New York Photo & Video Events

Our weekly events list from our (full event descriptions and option to subscribe by following the link):New York City Google Event Calendar

Henry Leutwyler, “Ballet” at Foley Gallery

Tue Nov 27, 2012
9:30am – 5:30pm  |  Opening: Group Show, “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde” 
Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10028-0918

6pm – 8pm  |  OPENING: BENNANI, CERUZZI & MOORE, BAEZ, HAND, PHOTO II, DRAWING
Where: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 30 Cooper Square New York, NY 10003

1pm – 2:30pm  |  Webinar: FCP X for FCP “Classic” Users
Where: http://www.moviola.com/webinars/fcp-x-for-fcpclassic-users/#.UKntxeTEeSo

9am – 12pm  |  Workshop: Introduction to Lightroom, Manage your digital assets
Where: 3rd Ward, 195 Morgan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11237

10am – 6pm  |  Workshop: PR 101: Introduction to Premiere Pro
Where: The Training Farm, 39 West 38th Street (btwn 5th & 6th Ave), Suite 1001, New York, NY 10018

5:30pm – 7:30pm  |  Workshop: Steven Ackerman, Canon EOS Autofocus System: In-depth
Where: The Adorama Building, 42 West 18th Street, 5th floor, New York, NY

Wed Nov 28, 2012
6pm – 8pm  |  Opening: Henry Leutwyler, “Ballet” 
Where: Foley Gallery, 97 Allen Street, New York, NY 10002

Highlight Tech: Joker-Bug

We offer the K5600 Joker-Bug lights in 200, 400, 800 and 1600 denominations. If you are looking for big light on a budget, the Jokers are an excellent choice with both the muscle and flexibility for single light set ups.

As you’d expect from a PAR the Jokers pack a punch in a small profile. With both large output and strong throw relative to their size. They’re great on location because of their fairly small power draw, although if you’re rocking a 1600 you’ll want to isolate it on the circuit. You can also run the Joker 200 and 400 off a battery belt if you are shooting in a location where there is no power available. Like any HMI the Jokers will take a couple of minutes to heat up to full illumination. Also plan for extra time for cool down before pack up.

The Jokers can be used with or without modifiers, but because of the high output you’ll want to a least diffuse through one of the kit lenses for most uses. A range of modifiers are available from softboxes to the Joker Big Eye profiled last week. Also, with the Joker Cross Over adapter, you can use it with ProFotos lineup of modifiers.

So if your looking for a powerful, flexible and affordable continuous light, take the Joker-Bug for a spin.

——

Anna Fischer is a fashion and beauty photographer based in New York City. You can find her work on her website.

New York Photo & Video Events

Our weekly events list from our (full event descriptions and option to subscribe by following the link):New York City Google Event Calendar

Rob Nypels, “Disorientation” at Witzenhausen Gallery

 

Tue Nov 20, 2012
6pm – 8pm  |  Opening: Richard Taddei & Robert Cusido 
Where: Jadite Galleries, 528 W 47th St., New York, NY 10019

10am – 6pm  |  Workshop: Becoming a Premiere Pro Expert
Where: The Training Farm, 39 West 38th Street (btwn 5th & 6th Ave), Suite 1001, New York, NY 10018

1pm – 2:30pm  |  Webinar: Fixing It In Post For Avid Video Editors
Where: http://www.moviola.com/webinars/fixing-it-inpost-for-avid-video-editors/#.UKCvkOTEeSo

5:30pm – 7:30pm  |  Workshop: Tony Sweet: The Power of Composition— Merging Technique,Creativity and Emotion
Where: The Adorama Building, 42 West 18th Street, 5th floor, New York, NY

7pm – 10pm  |  Workshop: Introduction to Digital Photography (Part 4 of 4)
Where: 3rd Ward, 195 Morgan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11237

Wed Nov 21, 2012
7pm – 10pm  |  Workshop: Introduction to Photoshop (Part 3 of 3) 
Where: 3rd Ward, 195 Morgan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11237

Thu Nov 22, 2012
6pm – 8pm  |  Opening: Rob Nypels, NYC solo 
Where: Witzenhausen Gallery NY, 547 W 27th Street Suite 530, 5th floor, New York, NY 10001

The Cinema EOS Gambit: Report from the Canon/Adorama Presentation

It’s easy to forget how recently film lorded over the Hollywood; how absolute, how unquestionable it’s dominance as the medium of choice.

