Is it a bike- or a steadicam?

If you like bikes and DSLR-gear, you must love this piece of homemade ingenuity. A steadicam made completely out of bike parts. (except for one part, I believe) I love it not only because it shows you how to recycle your old bicycle into a piece of gear, but for the sheer fact that someone came up with this idea. It's the summum of recycling!

New FCP-plugin for Canon DSLR-shooters

There is a new EOS plugin for 5D Mark II, 7D and 60D owners. Where does that leave us 550D and 600D users? Why not a plugin for all DSLR EOS cameras? Or do we 550D/T2i owners have to change scripts in the plugin folder again as we did for the first EOS plugin? The ways of Canon are mysterious sometimes. (and often frustrating- ever tried to find something on their websites?)
Here is an explanation why this plugin should be a great improvement over the first one.

video copyright

A while ago a company embedded a clip of mine on their professional website. It is a timelapse of a tree being pruned. This company used my video to demonstrate the type of work they do: tree pruning in Hawaii. Amsterdam is hardly Hawaii and I guess that's why they exchanged my video with something more tropical a few days ago...
But it makes me wonder: the fact that one allows embedding, does that give people the right to embed it wherever they want, for whatever purpose? Common sense would say no. I guess the line is drawn when someone uses your video to promote their own paid services.
I didn't mind that this company used my video. But I would have appreciated it if they asked.

Hang man

A man playing the Hang in the Vondelpark, Amsterdam. I was struck by the pure, bewitching sound of this instrument, which, as it turned out, was developed by Swiss musicians in 2000. I thought it sounded like it was centuries old and came from the far east.
This is the opposite of a snappy edit and I even left in the soft-focus, out-of-focus shots. As a matter of fact, you don't have to watch it, you can just listen. (although I particularly love the shadowsun-shot starting at 3:25') At first I wanted to cut it to around 3 minutes (web-length) but decided against it and used almost all of the 15 minutes I shot. Most of what we show eachother is video&form, this time I opted for audio&content. (Maybe not the most popular choice: I guess that's what they call a 'director's cut'...)

Hang man from Filmersblog on Vimeo.

A rising star

FREDERIQUE AT ART AMSTERDAM

May I introduce -with certain pride- a rising star in the art scene: Frederique Masselink van Rijn, photographer. She lives most of the year on a mountain in Spain, about an hour's inland from Barcelona. Her house is a former factory and together with her husband they ' cultivate'  many acres of land, keep pigs, chicken and goats. He build and rebuilds and works on his dreamhouse. And Frederique photographs. She has a great, romantic eye and a love for the ruins, for the transient nature of matter. She shows us houses, for instance, in varying states of demise, the beauty of it, the inevitabilty, the peace.
She photographs interiors that are timeless, still lives like paintings.
And now her work is part of Art Amsterdam and I was just there. Her work is acquired by large collectors and organizations and she is at the beginning of a great career. She also happens to be my sister's daughter, my niece: Frederique.

 

El Pairet (2010)

 

Untitled (2010)

Hostal de la Muga II (2009)

Cheap lens adapters

It should be fairly simple: you have a prime lens and you need an adapter to attach it to your digital camera. I don't need autofocus, electronic aperture control. Just a simple piece of metal to connect an old lens to a new camera. Well, nothing is simple...
I bought a few of these cheap adapters and never thought that they weren't 100% functional. Either they fit or they don't, I thought, rather simplistically. It turns out there's more to it than just that. The bad ones do not support infinity focus. I guess I have those.
I thought my Pentax 6mm wouldn't focus on infinity because the rear barrel needed more modification. I shaved it off so far I almost ruined the thing. But now I suspect it's probably the cheap lens adapter.... I ordered one double the price and see if that solves my problem! I'll keep you posted.

Canon's Cinestyle vs Panasonic's Cinema

Sorry about the late post- Google's server was down all day...

