On the rocks

I took this photo a while ago but have been experimenting with it again lately because I wanted to achieve a certain look. What I was going for is a soft, almost painting-like background, and a more contrasty, slightly oversharpened subject and foreground. I’ve seen those two style applied separately, but I thought that by combining them I could really make the subject jump out and at the same time create a somewhat surreal effect.

When I took the shot I purposely placed the flash visibly within the frame. One reason was that when shooting with a fisheye lens you have such a wide field of view that it’s almost impossible to place a flash outside the frame and still cast any significant amount of light on your subject. But it also makes the whole scene look a bit less serious.

Tweet of mouth

Twitter is rolling out a new retweet functionality to a select group of - probably random - users, including yours truly. Instead of retweeting someone’s original tweet by inserting “RT” and the username of the original author before it, you click a designated retweet button. Your followers then get to see the original tweet in their twitter stream, with the user icon of the original author.

I think that Twitter is overlooking one crucial aspect of social media here. Whenever I retweet something, it means that I want to tell my followers about something interesting I’ve seen elsewhere. The person who retweets puts the original message in a certain context, and lends it credibility. They can do that explicitly, by adding a few words of their own, or implicitly, just because you know who they are and what kind of stuff they’re interested in. It’s sort of like word of mouth. When a friend tells you about something he heard from someone else, you can put in into context because you know what kind of a person your friend is.

Now however, tweets from random strangers show up in my timeline, and I have to look at the small print below to see who retweeted them. And even then I have no idea why, because the retweeter can’t add their own comments. In the analog world that would be the equivalent of a total stranger randomly starting to tell you a story, instead of a friend telling you the story they heard from that person and why they thought it was interesting. What’s more: the retweets seem to show up on the Twitter website, and not in my desktop client (Tweetie).

The thing about Twitter seems to be that it’s so brilliantly simple that you can’t seem to add anything new to it without making it worse. I’m curious to see where this is going, but for now I can only conclude: RT #fail.

The making of

The “making of” is gradually becoming a more powerful way to communicate than the shiny, polished end product. Chase Jarvis did a great job producing the latest music video for Seattle-based band The Blakes, but even more interesting is the above “making of” video.

This beautifully styled mini documentary introduces the band, Chase and his staff, and a whole bunch of other people who made this project come together. You get to hear the stories behind the concept for the video and see a glimpse of what it takes to pull off a production like this. Everything is told from an engaging first person perspective.

There will always be a place for for the high-gloss end product, but it’s this behind-the-scenes stuff that really pulls you in. It just makes you want to invite Chase and The Blakes over to chat about their new album over a cup of coffee. And it certainly makes you want to watch the video again. In fact, that’s probably what I’m going to do right now.

One frame at a time

If you haven't already, you must check out Tom Lowe's timelapse videos. One frame at a time, he creates awesome shots of the night sky and mountain landscapes by stringing together hundreds or even thousands of individual long exposure photos. To create some extra depth, Tom puts the camera on a computer controlled dolly that moves along a track at precise increments. The resultng effect is that you see not only the movement of the stars, but also the changing perspective of objects in the foreground. Watch a little behind-the-scenes video after the break.

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Being everywhere

If you publish audio, video or photos on the web you will have to choose which site or service to use. The alternative is to just post them everywhere. Websites like Tubemogul allow you to upload videos to multiple sites at one with just one click of the mouse. The advantage is that you - in theory - reach more people. Some people hang out on YouTube while others frequent Vimeo and yet others use Viddler.

This "being everywhere" approach is what I use so far for IceScapes.tv. There are some drawbacks though. Sometimes you have to render your video in a different format because one of the sites doesn't accept the format you perfer. You might have to limit the length of the description of your video to the lowest common denominator. Some services accept more tags and keywords than others. The result is that you sometimes end up doing a quite a bit of extra work for each video.

So is it worth it? It depends... IceScapes.tv seems to get the most exposure and the most viewer comments on Vimeo so far. Some episodes occasionally get a few thousand views on one of the other sites, but then the next episode might get 2 views on that same site. I guess the conclusion is that you have to find the community that fits your content, and if you have some extra time on your hands, you can try to generate some extra exposure via other channels. On the other hand, I believe that social media and online sharing is going to shift from a numbers game (who has the most followers, the most views) to focusing on meaningful interactions. In that respect I'm tempted to ignore the viewer stats and just focus my energy on one or two platforms that generate some real interaction with the viewers.