Sure, digital was convenient, and certainly there was that mysterious theoretical crossover point at which image quality could uncannily pass the Turing test of a trained DP’s eye, for film. But there was a lingering denial in many hearts that such a day would come, and for so long, this held true. Nothing could match the latitude of a film negative, not to mention replicate that “look.” Video was confined to a “choice” for risk-taking filmmakers, eager to push the aesthetic envelope of audience comfort (think David Lynch or Lars von Trier) or by trigger happy directors prematurely convinced of its substitutability and advantages (Michael Mann comes to mind).

Yet Moore’s Law marches stoically forward, and with it, hearts follow minds into the future reality, which has finally become the current one. The all-caps opposites – staid, storied ARRI and its foil, the plucky upstart, RED – took an early lead in getting real films, indistinguishable from the namesake, into theaters. Notably, the gorgeous Skyfall was shot on the Alexa and the approaching Hobbit trilogy was EPIC shot. Sony, never one to be left out of seemingly any market, answered with the formidable F65, used on the forthcoming M. Night Shyamalan feature. A new oligarchy around the centerpiece of cinematic technology – the camera – was forming, as suddenly as the market came up for grabs. Canon, seeing

Tonight: #SANDY, a Fundraiser at Foley Gallery

Tonight from 6-9PM at Foley Gallery, the NYC photo community is coming together for #Sandy, a benefit sale to help support the ongoing Sandy relief efforts.

Photos will be on sale for $50 from the following photographers: Ben Lowy, Ed Kashi, Stephen Wilkes, Ruddy Roye, Wyatt Gallery, Hank Willis Thomas, Michael Christopher Brown, Craig Wetherby, Yosra El-Essawy, Sam Horine, Nicole Sweet, Dylan Chandler, Brent Bartley, Stanley Lumax, Varenka Ruiz, Lyle Owerko, and Erica Simone. Printing services are donated by fine art photo printing studio Gotham Imaging.

100% of the proceeds will be donated to Occupy Sandy and Alison Thompson’s Rockaway Relief center. With the region still reeling from the unprecedented climate change linked superstorm, there is no better time to come help support this important effort.

Interview: ROGCS Administrator Bruce Logan, ASC

I had the good luck of running into Bruce Logan, ASC, at PhotoPlus. The administrator of last summer’s revelatory Zacuto Revenge of the Great Camera Shootout camera test and a storied DP, having shot features like TRON and Star Trek, commercials for a who’s who of major brands and music videos for the likes of Madonna and Prince, he was recently asked by Panasonic to write, produce, direct and co-DP with Philip Bloom a short film, Genesis, using a pre-production GH3. We had a chance to talk cameras, industry trends, and just what exactly the takeaway from Revenge was.

Adorama Rental Company: Tell me about Revenge. Was that a massive time commitment for you?
Bruce Logan: Well it took a lot of time, but I learned so much that it was like going back to school. You know, they always say if you want to really learn a subject than go ahead and teach it. So being the administrator on that… I think it was a four-day event during the pre-light and everything else we had to do, but then the post took a long time. You know, we brought that test to NAB, but we couldn’t show it at NAB because the post pipeline was broken, and I was very unhappy with that. So I took it back to Chicago, and what we did was we made sure the native files went straight into Baselight and they came out as DPX 16-bit and nothing happened in between. And previously there’d been a whole bunch of different steps to get there. So yeah, it was intensive (laughs).

ARC: You mentioned earlier about administering different tests…
BL: The ICAS (Image Control Assessment Series) test, I didn’t actually administer that. They had wanted ICAS to be like little pieces of feature film. They were tired of seeing test charts and color charts and they wanted it to have a little more richness to the look. So I ended up being elected as the head writer. So it was my job to take 25 DPs in a room that wanted all these different parameters in the test, and then it was my job to come up with a concept that included those parameters, or most of them. So I was the writer and then I directed one of them. ICAS is a lot about the ACES workflow, and that is a very exciting thing that could revolutionize the industry for us.

