RobertBenson.com

I’ve been shooting Comic-Con in San Diego for the past three days. Thousands of nerds across the world converge in San Diego for the annual geek fest, and with it comes a lot of celebrity parties…

Here’s a real brief camera-cam view of what I’ve had to do (no need to critique video quality):

Off topic stuff and a few days late, but this is always good for a laugh, a tribute to the moonwalk on July 21, 1969:

Errr…. not mine, but came across this from a Sportsshooter.com reader: a funny website (Graphjam.com) with a lot of silly graphs like this one:

see more Funny Graphs

In an online video, editors at Inc. Magazine weigh in on what they think makes a good portrait, and say what they look for in a photographer when assigning a cover shoot. Check out the video!

Atlanta based shooter Andrew Kornylak has a pretty cool video he made using a DSLR, but not in the video mode: This video is composed he says of more than 550 still frames. It’s so cool I had to talk to him and find out what’s going on. He answered random questions below.

At first glance your video looks like a “normal” video, but then you notice there’s something going on… something isn’t “right.” What’s going on here? Esssentially I am shooting short motion clips as bursts of still images from a fast DSLR I can edit together as a “still-motion” video. The result has a lower frame rate, but a much greater resolution and color depth than HD video.

What kind of camera did you use? I used the Nikon D3 for this piece, though I started doing stillmotion a couple years ago with the Nikon D2X.

What was the frame rate that you used? his piece was shot at various frame rates between 7 and 11fps but most of the final footage was 11fps.

I’m assuming you used strobe at low power to keep up with the camera’s fast shooting speed, right? Which strobes did you use? I used Profoto B2 battery-powered strobes for this shoot, which has a minimum recycle time of 0.04 seconds. At these frame rates I can safely shoot at 1 or 2 stops from the lowest power, giving me 8, 16 or 32w/s from each head. We used 3 or 4 different light sources at a time for each clip.

Was it like a club’s dance floor with the strobes continuously firing? Yeah it can be kind of disorienting for the subject! My crew is used to it by now but its funny to see the looks on the rental guy’s face when he walks onto the set. I was a little worried that it would be too distracting for Nikki but she didn’t seem bothered by it at all, pulling tricky basketball moves and layups directly into a strobing high-boy!

Why did you use strobes, why not ambient light or hot lights? There are a bunch of reasons why strobes work better here. I need to be able to shoot at low shutter speeds but still freeze the action, especially if I am mixing in ambient light. I can’t drag the shutter like that with continuous lights. Also at these frame rates, strobes are more power-efficient and portable. They don’t generate as much heat, I have more control over color, quality, and modification… the list goes on. I think the look is unique as well.

Was this a paid gig? Yes. This is actually the first commission I’ve gotten to shoot with this stillmotion technique.

Did you shoot raw or jpeg? shot jpeg, at the largest size and quality, but in “cropped mode”, which on the D3 gives you a smaller frame size but lets you shoot at 11fps. The raw buffer is not deep enough to shoot clips of any meaningful length. Still, as long as you are careful with the exposure and white balance, the high-quality jpeg from the camera is superb in terms of resolution and color depth. I can still stretch it a lot in post.

Since they are a bunch of still images strung together, can each image still be Photoshopped/edited? Or do you need to use them straight out of the camera so there is consistency from frame to frame? Yes. There is always some post that needs to be done on the images. For whatever reason there can be slight exposure changes frame-to-frame and that has to be corrected, which can be tedious. Then there is color correction, spotting, cropping, re-positioning, etc. that might be done. This all happens in Photoshop before I edit the clips together in Final Cut Pro. The better the images look coming right out of the camera, the easier the workflow will be.

How did you convince the client to take a chance with this technique? The client, Nfinity, had seen a lot of the stillmotion work I had done before along with “frame grabs” from each one, which were print-ready stills. I think that is a big selling point of this technique, that you can shoot a motion piece that is high enough resolution to use any frame in a print campaign, all from one camera without too much production cost. They are a young company growing fast in a competitive market. I think they recognized that we could produce not only great, solid content to market their product and their athlete, but something that would be unique and groundbreaking in other ways, that could set their brand apart and generate some buzz. Nikki was immediately on board when I described the idea to her, so I think that also helped.

Where will this video air? They are taking a “viral” approach with this video, making it freely available through youtube and other online video outlets, and by generating interest on social networking hubs like twitter, facebook, etc. It makes total sense financially, but beyond that I think it’s a great approach. Nfinity makes women’s-specific sports shoes, for basketball, volleyball, and cheerleading. The company is made up of athletes, people close to the sport. I think sharing it this way will connect on a more intimate level with fans, followers, and consumers.

