Well, it’s day week 2 of working from home. It’s tough to shoot stuff now since most of my job is filming interviews, my work has come to a screeching halt. So in an effort to keep creating, I have decided to start working on a skill set that I have been interested in for a while, flash product photography. Now I didn’t go an invest lots of money in strobes, actually, I go a used Canon Speedlight and an Amazon Basics Speedlight. Speedlights are much cheaper and I think a little bit easier to use.

One of the coolest things about flash photography is that you can totally cut out all the ambient light with a flash and really slow F-Stop, like f.16-f.22, essentially turning the background black. Which is why you can’t see the side of my house behind the knife, don’t believe me here is the setup.

So as you can see, nothing fancy here, just 1 flash and Impact strip box. I’m using a Canon Eos R, which is my new favorite camera. The Eos R is not great for everything… trying to get a race car going around a track is absolutely pointless, but I digress. Since this knife isn’t moving. the Eos R works great. Between the camera and the cheap flash, I was able to get this raw image

Which I thought was a pretty good starting point. Now, this knife is nothing special, it’s my everyday carry (EDC). Which is why it’s scratched all to crap, this knife has been through a lot, I’ve been carrying it for at least a few years now. Typically it isn’t the only knife I carry, but again I digress. For the first try at it, I feel this is a good starting point. I knew it would have some texture and character so I wanted to see how that would translate, plus I knew I had this woodblock that would work perfectly for this.

I have many friends who make things and own a small or side business. I should have plenty of victims people who would love to get some good product shots of their wares. So and honestly, if I can help out some friends in the crazy time, win for me.

Thanks for joining me on the journey, hopefully, I’ll get to do some more stuff like this. The end game is to do some bottles, which since they are glass are a good deal tougher, and require a lot more work in post.

The post Flash Photography first appeared on FxN Productions.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that the show was God Friended Me. If you are reading this blog you know church and my faith are a big part of my life. So when it was explained to me what the show was about, I was even more thrilled. A show that is has a basis in faith on network television, how could I not want to be part of that! Plus I just finished watching it … and I gotta say it’s GOOD, nah, it was AWESOME! In this day in age I think it’s a show that NEEDS to be on network TV.

Needless to say my contribution was tiny, but I was really thrilled to be even a small part of it.

The post Career Highlight! first appeared on FxN Productions.

I was tempted to steal the title from one of the radio ads for my new company; “New Year, New Career.” However, it’s not really a career change for me. I have given up my freelance freedom for a big boy job, but I’m still doing creative services and focusing on video. I am now working at an I.T. trade school called MyComputerCareer, in the marketing department.

During the first week at my new job I got pushed out of my creative services safe space into doing a magazine cover. While I really enjoy photography and I like to think I have a good eye and some skill, you will notice my portfolio doesn’t feature any portraits… there is a reason for that. I don’t like doing portraits, I’m not particularly good at them. Getting people posed right so that there aren’t unflattering issues, it’s tough, it’s easy to make un-correctable mistakes, and I know I don’t succeed in that space.

When I got told what I would be doing, my response was “I don’t really do portraits.” I was told “You do today.” Fortunately, I am supported by a great team who was extremely patient with me and wildly helpful while I figured out how I was going to get his done.

Conceptually we knew what we wanted the picture to look like, but we were less sure how we wanted our talent to look. As a result we took lots of pictures so we would have lots of options. Big shout out to Grant Gibson, our talent, who went through all the wardrobe changes. In the end we got some great photos, but I didn’t have time to get them turned around so we sent them over to Jim Kumorek at Spreading Flames Media to do the final touch work on the cover. He did great job as you can see from the cover photo.

A few days later I was asked if we had enough photos to do a different version, we did. I ended up having to take a crack a very similar project to Jim’s for the back cover.

I know the guys at  RecruitMilitary and Search & Employ, also worked some of their magic on the images, but the final results of that team effort are really good.

As of today I have been at the job a little over 90 days. I am fortunate to be working with an amazing team in the marketing department, they are just a great group and really encouraging. Here’s a photo from a few days later, just to prove I’m still working in my skillset.

Don’t be surprised if my bog shifts gears a little bit from live production video to post production video. In my experience very few people are really dedicated to one or the other, usually if you are in video you get to do both.

The post New Year New Job first appeared on FxN Productions.

WFX Reach is next week

The post WFX Reach 2017 first appeared on FxN Productions.

Of course I did the video work for the campaign, because it’s something I believe in, I feel certain it’s going to prevent injuries and may very well save lives. So check it out and back the project.

The post Dibs first appeared on FxN Productions.

I am very proud of my boys, not just for this, but for the young men I believe they are growing into… in spite of my best efforts as a parent to ruin them. I love them both very much.

The post Proud Father Moments II first appeared on FxN Productions.

Now this product is AMAZINGLY easy to use. Download the app. Get the app communicating with the device itself, this takes a little trial and error. Program the device and you are off. If you watch the tutorials on their site it’s pretty easy to figure out. Note, they aren’t joking about having the volume up all the way… it really doesn’t work if you don’t. From there the Radian; moves, fires, repeats. The result is a silky smooth pan all they way through your time lapse.

