fuzzynormal

I think Clara Bow was the first to teach the camera things with her gaze. Especially desire. Free desire. Or was it defiant desire? I forget. 😉 Also, the camera has a bad memory because it keeps getting re-taught all those things by different people. But I suppose being enamored by others is normal. Celebrities exist for good reason. Cultural context mixed with a harmonizing charisma. Maybe it's not even the camera. The story and image of Mona Lisa is still around in our collective consciousness. The girl with the pearl earring. How about Adele Bloch? Or maybe if you'd rather consider the male rendered in a painting to think about ... well, again, the Mona Lisa ... ? Regardless, legend has it that Anna Whistler was a right old twat. Kicked a cat once and liked to slaughter chickens.

The farther I get from it, the more I yearn to go back to using my old XH-A1. Just for fun, but also ... kind of a really great IQ under good conditions.

He is to me. Also, welcome on your increasing visits to hermit-town. It's nice here.

Time to open a new business in Port Huron.

Dang. It even affects wildlife!

Well, I figured if the viewers online are so non-discriminating and it just needs to be vert-vid to be a reel on our group's page, I'll just do it like this and call it good. I'm lazy, I guess. Also, we ain't trying to maximize views, so no real PR stakes involved here.

Then I'd also like to ask, what exactly is the "have to" part of it. Like, y'all can't get paid and/or make a living without vertical videos? I'm not trying to be obtuse in my responses. I don't do things for social media because I really don't want to. Dabbled for a month back during the pandemic and just decided, "Nah, not for me." My career is winding down so I'm not chasing that shit. So ... I legit don't know what's going on for a "have to" to be part of the career calculus.

What game, tho'?

Oly cameras are charming. I have had plenty come and go. I don't like NOT having at least one. Currently own a EM10iii. The intangibles just make them "funner" to use.

In a world where 1+1 no longer equals 2?

And even more than that, stories typically rely on characters almost always being portrayed as somewhat competent, even if they're nefarious. Which I always find amusing because we should all know that's one hell of a myth.

In my experience, distance from screen matters the most.

It is and it isn't. A little history reveals otherwise. Honestly, humanity's default mode seems to welcome oppression. And why not? It's intellectually easy. Many peoples don't like trying to be more smarter.

Of course not, but here we are again.

Egalitarianism is a lost cause in the USA. It would be nice to strive to be on the correct side of that spectrum, as we've done since WWII, but I ain't holding my breath. We're back to our Gilded Age mode, which I fear is the default. Maybe with the way info moves these days we'll speed run it and it'll swing back the other way somehow? Then again, I look at too many of my own family members, see how they think, and just kind of know in my gut that none of this ends well.

I have a colleague from Kansas that use to do second unit for Malik back in the 70’s and this anecdote is right on target. My buddy’s job was to wander around the set’s region and find shots of bugs.

Best footage I ever shot in my life was on a XH-A1. It was the situation and lighting, not the camera. Could it have been better with a new 4K-whatever-camera? Sure! But only marginally so.

Here's the video if anyone wants to learn about hawks and the local people here to track 'em. Also, you can play guess the camera:

Same. On this particular project I found myself reaching for it more than the GH5. Not for the bird shots as that really required good slow-mo, but for the people shots? Looked awesome. It pancakes the highlights though; just loses details that LUMIX cameras hold onto. Other than that, pretty great for a $300 camera.

Oh god. That thing. When online people complain about lousy footage with the cliche "was that shot on a potato"? They're probably talking about the D90's codec.

I'm of a more ramshackle mentality, but even my loosey-goosey philosophies hit a limit. fyi, this particular doc was about people that are trying to help conserve raptor migration through SoCal. So, lots of bird shots. Which we don't really do, nor have done. The whole thing became kind of a production experiment. We were only answering to ourselves so we could take risks like that. The scope of the project kept changing, but the finances never did. There was very little money in our pockets, and what we did have we needed to save for travel. And being a seriously-non-affluent-filmmaker, it basically came down to a make-do-as-we-can process. Our personal finances, as well as the various situations of the shoot, were all over the place. We were borrowing/renting lenses and gear in a very haphazard way. Sometimes it worked. Mostly it did not. Meanwhile, the stuff we had in our own collection was inferior. For instance we used a POS Vintage Photax 500mm w/2x extender for an entire season to get a lot of the BIF shots. That was an insanely unfortunate thing to do, but it's what we could afford to have on hand. The biggest bitch was not having a real tripod. We truly wished we had friends/colleagues that could have let us use a pro Sacthler or Miller. More than willing to carry some sort of hefty rig into the wild if it would've allowed smooth shots when filming at a +2000mm FF equiv. That FOV reach is f'in hard to control. As a side note, it was pretty wild running around with birders carrying equipment that was so expensive and professional while us "filmmakers" were often using, basically, consumer toys to grab video. At the end of the day, the images are passable by a certain standard, but when you pixel peep you can tell it's all held together with spit, bubblegum, hopes, and prayers. "f8 and be there" was the mantra we had to talk ourselves into and accept. "The best camera is the one you got." ...That sort of thing.

GH5 GH4 EM10iii OM-1 5Dii XPRO2 XT-5 P1100 DSC-RX10 iPhone15 iPhone12 Xiaomi12 Ultra DJI Mavic Pro GoPro Hero All those different cameras were used to make our latest indy documentary on-and-off over the last 3 years. We finally finished post-production (for real this time) last month. Not to mention all the different ridiculous vintage lenses and modern lenses employed along the way. So that happened. My advice? Yeah, don't use so many cameras...and then try to make all that cohere somehow with no legitimate color grading skills... Surprisingly, I found the EM10iii footage the most pleasant looking color-wise when exposed correctly.

Just got one in San Diego for $300'ish, so always keep looking, you never know what'll pop up.

I'll return to Lubezki's work. Feeling the same vibes. The stuff he does with Cuarón, and overall in general I guess, really nurture the deep dof. Here's a film he shot in my back yard. I can literally see the location from my office -- which I still get a kick out of being able to 'name-drop' As an indy documentarian, I gotta say, I can't really get completely behind this notion, but I do think I know what you're getting at and why useage-context with a camera is important. I just came off a project where the cinematographer was leaving an insane amount of shots and potential in the field. Why? He was trying to wield a bunch of large production shit on an full-fledged ARRI set up rather than just shooting good extensive coverage with a small simple rig. Yes, sometimes what he got looks great. But, trust me, what he missed (and missed often) had better potential. You can chalk some of it to him not being that spry anymore ... which to me would demand you go light and small to mitigate that, but he is definitely a boy-with-his-toys kind of guy rather than a remarkable creative. Wants to have the best most powerful super car, even if he can't drive it, y'know? Anyway, IQ superior? Yes. Practicality? Debatable. Which, coincidentally, practicality is the DP's argument for the GH7 and a 12mm lens on this Magellan movie. I kind of like the 'too-much-grain' treatment, but, yeah, it's a choice. Damn. I'm rambling. Too much wine tonight.

Thankfully, we're so far beyond the camera being the gatekeeper to accomplishing beautiful cinema. There's no real technical limitation affecting the cinema we see here. I've always been partial to portrait focal lengths because of what they take away from an image, but it's great to see more creative cinematographers shooting wide. Lubezki pretty much hangs out there most of the time.