Canon 600D Technicolor CineStyle versus GH2 Cinema Mode from Andrew Reid on Vimeo.

Panasonic introduces G3

Ok, so I thought I could be fast in getting this news out and draw some attention to the blog but... I was so fast I didn't check my sources. The last time I'll ever make this mistake!! It's a bloody G3, NOT GH3!!! I apologize...
Here's a full review.

Just another night at the office...

HOW NOT TO USE THE STAGE!!

I spent some weary, non-stop hours last night filming an event (or at least trying to) with 15 speakers and a singing act. The lighting was theatrical (dramatic!) ie loads of light next to complete darkness. I emphasized that all speakers remain in the light during their speech, but many either walked in and out of the dark or chose to remain there 80% of the time...

Can things be worse for a filmer? Yes! Our friendly but inexperienced speakers either didn't use or walked away from the microphone half of the time, leaving me pumping the volume up and down. And to make things a complete disaster: the host of the evening had his own mic and screamed like a chicken, making the contrast with the other speakers even more noticeable.

And another 4,- lens!

I exchanged 2 of my 4,- lenses because they were defect and got two with M42 mounts. One of them is a Pentacon 50mm 1.8. It has a little slack in the focus ring but seems to work fine otherwise. I made a few quick snapshots around the house and I had a hard time to get proper focus closeby. Shot at 1/100 shutter but maybe I should have gone faster to eliminate handshake. A little further away it got better.

11 looks compared

I was so impressed with the look of this footage I shot a few days ago that I thought it a good idea to compare the different 'looks' or 'presets' available in the Panasonic GH2. (also because I accidentally changed a setting and forgot which one I used!)
I shot this in full HD with the Lumix 20mm 1.7 and fader ND wide open. It's all straight out of the camera but I did lower the brightness by two nudges in FCP on the Nostalgic and Nature shots because they seemed too bright.

The settings for 'my film' are:

Contrast 0
Sharpness -1
Saturation 0
NR 0

(spectacular, eh? ;-)


11 looks compared from Filmersblog on Vimeo.

550D/T2i and GH2 Full HD comparison

The second edition of a practical, completely non-scientific test. The first time shot in 720P, now in full HD. Two camera's, mounted with the same lenses: a 20mm, 50mm and 135mm. How do they compare. Both daylight WB, aperture mostly stopped down all the way -or almost so- except for the inside shots. Both camera's set to the highest quality.

Straight out of the camera's.

550D/T2i and GH2 Full HD comparison from Filmersblog on Vimeo.

Summerday: a short film

Took my son out to the 'skate-pleintje' (skate square) in the neighborhood. A bunch of kids, boys around the age of my son, were hanging out and skating. Nice kids, having a good time. I just wanted to take a few shots of the action & some skating but it became more than that.
When I came home and looked at the shots it felt -excusez le mot- 'filmic'. (There is something about this lens, the pancake Lumix 20mm 1.7. I talked about it in a post a few days ago: how can something be sharp and soft at the same time? Well, this lens demonstrates it.) Maybe it was the light on this day and the way I was able to control it with the Fader ND filter that made this footage stand out. The colors and warmth. The photogenic boys. The sound and movement. The special combination of it all somehow makes it more than just a few shots of some kids skating.
A short visual on comraderie, playing from dawn to sunset, about careless summerdays. This could be anywhere and about any boy in the world. (watch it fullscreen)

Summerday: a short film from Filmersblog on Vimeo.

abused Pentax 6mm 1.2

SHAVED REAR TURNS GOLD!

I found someone who was willing and able to grind down the rear barrel of my Pentax 6mm 1.2 so that I could focus. Somehow the lens didn't sink low enough into the adapter to be able to focus. After some chiseling and machining about 2 mm is shaved off. And yes, it focuses! But not, to my great disappointment, into infinity...
So I paid someone 20,- to abuse my lens and it is effectively useless. Where did I go wrong? Others have done the same thing and have been more succesful. I'm sure I can fix it. I won't give up. This story is not over yet...
I wanted to try it out anyway and took my GH2 to the Sushi restaurant and was able to steal a few shots of the food before my wife got annoyed with my monomanic behaviour, ordered me to put the camera away and be social...