So for this video I used a Canon 7D, with my new favorite wide lens the Tokina 11-16mm 2.8. This lens is great for wide angle time lapse and astral photography. I programed the Radian to rotate 110 degrees and take photos every 4 seconds. Here is the semi-raw result. I say semi-raw because I did pan and scan the last shot to remove the gear we stashed to the side that crept into the frame.

Bev’s from Mark Hanna on Vimeo.

Again special thanks to: RockerDown Studios for the loan of the gear, Alchmey Video for bringing me in on the project, and Bev’s Fine Arts for being great a subject for the day.

The post Product Review: Alpine Labs Radian first appeared on FxN Productions.

The post Proud Father Moments first appeared on FxN Productions.

The reason I have been able to do anything video related professionally is I know how to get video work done, even if I sometimes I don’t really know what I am doing. So if you are like me and only have a dots worth of knowledge about what you are doing, how do you get a circle? My answer, cheat! I went to a military college for the first year and half I was in college, and my company had the unofficial motto of “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying” which was usually followed by “if you get caught cheating, you ain’t trying hard enough.”  I always laughed at that saying until I started working in tech ministry, then I discovered the truth to it. It’s actually gotten to the point I always make my younger volunteers and interns repeat to me “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying”. All too often in the tech ministry we are encouraged to cheat to get the result we want. I think it helps that most tech guys are outside the box thinkers so once they get a thought they worry it like a dog with a bone.

At this point you might be asking yourself, how are you cheating? Well perfect example, at the church I used to work at they use the North Point model for video display at the multi-sites. Which means they are playing back 2 video feeds at the same time, which is way tougher then one would think. This is done by playing the videos into 3D recorder which thinks it’s getting red/blue video, but what it’s really getting are 2 different videos. Cheating. Pretty much any outside the box thinking or application I consider cheating.

Since rarely do we have the budget, training, or time to do things the “right” way most of the time we have to make things up as we go. Often times I have found myself discovering a work around to get something done, and ended up doing it in a way that no one ever intended it to be used.  That was one of the more exciting things about NAB this year, everyone jumped on the 4K bandwagon. Honestly I don’t think it’s really a big deal yet, maybe it’s ok for post produced work, but I don’t think it’s ready for mainstream live production yet. However, what excites me about 4k is the opportunity you have to cheat with it. How? Well you have to think about 4k in it’s component parts, not as the sum of the whole. Traditionally the way you achieve 4k is by taking 4, 1080p video signals and putting them to gether edge to edge like this:

Now I personally thing 4k is still years away from being used in prime time as far as live productions, but there are some potential applications that make me excited about the fact that everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. The first really good application I see for 4K is multi-camera environment recording isolation or isos. If you have a 4 cam IMAG environment being able to send all 4 cams to one recorder which will record them all synced is pretty cool. Especially if you are having to make a broadcast edit in post, having all the potential footage synced ready to use is huge.

Another cool application is expanding the current North Point model of multi-site. Imagine being able to send a campus 4 synced pieces of info; a tight shot with notes, a wide shot for the stage, and discrete note feed for campuses that need a local copy of notes to distribute to sources the other campuses don’t have, and a broadcast mix for overflow and second room distribution so your axillary spaces don’t get the boring IMAG feed. Now imagine that all in one package, on a single drive of some type or just being pulled down right off the internet that way. It’s VERY cool way of thinking about it, the problem is while most church tech people can see that potential immediately many manufactures can’t see it at all. I have talked to engineers at several large video manufacturing companies (you would know them if I said them) about this and always I get the same response “you can’t do that.” Which always leads to me responding “no YOU can’t do that, but if you would just think about it you would realize yes you can.” The hang up on the 4k idea in particular is what does the 4k image look like? Well it looks like 4 TV slammed together all on different channels. Which always make the manufacturers go “no one would use that.” Which is correct no one would use the entire 4k image, you don’t want them to, you want them to use the sum of the parts, because in this case they really are greater then the whole.  However, you have to be willing to cheat.

photo credit: Upupa4me via photopin cc

The post If you ain’t cheating… first appeared on FxN Productions.

I am not going to appolgize for it because this is MY egocast blog. As many of you know I “write” for Church Production Magazine. I put “write” in quotes there because if you are reading my blog you know I don’t know how to spell, or fix run on sentences, the editors over at CPM do an amazing job. I have two product reviews in this months issue of Church Production Magazine; the Sound Devices Pix 270i and the Roland VR-50HD. Both are really cool products and were fun to review. While flipping through this months magazine to see what else was in it, which of my friends got articles in, what new products were out ect…  I stumbled on an ad. Typically I skip right over these, but this one grabbed my attention and it took me a few seconds to realize why I had stopped. First, it occurred to me that this was an ad for a product I both reviewed and purchased, Clear-Com Tempest wireless intercom and the CC300 headset. Then it hit me, I was in the picture portion of the ad. Sadly I was way more excited about that, then the articles I got published. Yes, yes I know I am a terrible person. I would like to give a shout out to my good friend Josh Hancock who took this picture as you can see in the upper right hand corner.

The post Indulging My Ego first appeared on FxN Productions.