enclosure. These enclosures rock. I have the single one that I travel with and then dual and quads at the office. You can slide the actual HD’s out of the enclosures. They’re interchangeable and pretty cool. Great Product.

2 750GB bus powered HD’s

Power supplies, lock, CF card reader, another set of USB data connections for the camera, firewire cables, eSATA card and cables.

The grip pack

You can go over board packing for the unknown – that’s why scouting pays off – good scouting that is. Where o you have power? Is it enough power? Who is in charge of the location that you’re in? Who can override their decision? How do you secure your gear or do you want to sit next to it for 10 hours a day; other than being boring that means you won’t be able to do anything else.

Back to packing – my grip/rigging bag is an old computer laptop back pack (Targus Computer back pack). I specifically chose this bag for this assignment, because I had to shoot up in the catwalks 40′ above the ground, with the only access being a small spiral stair case. That means no cases, no tripods and no carts up there. I need to be totally mobile – so camera in hand and grip/rigging gear on back – and I can slip the computer into this case, if I had to.

Since we are shooting a long day we need to get power to the computer that’s running the time-lapse camera. A few hundred feet of extension cords do the trick, along with some surge protector strips – since we are charging camera batteries, running lap tops, ect.

Rigging gear, i.E. webbing, carabiners, ratchets, clamps, … for securing the camera when it gets suspended from the catwalks and boat railings. Some coffee (gotta have coffee – no that’s not a canon lens – it’s a canon coffee mug :) thanks Trevor).

The black cloth in the foreground is a 3′x3′ piece of velvet. When I scouted the location, I saw that we were going to shoot through the glass of the restaurant we were shooting from and that we needed to eliminate the reflections for the time-lapse. Gaffer tape this piece to the window, lens goes through a hole in the center – secured by a rubber band. No more reflections. Make sure that the fabric does not vignette in your lens.

The other black fabric is a large piece of canvas to put down on the super dirty catwalks (that no one has EVER cleaned), so I can lie down and place equipment on a clean surface.

Now that you’ve finished planning and packing it’s time to photograph your time-lapse project.

Go on reading how to photograph a commercial time-lapse project on Friday.

I just finished shooting a four day time-lapse project at the Miami Boat Show for one of my new clients Meridian Yachts. Our goal was to show the 3 day set up process, which no one visiting the boat show gets to see. It’s fascinating to watch the Miami Beach Convention Center transform from an empty cavernous warehouse to the biggest boat show in the States. In my research I have found numerous video tutorials, examples, web posts, … on time-lapse projects; but I have not found one that speaks about the process of preparing to shoot one in detail. This blog post will talk about how I planned, produced and photographed a commercial time lapse and how I put it all together after all the pieces were been shot.

1. Plan it

Scouting the location

I’m gonna assume that you already have a project in mind. So the first thing I do is to scout the location that I will be shooting in. What is the subject that you’re going to be shooting? Where will it be? Are there vantage points that will become obstructed in the course of your time-lapse? Is your location accesible? Do you need to get to the camera to change batteries, cards, … Is there a way to get around power and storage requirements? Is access restricted? Who will guard the equipment for the duration of the time-lapse (in our case it was 4 days). Shoot photographs and look at your field of view.

Click for a larger view

Now you’re ready to have an intelligent discussion with your client. Why have you picked the location that you’ve selected? Remember once you start shooting, you can not change your location or you’ll ruin the time-lapse, so be careful where you set up. In our case there where 3 possible locations:

• a business center that was too far away to get a good angle on the clients booth

• a restaurant that was not going to be in use during the time of set up, but was directly behind the booth

• the cat walk directly above the booth

But I still checked all 3 possible locations to make sure that I was picking the correct one. The restaurant was going to give us power and a place to keep our set up overnight, without the risk of someone disturbing our set-up. The client had coordinated with the show’s organizers to get me access in these restricted areas. Get to know the person who is in charge of security and the access to the off limits portions of the building and become their friend. They will be invaluable during the project. (Special thanks to Venus from the boat show, by the way who was never to busy to get me security, engineering, access, … she made this project run smooth. You rock!)