What's your approach? Being everywhere or focus on a couple of sites that work for you? I'd love to hear your reaction the comments.

Landscape videography and avoiding supreme disappointment

According to über landscape photographer Ansel Adams, "Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer and often the supreme disappointment". That probably goes even more for landscape videography (not sure that's the proper terminology).

If you've ever tried to capture an otherwise interesting looking landscape on video, you very quickly notice that your shots have a tendency to turn out rather static. String a couple of those together into a video, and you have to squint really hard to convince yourself you're not actually looking at a photo slideshow - wait, did that blade of grass over there just move? And while some people are attracted to this type of minimalist aesthetic, most of your viewers might quickly zone out. When we watch a video after all we expect there to be stuff going on.

So how do we keep it interesting? Here's a couple of suggestions:

Panning and zooming - tiltling the camera up and down, or left and right can add interest to a scene where not much is happening otherwise. If you film at a higher resolution than your final output, you can do this also to a certain degree in post production, by showing only part of your frame.

Moving the camera itself - taking it a step further (literally), you can move the camera itself by walking around with it, or mounting it on a mobile platform such as a dolly, car, boat or helicopter. The movement is going to change the viewers perspective of the landscape, especially for elements that are in the foreground.

Motion - the human eye is very good at detecting subtle motion, so as long as there's water, trees, grass, or other moving objects in your frame, it's going to look less like a static photo. Of course you can also use less subtle motion by having things like people or cars moving across your field of view.

Changing light - things like the shadows of clouds moving across a landscape can make it seem much more alive and 3-dimensional. The changing of light between the different parts of the day can also do that, but unfortunately that takes a very long time, which is why we might have to resort to our next option...

Timelapse - by capturing only one frame every couple of seconds instead of dozens of frames per second we can speed things up a little, which makes motion that would be otherwise to subtle to perceive come alive.

These are just a few quick suggestions, so if you know of more and better ways, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Liquid Time

After finishing the most recent IceScapes.tv episode I felt like doing a quick experimental project that wouldn't take weeks of work to complete. For a while I've been wanting to play with the combination of very short shutter speeds and slow-motion. The result is this ultra-short experimental film called Liquid Time.

The Canon 5d mkII allows you to film at 1/4000th of a second, at 30 frames per second. That means you can "freeze" very fast moving subjects in time. To enhance that effect I played around with the time remapping feature in Final Cut Pro, slowing down the footage to between 10% and 20% of it's normal speed, smoothly ramping up and down the speed.

In addition I wanted to try out the in-camera picture styles of the 5d to achieve a contrasty black and white effect. Normally you would do something like that in post production, so you can tweak it untill it's exactly the way you want it, but I wanted to see if I can shorten the workflow a little bit by achieving this effect inside the camera and having it already baked into the footage. In a way it's limiting oneself, but that can also be a good thing. It enables you to purely focus on the creative process without getting lost in endless post production. Also, because the camera display gives me immediate feedback of what the end result is going to look like, I might shoot the same thing differently than I would have done otherwise. With the high contrast black and white for example, you can sometimes achieve a cool effect by over- or underexposing a little, creating bright whites and deep blacks.

Ilulissat icebergs

I already hinted at the imminent release of the latest IceScapes.tv episode yesterday... well, here it is. This one takes you on a short trip from the Ilulissat ice fjord to Red Bay in Greenland. The Ilulissat glacier is the most productive glacier in the northern hemisphere, creating an approximate 20 billion tons worth of icebergs per year, a few of which you will be able to spot in this episode. Enjoy!

IceScapes.tv on various websites

Happy to see that the previous episodes of IceScapes.tv titled "A thousand shades of white" is featured on Gliving.com in their G-tagged section. Also, it was chosen as editor's weekly pick on travercial.com, a website around travel videos. Overall I'm very pleased with the amount of positive response this episode has generated.

Preview IceScapes.tv episode 15

Above is a sneak peek at the latest IceScapes.tv episode that I've just finished. I've been working on this 2 minute long video for a very long time now, as it involved a lot of smoothcam analysis, time remapping and color grading, and hopefully the end result is worth it. After this I really feel like doing a quick and easy project that involves little to no post-production.