Jesse Rosten

Had a little free time last week so I pulled together an impromptu shoot with some friends. This was an experiment to test out some lighting setups with on-axis fill.

On-axis light is light that is on the same axis as your camera lens; e.g. your on-camera flash. This kind of light illuminates everything very evenly, creating a flat, and generally unflattering image. It’s akin to xeroxing your subject. The idea here is to create shadow and depth with some off-axis lighting and then let the on-axis ring flash (AB800R) act as a fill and lift those shadows out of the dark. Daniel (pictured) mapped out the the setups on his nifty Strobox iPhone app. Also, the first pic in the gallery below is a 100% crop of the pic above. I put a lot of post work into these photos and don’t want the finer details to get lost to web resolution.

My wife is slowly teaching me what it means to be well dressed. Thus far I’ve learned: shoes and belt color should match, and denim does not go with MORE denim. During this little impromptu photo session with Lyn (wife) and Kallie (friend), I also learned that with you can never have too many layers.

This is true in Photoshop, too. I’m all about the layers. I usually make a new layer for every step in the edit. Healing brush, dodge and burn, sharpening, curves – each major step lives on its own layer. And I always keep the original layer in the stack, too. That way I can go back if I get lost. Plus, if you’re like me, you love soloing layers to see how far a photo has come.

Here are a few test shots with the new AB1600 down by Whiskeytown Lake. Using the PocketWizard Mini and Flex I was able to get a useable strobe sync speed of around 1/640. Strobe was boomed overhead with a small silver umbrella. Looking forward to setting up some more daylight blasting sessions soon.

We have a rad dog named Stella. She’s a unique little creature. Here’s a little flick Lyn and I created to show a typical day in Stella’s life. This was shot entirely on the Canon 5DMKII. It’s a good proof-of-concept to show that you don’t need a Red camera to create interesting visuals. You just need, well, interesting visuals. The small size and low weight of the MKII made it easy to get some of these hard to reach POV shots. Huge thanks to the talented Jef Gibbons for his musical contribution.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas to all.

Thankfully, the majority of my projects require no DVD authoring. Recently though, I needed to make a simple DVD menu and sub-menu with scene selection buttons. I ran into a peculiar DVD Studio Pro quirk that irked my skirt. In brief, this problem had to do with restarting a DVD after hitting stop twice. After hours of combing the web, and heading down dead-end rabbit trails, I finally came up with a solution. Figured I’d pay-it-forward to any bleary-eyed editors out there who’ve been pulling their hair out over this.

First the problem: When you hit ’stop’ on a DVD and then ‘play,’ normal behavior for a DVD is to ‘resume’ playback from the stopped point. If you hit stop, and then stop again, this should reset the disc as if you’d just inserted it into the DVD player. The problem with my disc is that, after hitting stop twice and then play, the disc would start on track 1 and not the first play menu. (My log read, “User action: System initialization. Jumping to Track: Track 1) How annoying is that? I still don’t know why this was happening. But it’s likely an issue with the way DVD Studio Pro writes it’s GRPM and SPRM values. Now you could buy expensive software and learn how to program DVD discs from the ground up, or you could try this…

My Solution: No matter what I tried, I could not get DVDSP to return to the menu after a double-stop. I tried scripting it, I tried rebuilding the project, I even tried some demo versions of that expensive software I mentioned but it quickly got over my head. Since DVDSP was being stubborn, and completely set on restarting at track 1, I finally gave up and said, “fine you can have track 1, stupid software, but I get to tell you what’s going to be on track 1.” And that’s the solution: put 2 seconds of black on track 1 and then tell the DVD to end-jump to the main menu. Hey, it’s not perfect, but it works.

If anyone has another way to solve this problem, please let me know.

I’ve been doing a little bit of house cleaning and have decided to unload some of the gear that is not getting used. If you know me, you know I do a lot of research before purchasing anything. So I can assure you, all of this is good quality gear that I would recommend to anyone. The pictures feature the actual items for sale. If you are interested in anything let me know or make me an offer.

First up are some audio goodies. There was a time in my life when I thought I was going to make hit records and wear gold-plated diapers. Well, that hasn’t happened. So I’m reluctantly letting go of some of my recording and monitoring gear. Here is a like-new pair of Dynaudio BM6A mkII monitors. These are beautiful near-field monitors that create stunningly clear sound. If critical monitoring is important to you, (and it should be), do a little research on these. But do it fast ’cause you’ll get the best deal through me and supplies are definitely limited. I bought these new about a year ago through Sweetwater Sound. Only used them a couple times.

Next up in the audio department is a sweet little audio interface, the Mobile I/O 2882. The big selling point for me on this box was the high-quality pre amps (there’s eight of them); and it’s completely BUS powered through Firewire. Just mate this to a Macbook Pro and you’ve got a portable recording studio. 

And lastly, let’s move over to the video side of life. Up for sale is a used Matrox MXO. Great for monitoring and color correcting video on an external monitor. The MXO converts your secondary DVI output to a true REC709 broadcast signal. It also allows you to calibrate an Apple Cinema Display or other DVI monitor using a proc amp. Works with the lappy tops too! Great little box that I simply no longer need.

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