Any feedback from the client? They love it, and they are excited that people like the commercial and are also interested in how it was done.

What program did you use to edit the video? I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Bridge to edit and organize the individual photos, then used Final Cut Pro and Quicktime to create and edit the clips, sound, music (composed by local artist Brock Scott) and voiceover into the final video.

What were the challenges in making something like this? There were some special logistics. The idea was to use life-sized cutouts of Nikki to help tell her story from middle school to the pros. We didn’t have much time and I was worried about the quality of the photos we might be able to dig up, but her mother sent us these adorable shots of her from back in the day and we were able to get them made really fast. Every time I shoot a stillmotion project, I end up doing something totally new. I had tried to shoot multiple cameras at once, but I found it was impossible to sync multiple cameras with strobe lighting effectively so I just went back to a single camera. Shooting with strobes like this taxes even the best battery packs and I was worried about killing all our batteries too fast, but our rental guy (Jay Morel Studio Support of Atlanta) was on it, shuttling extra battery packs to us throughout the evening.

When your camera hit the buffer limit (if it did) what did you do? The buffer maxed out at around 70-85 shots at this resolution. Thats about 7 seconds of footage, which is pretty much all I needed each time. For longer sequences I can drop down to small sized cropped jpegs and get up to 120 shots but it was unecessary for this. It just takes careful shot planning. If the sequences are tight in-camera, there is less editing to do afterwards. I could get a buffer upgrade which nearly doubles the buffer size, but I’m too cheap

How many “takes” did this commercial involve? I think for each sequence there was no more than 3 takes. We didn’t have a ton of time with Nikki. Just a few hours in the evening before a game she had in Atlanta the next day, and we had a lot of stuff to cover: makeup, brainstorming moves, shooting all the sequences, each with lighting changes, then recording the ambient sounds, and finally the voiceovers. Some sequences were just one take and they turned out perfectly, but even so its hard to move on with just one shot “in the bag”

Were the cardboard cutouts your idea as well? Yeah, but actually when I sat down with the client, they had a very similar idea, so it was cool that we were on the same wavelength!

Finally, with video now standard in newer DSLRs, is it necessary to do things the way you did? I think it’s a different ballgame. I am just now editing video from a DSLR with video and there is no comparison as far as image quality. This commercial can be mastered at about 2x HD resolution. If you shoot at full-frame it is 4x HD. I think the DSLR video will catch up quickly, and probably in a couple years a camera will exist to make this stillmotion thing “moot.” I like to repurpose technology and find new ways to exploit it though. Sometimes I wonder what all the rush is to make things obsolete. It’s amazing what you can do with just a plain ol’ Nikon D3!

Check out more of Andrew’s work here.

I asked Dave Good to help out today by being a human light stand, and going mobile with a light as I shot a lifeguard at a beach in San Diego. I told him to always sidelight the subject and stay about 10 feet away. That way, my exposure remained the same and I could just shoot for moments without worrying about F stops….

Inside the backpack was an Alien Bee generator pack, powering a small Speedotron pack, which was powering a fresnel light, which I converted to strobe some time back.

In 1998 at Syracuse University, National Geographic shooter Bob Sacha came and spoke to our class, and gave a slide show of images he shot under New York – in sewers and tunnels, all dark places. I remember him saying he had an assistant with a light on a stick, always staying X number of feet away from the subject, and when the subject moved, so did the assistant with the light.

Wedding photographers use this technique, human light stands. More recently I’ve been really digging the work of Brian Finke, who seems to do this technique quite a bit. If you have a extra body, it’s always nice!

Jammed inside the backpack was a generator pack, radio slave and Speedotron pack.

Er.... Don't mind me

These boys were itching to get their picture taken, so I did it. They then yelled"what's this for?" Dave the assistant answered: "It's for Gay TV." That got them even more excited. (Don't ask, don't tell).

The light is coming from behind her (left), with human light stand in back seat. In the image on right, my human light stand is standing outside the door, so cool shadows are cast.

"Light stand" in front of car, with both images.

I went to the local library last week, and got a years worth of back issues of Inc. Magazine and Fortune Magazine, with the intent of seeing who’s doing what. When I came across a photograph I liked, I wrote down the photographers byline, and Googled them later. Some of the names I’ve seen before, and are listed on the left side of my blog.  Others, like the guys below, had work that I really liked (click on the photo to link to their website):

Brian Finke:

Justin Stephens:

Michael Sugrue:

Roark Johnson:

Robin Twomey:

Imke Lass:

Jeff Sciortino:

Eric Percher:

Amanda Friedman:

Did a photo shoot for a magazine cover with a financial lady here in San Diego. She was nice enough to give me four hours of her time (yeah, four hours…) at two locations…. Dave Good shot the video.