ARC: How so?
BL: Well because ACES is a standard, in the same way that 35mm frame has been a standard bucket we’ve put all photographic information in, this is a new file, which is based on OpenEXR, which is originally for visual effects – for swapping visual effects between post houses so that there was a standardization to it – and each camera manufacturer will come up with an IDT, or an Input Device Transform, that will take their camera and their sensor and really kind of zero it out. So once you get into the ACES workflow you should theoretically be able to get a Canon, a RED, and an F65 put them all side by side and shoot this thing and when you bring them in, all the files look the same. Not necessarily in quality or dynamic range, but the basic color correction you’re gonna look at is standardized.

And then the other exciting thing about it is, if you do an ACES master negative of your project, even though normally you bake in a color correction, well nothing gets baked in with ACES, it’s just kind of a LUT that’s superimposed on it. So that means that when you archive the movie, you can always go back to the original negative, the way it was shot. And it doesn’t solve the problem of, physically, how do you keep data for 20 year or 100 years? But it’s a really great step forward in terms of standardization. And I guess post houses won’t be very happy about this, because it takes away some of the secret sauce away from the post houses. It has the catch that they are big files and its gonna be more data – but there’s Moore’s Law, and in a few years from now that won’t be significant.

ARC: Let’s go back to the Revenge of the Great Camera Shootout because everyone was blown away by that. Were you surprised by the results?
BL: Well, I’m told there were no results (laughs). I think it was really interesting to let DPs light for their camera. But basically what it shows is that there are a lot of choices out there that you can shoot a digital cinema movie with, if you’re a good DP and know the weaknesses of your camera. Like the GH2, they said “we knew we couldn’t compete with the dynamic range, so we put a lot more fill light in there.” So that part of the test is really more a DP test than a camera test, or a combination of the two. But there was that zero line of, “I want to include in the test every camera going through with the same lighting setup, same file…”

ARC: And they were more in line with the price point at that point.
BL: Exactly. And as I say the great leveler for that was the 2K, because a lot of the higher resolution cameras, at 2K, which is the de facto distribution now – 4K will be here soon, but it’s not really here worldwide yet – that gave an advantage to some of the low end cameras.

ARC: And you were saying up-resing has a disadvantage which would be more apparent, obviously.
BL: Well that’s what was really surprising to me. The HD cameras up-resed to 2K did better than the 8K, 4K cameras down-resed. And I thought the oversampling was going to negate that, was really going to make a difference. But it didn’t. It was the great leveler for those cameras.

ARC: What trends do you see in the industry right now? Does the GH2 represent a turning point? Or the Black Magic? What do you think about that camera?
BL: I haven’t seen footage. I’ve had it in my hands, but I wasn’t allowed to shoot files. So I don’t really know about that. But I have friends that have them, and they’re quite pleased with it. But until I get hands on myself and get it into Resolve, I’m not really gonna know. I’m on this tirade now, where I think DPs have to take control of color correction. And if that means being their own colorist, I think they should be. If the want to maintain and be the “auteur” of the image, they’re going to have to take control of that process. To have a producer and a colorist go in and decide how it’s going to be, I don’t think that’s acceptable anymore.

ARC: You used to decide, before you shot, the look you wanted.
BL: Exactly, you had so little – you had color correction and density – that’s all you had when you were doing photochemical negative. Now that we’re shooting RAW, it’s very hard for the DP to control the image at that point. I mean, the good lighting’s never going to go away, but as far as controlling the look, if it’s not there and taking hold of that process…

ARC: So you see those roles merging in the future, potentially?
BL: Well they have for me. The last two features I’ve done I’ve color corrected myself. I can go straight to where I want.

ARC: And what’s your camera of choice these days?
BL: Well this would just be a moment in time, because ask me again next week… But I really like the Alexa. And I really don’t mind whether I’m shooting RAW or ProRES. I don’t see a lot of differences.

ARC: Thanks so much for your time!
BL: Thank you.

