It lives!! Where’s my wallet??

Although it is not the Scarlet FF35 I personally would like to get my hands on, there’s no doubt that this shot of a WORKING Red Scarlet 2/3″ is a positive step forward – yes, yes, I know that I keep harping on about these cameras (and how slow their release has been), but they are seriously sweet tech!!

No point really reaching for my wallet though, they’re all too expensive for my shooting budget (which has a lot of zeros in it – starting with 0!!) – if the SLR-like EPIC-X is anything to go by, $US 28,000 for a camera body is not exactly attractively priced unless you want to shoot stills and high frame-rate video – otherwise, you’d buy a point-and-shoot ‘blad and have change left over!!

*sigh* Perhaps doing all my shoots with an iPhone is the way forward, all the pro’s are doing it!!

Light test meets fashion and fine art

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Last months weekend of lighting tests (which produced the latest series with Jess) also resulted in an EXTREMELY productive session with Kaye, someone I’d not worked with before but who came with high recommendations from friends in South Australia!!

Pinhole awesome

There’s something seriously cool about pinhole photography – it takes skills to set up, but also has quite a large unknown element to it, since the results really aren’t predictable, particularly on film! And it gets even more random for the extremely long exposures being attempted.

Who needs pro gear anyway?

You might recall my post last month when I noted that Lee Morris’ fashion shoot with an iPhone 3Gs effectively rendered my excuses about inadequate gear as completely pointless!! Turns out it gets worse – apparently I could also be shooting awesome VIDEO on my iPhone 4 as well (not that I have one, but if I did…).

Of course, iPhone video footage would be crap without attaching (seamlessly!) an SLR lens – coz that looks completely professional, a mobile phone with an SLR lens gaff’d onto it!! Still, check out the video after the jump, it is worth a look!!

Last roll of Kodachrome

Yet another milestone reached in the slow but sure demise of film as a mainstream medium – the last roll of Kodachrome has been produced and used! According to this article in the Wichita Eagle:

Kodak announced last year that it would retire Kodachrome, a brand name of color reversal film it had manufactured since 1935. McCurry, well-known for his 1984 photograph of Sharbat Gula, or the “Afghan Girl,” published on the cover of National Geographic magazine, requested from Kodak to shoot the last roll of 36 frames it manufactured.

It’s a great article and well worth the read – but also sad in a way, as yet another icon bids farewell.

Studio shoot with Jess

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I realise it might appear like I don’t shoot much, but lately I’ve been shooting mostly theatre and events – meaning I don’t get to show off the images. But recently I did manage to get a couple of projects done in the studio, and I can show you these results!! I spent a couple of days testing a couple of lighting rigs, and managed to get in some portfolio/head shot sessions as a result.

Canon Wonder Camera Concept

Canon decided to surprise the attendees of the Shanghai Expo 2010 by announcing and showing off their vision of the camera in 20 years time! There’s a lot in the article that talks through the ideas and concepts, so I’m not going to delve into it here – but I did like one commenter who noted that it looks like a camera from the 70′s!!

Check out the article here

My gear IS good enough, what?

I’m an OK photographer – very occasional flashes of brilliance surrounded by a middle-of-the-road competence behind the lens (at least, that’s my view of my own work!). I can produce a reasonable result in most situations, and I do try to get it right in the camera (because I hate editing, and I’m a better shooter than I am a Photoshopper!!).

In the back of my mind I’m always telling myself “that image could have been great if I had a sensor that dealt with low light better”, or “if only I had the 200mm f2 fixed Canon lens, my shots would be awesome”!! But it would appear I have been deluding myself…

Hey Red, you’re late!

Some of you may recall my drooling over the much anticipated Scarlet Mysterium Monstro FF35 – sure it looks like a Lego camera, but this thing seriously had tech spec cred back in October of last year!

Of course, the existing HDDSLR players were going to be nipping at Reds’ heels with their big budgets and massive global R&D efforts, and the Canon HDDSLR offerings (particularly the 5D MkII) has shown that hardware cheaper than Red (or Alexa) can produce some pretty impressive results!!

Copy-pocrisy?

Copyright has long been one of those really interesting topics for discussion, that quickly turns dead boring as soon as you start looking into the details on the legal side!! As photographers, we’re really good at communicating how we’d individually like copyright to be handled so that our own works are treated right, but terrible at coming up with a useful set of rules that we think should apply to everyone – face it, we live in a world that is dominated by exceptions to the rule, and not the rule itself!!