Months of speculation and scouring rumor sites have come down to this. I now own a Nikon D7000.
After waiting on a pre-order that never materialized, I walked into a Best Buy this morning and there it was. Go figure.
After spending much of the day fondling handling it and testing, I can say that it terrifies me. Why? Because I need to be very aware of, for lack of a better phrase, ‘who I am’ while I shoot. For the same reason that back at film school they forced us to shoot and cut 16mm, I now have to be sure to shoot like a photographer and not a tourist. If my photos aren’t sharp, it could it be because I’m shooting like a jackass. Don’t be a jackass Doug.
In any case, I took the camera on safari at the local crafts store, and here’s what I came up with. These are JPEGS on “Normal” quality. I haven’t shot RAW yet, mostly because the camera is so new, my software doesn’t know how to deal with the files. The lens was my trusty Ai 50mm 1.4, which becomes more like a 75mm on this camera.
Engadget has posted a piece about a group that has figured out how to record HDR video. HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography has been a controversial next step in image capture since just about day one. Purists complain for reasons I can’t quite understand. It seems like a completely valid and complementary way of expressing yourself through photography to me, and how often have you heard professionals complaining that an image sensor doesn’t have enough dynamic range? Here you go – problem solved. As Steve Jobs explained when he demoed the feature for iPhone 4 in the new OS update, a digital camera takes three (or more) images in rapid succession, each exposed for what Ansel Adams might have called a different “zone”. One is underexposed, one is overexposed, and one is juuuuusst right.
The underexposed image will have black shadows but keep detail in the highlights, the overexposed image will blow out the highlights but pick up detail in the shadows. Then, through the magic of software, the images are combined, such that detail is preserved in the shadows and highlights. A thus:
In addition to the multiple exposures, many users also use more software tricks to saturate the colors and create this kind of surreal effect. Yet, I’ve never seen the trick applied to video before, or even considered that it could be done. Yet, Soviet Montage has managed to do just that, by hacking a pair of Canon 5D Mk. II’s and splitting the live-view feed, or some such thing. I also think it’s hysterical that they use the same wordpress theme as I do. I highly suggest you turn Vimeo’s HD on.
The result is quite surreal I think you’ll agree. The images almost look like they’ve been pulled out of a video game rendering or a Richard Linklater film. The human face is particularly unnerving. Yet perhaps with more time and advanced processing, we might be looking at the future of all video capture. Think of it – with 3D TV’s on the horizon that don’t require glasses, and super high-def resolutions, this seems to be the final key to making TV about as close to looking through a window as we’ll get until we catch up with Star Trek.
The question is how to make it work with one camera instead of two. It would seem that if you could get a fast enough processor to shoot at around 72fps, with every three frames being treated as a grouping of the same exposure, you’d be able to scale it back to 24fps and have an HDR effect. Of course any small bit of motion between the frames would be problematic. If they’re already shooting 3D movies with dual lens cameras, why not build some sort of Chimera camera with three parallax adjusted lenses? 3D HDR? I really know nothing about how this would work. Still fun to think about.
I’m a little pissed off right now because I came home from a week of house-sitting in Brooklyn to discover my favorite $120 chef’s knife somehow had its tip chipped off in my absence, and was left with rusting spots in the dish-rack. Not cool. I was gonna gift it to one of you when I went abroad, but now it hardly seems worth it.
Still, no use crying over the loss of the material. Perhaps it should even be celebrated.
So about those travel plans – for those readers who may be unaware, sometime around the third week in September I intend to ride a one way ticket to Southeast Asia, with my current itinerary going something like this: Continue reading →
It’s great to see media professionals willing to share all (or most) of their trade secrets, experience, and methods for we up and comers. Here, photographer Chase Jarvis talks workflow, and how he gets his material from the camera to the archive and out to the clients.
Today we bid a fond farewell to my precious Canon SD1000, who yesterday, after rallying for a final performance shooting long-exposures of fire dancers at the Sagaponack Drum Circle on the summer solstice, finally gave up the ghost. I guess it was just one too many grains of sand, one too many wedges into craggy rocks and tree limbs, one too many ocean sprays and drops from unkind heights.
It was a perfect size and shape, with its squared off corners and sexy dress. It had all the functions I desired, and gave me some great memories. Maybe I’ll get the same model all over again for cheap?
Once I can figure out how to get the pictures off the memory card, its final work will be presented here.
You may remember a month or so back I posted a couple of essays speculating on the future of digital camera design. I suggested that the traditional SLR shape might adopt some of the characteristics of medium format bodies as they adapt to shooting video. Well nikonrumors.com has posted the work of designer Marc Levinson, who seems to have been thinking along the same lines in imagining a future “Nikon D4x”.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about the hand brick (grip), but other concept shots show how it might help in hand held video work.
So I’ve got an unofficial mission to shoot every kind of film I can find at least once. I just bought these three, which I have no previous experience with. Which should I load first?