New York Photo & Video Events

Our weekly events list from our (full event descriptions and option to subscribe by following the link):New York City Google Event Calendar 

David LaChapelle, “Still Life” at Paul Kasmin Gallery

Tue Nov 13, 2012

1pm – 2:30pm  |  Webinar: Darwinian Filmmaking: Evolution or Extinction
Where:http://www.moviola.com/webinars/darwinian-filmmaking-evolution-or-extinction/#.UI81EW_MjfI

5:30pm – 8pm  |  Workshop: Zach and Jody Gray: 3 Steps to Bigger Sales
Where: The Adorama Building, 42 West 18th Street, 5th floor, New York, NY

6pm – 9pm  |  Workshop: Adorama Presents Canon Digital Cinema Event with Larry Thorpe
Where: Union Square Ballroom, 27 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003

7pm – 10pm  |  Workshop: Introduction to Digital Photography (Part 3 of 4)
Where: 3rd Ward, 195 Morgan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11237

7pm – 8:30pm  |  CAP Artist Lecture: Jerry Vezzuso
Where: Center for Alternative Photography,36 East 30th Street, New York, NY 10016

Wed Nov 14, 2012
6pm – 8pm  |  Opening: Group Show, “13.0.0.0.0”
Where: RH Gallery, 137 Duane St., New York, NY 10013

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera has Landed at ARC!

Blackmagic Cinema Camera at Adorama Rental Co.

Blackmagic Design made history at NAB in April, transforming itself overnight from a niche supplier of high-end I/O and software solutions for the filmmaking industry to a mass market camera manufacturer. Eight months on, its name is uttered with hushed and quivering reverence in the filmmaking community. How did it achieve such a feat? With nothing short of an industry-defying, paradigm shifting announcement: the Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

With 2.5K,12-bit, RAW and 10-bit ProRes 1080p recording, a promised 13 stops of dynamic range, radical diminutive form factor, electronic EF mount, and innovative touch screen interface/monitor, the camera had filmmakers salivating straightaway. But then the truly jaw dropping feature landed: the price tag. All this could be had for $2,995. It seemed like a typo. Shouldn’t there be an extra digit in there somewhere? We were incredulous when we interviewed Blackmagic U.S. President Dan May last at the show.

The question remained: could the BMCC live up to its vaunted specs at this aggressive price point? Videos have recently begun trickling in from pre-production models answering enthusiastically in the affirmative. The images coming out of the camera were amazing, holding detail deep into the shadows, possessing pleasant, film-like highlight rolloff, and resolving incredible detail. This

Highlight Tech: Joker Big Eye

The Joker Big Eye is a Fresnel modifier that fits the 200, 400 and 800 Joker heads.

The Big Eye gives you plenty of bang for your buck with a 24” fresnel lens that packs extremely small and weighs significantly less than most smaller fresnel housings.

The glass is frosted for a softer light than your average fresnels, and the large size gives it more wrap than a traditional fresnel but still maintains a strong contouring directionality. Because of it’s size it feels a bit like a beauty dish, offering broad directional light.

The Big Eye will Zoom to spot and flood. From 60% wide open focusing all the way down to 10%. At 10% you can produce a narrow directional but still soft beam. It’s important to note the Big Eye significantly reduces the throw of the Joker, especially when flooded; at a 50% spread you lose about half of the output every 5ft.

Full photometrics can be found on k5600’s site.

Overall the Big Eye is a flattering light for tighter portrait length video shots or still photographers who want to experiment with a beauty dish alternative.

Canon Digital Cinema Event from Adorama

This coming Tuesday, join Adorama and Canon for an in depth Presentation by Larry Thorpe, Senior Fellow of the Professional Engineering & Solutions Division of Canon USA, Inc., on the Cinema EOS cameras, including the newly announced C500, C100, 1DC, as well as the C300.

The presentation will be followed by hands on time on the full Cinema Family products, CINE lenses (Primes and Zooms) and the Pro Camcorder lineup (XF/XA products).

Food and drinks drinks will be served. Doors open at 6, the presentation starts at 6.30, and you’ll have the opportunity to go hands-on with the gear at 8.

The event will be held at Union Square Ballroom, 27 Union Square W. Please click the image to RSVP. See you there!