Jesse Rosten

A little news update: Cart was accepted into the Mammoth Film Festival and will be screening this December. I am tickled a very particular shade of coral. I created the film with a Redding audience in mind and am thrilled that the film has legs outside of this town. Another honor is that Cart will be the opening short of the festival. It’ll appear along side the feature Rock Slyde, a comedy starring Patrick Warburton (AKA Joe from Family Guy) and Andy Dick. Check out the trailer for Rock Slyde. It looks really funny. If all that news isn’t exciting enough for you, consider this: Mammoth Mountain has over 3500 skiable acres. See you on the mountain?

Finally finished up the edit for my cousin’s wedding back in Colorado. Here’s a gallery with a few of my favorites. It was fun seeing some of the extended family, many of whom I hadn’t seen in 10 years or so, including my cousin Matt. He was a great resource for me when I was first learning about photography. Back in ‘those’ days we shot film and had to walk to the photo lab, through the snow, uphill, both ways, etc, etc, kids these days with their rap music and digital cameras…

Since I traveled to Colorado by plane, my gear was limited to what I could fit in a carry on bag. No worries; perfect excuse to summon the strobist ninja inside and find ways to do more with less. A single speedlight (580ex) and shoot-thru umbrella seemed to do the trick. Avoiding direct sunlight meant I didn’t need lots of watts to over power the ambient. In fact, we had to move fast after the ceremony to make use of what sunlight was left. Thankfully, Matt was a not only a great photo assistant, but an excellent VAL (voice activated lightstand).

The photos were processed in Lightroom, DXO Optics, and Photoshop. Yes, all three. DXO is a great piece of software that automagically removes distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberrations. It does this by peeping your EXIF data, and applying custom corrections based on your lens+camera combination. This is particularly useful with wide angle lenses like the 17-40mm that have a lot of barrel distortion. I didn’t realize just how much distortion was present with this lens until I compared the corrected and non-corrected photos. Yikes. Now, if only we could get DXO to work as a Lightroom plugin the trifecta would be complete.

The pic you see above was processed by creating two exposures from the RAW file, one for the foreground and one for the sky. Neat thing about shooting RAW is all that detail is hiding in there you just have to coax it out. RAWr.

Last month Lyn and I jumped down to Santa Rosa to film Levi Leipheimer’s Gran Fondo. I know what you’re thinking, “What the heck is a gran fondo?” Well, according to levisgranfondo.com, it is a “long distance, mass-participation cycling event – not a race.” There, now you know. I must say it was a grand gran fondo. The course wound its way through deep, dark forests and across golden hillsides.

The standard practice for covering cycling events is from the back of a motorcycle, or from a helicopter. Luckily, we had both. Carl Burchfiel, our fearless leader, wrestled a fully-kitted Red inside a tiny chopper while Lyn and I took the motos. I rode behind Bill and Lyn rode behind Val Kilmer Chad on his BMW 1200GS (For the record, I can neither confirm or deny the possibility of me being obsessed with this particular motorcycle).

As I was building out my camera the night before, I discovered I was missing the top handle – probably left it in the rental car in Cleavland. Operating a Red One without a top handle is like trying to cut a steak without thumbs. It’s awkward, and makes you look stupid. Hanging onto the back of a speeding motorcycle made it all the more challenging. I still managed to get some decent moving shots from the back of the bike. The rest of the time we’d try to leapfrog Levi, pull over, and film as he passed. Lyn carried the tripod on her back and our motos rode together. We were a motorcycle gang of two.

It was great meeting Levi. He’s a really nice guy and put together this ride as a fundraiser for the city of Santa Rosa and Forget Me Not Farm.

What I learned on this shoot:
* Size matters – can’t wait until Red comes out with some smaller cameras for this type of work. I hear the Scarlet should be out by 2015 [sarcasm].
* Story, story, story – I was reminded that gorgeous vistas and cycling celebrities do not an interesting video make. It always has, and always will be about the story. Even though we had rough audio and limited time with The Levi, I think I managed to eek out a subtle story line here. Enjoy.