Do the math

You’re gonna have to figure out how long the finished piece is going to be. What frame rate will in play at? In our case it’s between 2 1/2 min to 5 min. I suggested shooting enough photographs to run at 60 fps. [5 min * 60 sec * 60 fps = 18,000 images].

Now take a look at how long your event it going to be. In our case 4 days. The first day will be 10 hours, the second and the third will be 8 hours and the last one is 4 hours. [10+8+8+4 = 30 hours * 60 min = 1800 min * 60 sec = 108,000 sec].

No all that’s left is to divide the number of seconds in your event by the number of images needed in your project and you’ll know how many seconds you have in between shots. 108,000 / 18,000 = 6.

Double check your math, for real.

Now for the important part: TEST YOUR CAMERAS SHOOTING SPEED! How large of a file writes to what speed of card in what length of time. You don’t want the buffer to fill up and mess up your time-lapse project. In our case we’re shooting sRAW (~10 MB) tethered to the computer using a software to fire the shutter, more about all that later; but it turns out that the speed from one frame to the next is 7 sec for that set up. Which is fine, since we are shooting for a 2 1/2 – 5 min project that will have B-roll to intercut with the time-lapse. But you want to know that before you begin shooting. If you’re shooting to a card, you’ll want to figure out how many images can be stored on the card before it is full and messes up your time-lapse. What about power? Did you think of that? How long can the camera run on one battery or two batteries in a vertical grip or do you have a power adapter for your camera?

How much power do you need?

One battery is going to interrupt your time-lapse. You’ll have to stop shooting to replace the battery. A power adapter is great to have, but we couldn’t get one in time. The vertical grip doubles your battery life, but when you open the door to switch batteries, that shuts off the power too, however thanks to a little research on google and melandercl on the timescapes.org forum there is a hack on how to keep the door open and the power on. Read the post for all the details, but the short version is open the battery door, find the little button on the top left side of the battery grip that gets engaged by the door, push that (the cap of a ball point pen works perfectly) and turn on your camera. Voilá! Camera is powered up with the open door. Now write “DO NOT CLOSE” on a piece of tape and stick it on the inside of the open battery door, I’m just sayin’ old habits die hard. Thanks to the battery door hack (thank you melandercl!) we have unlimited power, because the third battery in the charger is charged much faster than the two batteries in the grip will run out of power. Have a system in place to know which is the last battery you swapped out (right in the morning, left in the afternoon) or what ever works for you.

Power savings

Even with the battery solution we want to limit the amount of power the camera draws. Here are some settings you can change to prolong the battery life:

• Turn Live View off. Although it’s cool to watch each shot as it comes in – nothing drains the battery more than having the LCD screen on for 4 days. Just don’t turn Live View on. If you’re software (like the one I used) defaults to Live View on – disable it.

• Turn Image Review off. You’re not going to be watching the camera screen, so why have it fire up every 7 seconds to display an image. You can do this in the first camera screen of the menu under review time. Turn it to ‘OFF’.

• Turn the meter off – unless your shooting in AV mode (more about that later as well). If your on Manual exposure – the light in the scene I was shooting did not change, so why would you want to meter something that you know. The closest you’ll get to this is in the ‘Live View/Movie func. set.’ in the second wrench window of the menu. Inside there you’ll find ‘Metering Timer’ – set it to 4 sec. the shortest time available. If you don’t hit the shutter button, the meter should stay off anyway.

Will you run out of storage?

Once you have the amount frames figured out, you can extrapolate your power and storage requirements. How much fits on your storage medium (in our case a 1 GB external USB 2.0 drive) more than enough. But know how many hours it will take the camera to fill up your card, if you’re shooting to one. In our case it would have taken almost a week of shooting 24 hours to fill up the drive. We did shoot to two separate drives Day One to drive One, Day two to drive Two, Day Three to drive One and Day four to drive Two. That way you can back up the previous day to a separate hard drive that lives somewhere else – in our case that was a 1.5 TB HD.

Go on reading how to pack for a commercial time-lapse project on Wednesday.

How many times a day do you need to show a client a file, concept, video, photo, …? If you’re anything like me, it’s all the time. Many of our files are pretty big or proprietary and confidential, so it’s hard to send them through email or over a social network like facebook (I mean do you really want to be discussing the terms of an upcoming shoot on your fb wall?)