Modified (abused) Pentax 6mm 1.2 from Filmersblog on Vimeo.

To color correct or not to

"We'll fix it in post", is a much heard expression and its meaning is becoming more and more prevalent in video and filmproduction. The ability to correct and manipulate (the look of) footage has become more mainstream since the advent of tools such as Magic Bullet's Look or Colorista.

I wouldn't call myself a knowledgeable color corrector at all and I feel I make too little use of it. I have used presets from 'Looks' on a few clips and the response on Vimeo was so much more enthusiastic compared to 'unmanipulated footage'... it was a great stimulus to explore more of that area.

Philip Bloom compares Sony FS100, Panasonic AF100 and Sony F3

A real world comparison, shooting out on the streets. Just two guys (and a girl, I believe) and their camera's. And they brought their Canon 5D Mark II as well. I like this type of testing so much more than scientific charts. After all you just want to see what your camera produces in certain circumstances, not how it behaves in theory.  This is part 1 of the test.

AF100 vs F3 vs FS100 Part 1: The Real World from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Mailbox: rare Wollensak lens

 

The latest victim of my C-mount frenzy has arrived and it's a beauty: a rare Wollensak 1 inch 1.5 Cine-Velostigmat. It's in great shape, considering its age. This lens must be at last 50 years old, looking at the materials and the history of the company. The Wollensak firm branched off Bausch & Lomb in 1899 and started producing lenses a few years later. It's heydays were in the 50's and it went bankrupt in 1972. I am all for recycling and reusing and find it great that new use is being found for all these great products from the past. If it wasn't for the M43 camera's, these lenses would have rusted away and ground to dirt in dumpsites. A few would have been preserved by collectors or found their way to musea. But now they're back and in demand, taking pictures again of a world quite different from what they saw 50 to 100 years ago.

But we read the friggin' manual!?

I've owned the Sennheiser EW-100 G2 wireless mic system for many years and it's been a great workhorse. For the budget-minded shooters the general consensus is that you can't get any better for the money. I believe I paid between 600 and 700 euro's for mine many years ago.
A friend of mine rents my set on a regular basis but has finally decided to buy a set of his own: the latest successor of my set, the Sennheiser EW-112P G3. Newer must be better, right?

He was familiar with the settings of my set and assumed the new system would have pretty much the same menu. Not so. The day before the shoot he spent literally hours setting up his system but the mic would not pick up any sound. He practically memorized the manual but to no avail.

Final Cut Pro X: a stable system at last?

 

So Final Cut Pro X is coming soon to a Mac near you and that looks great, but what does it mean for all the hard- and software that we use for editing?
For example: I own a Matrox MXO which I bought a few years ago for monitoring and color correcting HD video on a Dell 24' monitor. Now I can't say the experience has been entirely positive, to understate it... It worked for the first year or so on my G5 Quad but then the sh*t started to hit the fan. Mac OS upgrades and consequent MXO firmware upgrades have caused more misery than benefits.

The biggest yardsale in the world (timelapse)

April 30 is Koninginnedag (Queensday) in the Netherlands, birthdate of the belated queen Juliana. It has evolved into a massive national party.
People sing, dance, perform, buy and sell. Half of Holland buys the crap that the other half wants to get rid of. Literally millions of people empty out their attics, basements, storages and closets to sit out on the street and make a few bucks.
The Vondelpark in Amsterdam is the place for kids to buy and sell toys, play instruments and do their thing, whatever it is. Like streetperformers they place a hat in which you can throw a few coins.

Shot on a Canon 550D/T2i and a Sony EX1-R

Queens Day: the biggest yardsale in the world from Filmersblog on Vimeo.