For those of you who don’t know, Lyn and I had the privileged of making several trips to Rwanda over the last few years to work on a documentary film. We premiered the film in Redding last January at the Cascade Theatre and are now happy to announce the DVD is available. Our good friend Trevor directed the film and had this to say:

It’s hard to believe that almost five years ago, five friends started planning for a trip to Rwanda. Our plan was to shoot a documentary in two weeks, spend a month in hard-core editing, and have it ready to watch by the summer of 2005.

I was so naive, in so many ways. I had shot several documentaries by this point, but nothing on this scale. The process has been intense, difficult, and there was more than once that the whole thing almost didn’t happen. But here we are… the film is ready for the world to see on DVD.

You can get your copy here: Hope Rises Store. There is more info and trailers on the website as well as a Facebook fan page.

Thanks for all of your support over the years to get this thing made.

Extra! Extra! This just in. Canon has announced their newest flagship DSLR. I’m watching the walk-through video as I type this. Here’s what I’ve gleaned so far:

• 16.1 Megapixel APS-H sized sensor
• ISO Range 100-12,800 native with extend ISO up to 102,400. It’ll be interesting to see how this stacks up to the low light performance of the new Nikon D3s
• New 45-Point AF
• Auto Lighting Optimizer. I have no idea how this is supposed to work, but it looks kind of like it may add a little “fill light” to the picture. Similar to how Photoshop’s shadows/highlights feature works. Don’t quote me on that though.
• 1080 24p + 720 60p. I wonder if they are still employing line skipping to generate video image? And…does anyone shooting for web or SD broadcast care?

Find out more for yourself with these tasty links.
Canon USA
Vincet Laforet Video in HD

Here are a few spur-of-the-moment shots from the local skating rink. We threw this shoot together very last minute with the help of a Facebook casting call (don’t forget to follow via Facebook and Twitter!)

I first tried setting up the light on a stand and had the skaters roll by as I shot. This yielded horrible results. I quickly realized that I needed to get the camera and light rolling along with the skaters, at a consistent distance, to get consistent focus and exposure. Well, it just so happens that I spent a good portion of the ’90s roller skating on a weekly basis. Yes, I was THAT kid. I skated in front of the subject and had an assistant (thank you Jeremy and Lyn) on wheels skate along side holding the flash (580ex, shoot-thru umbrella, triggered via PW). Shooting blind meant I shot a lot of frames and hoped to get some keepers. Doing a photo shoot on roller skates really got me wondering how much more efficient my life might be if I could wear roller skates all the time. Imagine how fast shopping at Costco would be with a pair of skates.

I’ve been seeing a lot of motion graphic spots on TV lately that rely more on well designed graphics and less on dazzling motion. Figured that might be a good approach to this spot since I only had a few days to complete. Wish I could have spent more time on transitions between scenes but I like how it turned out thematically.

No rest for the weary. I was in Cleveland last week working on a campaign video for a US Senate race. Had one night in my own bed and then was off again. Spent last weekend in Santa Rosa filming pro cyclist Levi Leipheimer during his Gran Fondo ride. Lyn and I enjoyed a thrilling day wrestling the Red and a tripod on the back of a couple of motorcycles. Thumbs up to Bill and Chad our excellent moto drivers. Thumbs down to the angry rancher who used his truck as a weapon, driving over my tripod bag and stopping literally inches away from a *very* expensive camera. I’ll tell you the story over drinks sometime.

I’m home for a week now, long enough to catch up on some last minute editing before I fly off to Colorado to shoot a wedding. Can’t wait to see the fall colors in that part of the country. I leave you with a few iPhone shots from the last few weeks of whirlwinding.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know a thing about 3D. But I do know how to push software buttons. While waiting for some proxies to render, I thought I’d have a go at Cinema 4D. These are simple test renders, nothing fancy. Inspiration came from watching some videos on Greyscalegorilla.com. Hopefully, I can create more of this stuff. It would definitely add another dimension to my work. Oh yes, I went there.