Would it not be great to have one place that is like facebook, just secure? A social network for business that is more personal than LinkedIn? A timeline like Twitter that shows your whole team what is happening in your business? A place were you can work together with your vendors, clients and crew to produce, review, share and comment on the projects that you are working on?

Find out how you can do all this for free after the jump.
If you read my blog, you know that I use SalesForce for my customer relationship management and that it is tied into my website. They introduced a “facebook for business” about a year ago, where you could do just that inside your SalesForce account, which is great for a company that has many people using this CRM, but does not do much good if your by yourself.

All that changed on Sunday though when SalesForce opened Chatter up to everyone. (You may have seen their ads in the Superbowl) – here is a quick video that gives you a Chatter overview.

Let me give you an example of how Chatter works in practice. I shot a video for one of my clients last week and needed to get the rough cut approved. Usually I would upload a small version to YouSendIt or to DropBox, wait for the client to download it and sometime get a call or an email about what they though about the project. However today I uploaded the video to Chatter, invited my client to Chatter and placed the video in a private group that only they and I can access – and SalesForce knows how to do security, believe me. So I can upload proprietary information to the cloud, for them to review and to comment on – directly in Chatter! (Which shows up in my Chatter feed – similar to your facebook wall or twitter timeline.)

Pretty cool stuff. You can check Chatter out for yourself – it’s free and it’s pretty cool.

Eeny meeny miny mo …

If you have not purchased your DSLR yet, this Emmy winning set of Webisodes is must watching. Zacuto, a film making accessories manufacturer, put together a test a few months back, in which they pit DSRL’s against 35mm motion picture film, which was screened in front of film industry professionals. The results may surprise you.

Webisode 1 tests the latitude of DSLR cameras and film, webisode 2 looks at ability to shoot in low light due to the increased sensitivity of DSLR’s and the final webisode 3 looks at the ability to have DSLR’s used with green screens and looks at resolution and color. You’ll need some time each episode is about half an hour long, but it’s worth every minute of it. It’s an objective test between DSLR’s and movie film cameras. In addition to this you get the feedback of industry professionals.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

So now that you know which camera to buy (right), you gotta figure out how to move this – for us photographers, movement (and sound) are new challenges that we need to wrap our heads around, since my still photo does not move at all. I stumbled across Phil Holland video, in which he describes his DSLR rig. He does a nice job explaining why and how he uses the different components of this rig.

This is a great place to start learning about some of the things you’ll need want to have, when getting into video on your DSLR.

Can you hear me now?

Sound is the other dimension that I don’t think about. I was shooting for Mars a few weeks ago and the Creative Director that was on location with me stopped the shoot, when a plane went over head – something that did not even phase me – nor did it have to, since we were shooting stills. However in cinematography this becomes a major issue since at least half the content (speech and music are communicated non-visually). But the sound recording features on the DSLR’s are not really up to par with what you need to capture that ‘Hollywood sound’.

So how do you record sound on you DSRL? Philip Bloom, one of the guys that was in the Zacuto shootout film, sounds off about this problem in his blogpost “How to record sound with the Canon 5dmk2 and a great plug in for Final Cut for auto synching“.

If you’d like to read a little more detailed review of external recorders that can be used with DSLR’s take a look at Jon Fairhurst’s series of video post on the Canon 5D tips blog. He reviews 4 different external recorders for your DSLR.

This post is a work in progress, I will continue to post articles, webisodes, blog posts, … that I find helpful in making decisions on what equipment to choose to create motion pictures.

How do I grow as a photographer? What do I do to push myself to create better work? My book looks like it did two years ago. While the images have changed the photography has stayed the same. I just finished watching another one of Chase Jarvis’ CJLive videos, where Chase and his guest speak about the need to constantly be creating work, on the one hand pushing the envelope while on assignment and on the other hand creating personal work when your not photographing for clients.

Traceur Nhan Du leaps from the wall onto a ledge.

However, I always seem to come up with a lame excuse for not trying something new: “I’m too busy, shooting.” “I’m not busy enough, so I need to … work on the website, call up that new client, learn that new technique, …” So as my 2010 new years resolution – ok so I’m a little behind in those  - I’ve decided that I just gotta take the leap, jump off that wall. I have a few concepts in mind that I want to shoot, that I need to create, that I have to capture. Some piggy back on current clients assignment work (like the floral wholesaler, that I will shoot flower bouquets for – that I want to use to photograph some editorial bridal photographs) and some that will be completely my own.

Nhan Du walks around the corner.

I photographed one of those today: Nhan, a traceur, moving around some walls and corners as he practices the art of parkour for fun. Just as he has to commit to the jump all the way to reach his goal – in his case the wall on the opposite side – I must do the same. I must commit to stretch my photographic muscle, so to speak, otherwise my book next year, will look like it did 2 years ago.

We spend a lot of thought and time on advertising, promoting, website design, SEO, CRM, email marketing, … to be on top of mind of our potential client at ‘the moment of relevance‘, as Google calls it. So now you’re on the phone with him – what do you talk about? Obviously there’s the information you need about the production of the shoot, how many images, how they’ll be used, … but all photographers should be doning this. So what sets you apart? What makes you the guy or girl that this potential client is going to hire?

I mean apart from the obvious: that your work is first rate and that you can deliver and that your style communicates what the client wants to images to say (you know the 1,000 word bit). I had a phone call today with a new client that drove this point home for me (hence this post).

He had found me online, liked my work, contacted me through my website and was captured in my CRM tie-in, got an immediate email response from my website (read more about how automation on my website lets me do all this). So through the captured phone number and email address I contacted him back to discuss this job.

The conversation ended up turning to another photographer that he had spoken about this project with. “I like the way you are thinking about my product, the other guy was only interested in talking about who he had photographed for in the past.”

Our conversation had moved from the details of the current shoot (how many images, what background, usage, …) to the next shoot – thinking through how this product needs to be displayed in an editorial fashion to explain and show case how it is to be used.

That’s what made the difference. I was thinking about how to make his product look good, how to help him, how to drive more sales from his website to his pocketbook; instead of making me look great (some of my clients are national brands: Mars, Tyco, L’Oreal, Frontgate, Boston Proper, …), but I was more interested in offering him a solution to his company than making me look good.

Do you think he will spend more money on my shoot than on my competitors? Do you think I will be shooting for him for the second editorial shoot? Does he trust that I will deliver images that make his product look great? You betcha!

I will be photographing for him next week, because I took the time to listen to what he wanted and needed, I offered suggestions of photos and solutions that he had not thought about, and I want him to succeed in his new venture. Why? I want to grow with my clients, so that they will hire me for all of their upcoming work. And recommend me to their friends and business associates, because word-of-mouth advertising for my photography is far better than any email blast.

(I just read an article “Make People Love You Madly: The No-Fail Framework for Marketing Yourself” by Colleen Wainright on the Adbase blog.)

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about my involvement in the photographic community in Miami. I am an active member in ASMP, and I attend events that are held in South Florida, but I asked myself: “What do I give back to the photographic community?” This introspective was caused by reading Chase Jarvis’ blog, who challenges photographers to share their knowledge of what goes on inside the ‘black box’ of photography with the world. In a recent panel discussion at Photo Plus Expo, Chase had a group of his photographer and blogger friends together in a pannel.

One of the members of the pannel in the end of this video is Vincent Laforet, who’s blog I’ve been reading for the past few days, where Vincent is interviewed by Marc Silber. Long story short Marc had this idea a few days ago about something he calls “Advance your Photography”.

Since I am looking for a way get involved in the local photography community in South Florida and Marc was looking for pros that were willing to launch the AYP (Advance your Photography) Club pilot with him, this seemed like a great match.

We will be launching the Miami Chapter of the AYP club soon and we’ve put up a facebook community page to encourage people to keep in touch with us on this opportunity. If you know someone, who is a photographer (amateur or pro) that want’s to learn from Marc’s library of interviews with the best photographers in the world, as well as have a commercial photographer critique their photography, with the intent of advancing their craft – please share this with them. I’m looking forward to our first meeting …

Miami AYP club

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