Technical Ramblings

So, I’ve been an amateur photographer for years. I started helping to take pictures of family vacations with my dad’s AE-1 back when I was in grade school. I took photo classes in college, and I got my first digital camera in 2003. (I still have it, by the way.)

I’ve had a Digital Rebel for the past 9 years. (I got my first in December of 2005.) I’ve had my most recent camera for another 3 or so. I’ve brought these cameras to a dozen conferences and events; I’ve used them in bars, on skating rinks, at the beach. I have uploaded over 6000 public pictures to Flickr — which means that in that time, I’ve probably *thrown away* another 12000 or so. (My rate of success has drifted over time, from as low as 10% to as high as 75%.)

I won’t claim I’m an expert photographer — I’m good at taking candid portraits, but a lot of other things continue to evade my skills — but I’ve taken a lot of pictures, and I like a lot of what I take these days.

And now that I’ve started looking at video, that all changes.

I have no meaningful experience with video. I helped run the camcorder at a couple of events for my dad (who has been doing video for years), but that’s it. Now I’m faced with an entirely different medium, with a different set of requirements, and a different set of tools, and I find myself feeling completely frustrated by my efforts.

The number one thing that I learned with digital photography is you have to prepared to throw away 90% of what you take, especially when you get started. (It took me a while to get good at this.) Most of the pictures you take will be crap; even if you got the frame and content you tried to capture, you might have caught a person blinking, or have a photo that’s more out of focus, or with the wrong color balance to the point you can’t adjust it any more.

With video, the same is true (at least, I feel that way): most shots don’t come out the way you want them to. Even worse: a minor edit to a shot can change it from being perfectly reasonable to being silly (or from being perfectly silly to looking just reasonable). So in addition to finding the perfect shot, you’ve got to edit it right.

Attention spans are short. I once read an article from someone complaining about ‘quick cuts’ in modern TV. Since then I’ve paid careful attention, and learned that it is rare for most TV to have single visual cuts that are longer than about 3-5 seconds. (If you watch fast-paced shows like The Amazing Race, this drops by half; you have tons of super-fast clips.) Even for a relatively short, 3.5 minute video, my Ohanami video, on average people only watch one minute of it before they stop. (And I consider that video one of my better / more entertaining efforts so far!)

When I started editing video from my quadcopter, Jess jokingly sent me a link to the Friend Who Sent Link To 8-Minute YouTube Video Must Be Fucking Delusional Onion article, in response to my first Phantom FC40 edited video. I defended my position, indicating that I had put a lot of work into trimming out the boring parts… but since then, I’ve become much more ruthless. (In the case of the Ohanami video, I edited approximately 1.5 hours of total video footage into a 3 minute clip reel, and it was relatively well-received.) As usual, my lovely wife was right: people don’t care about 90% of the footage I’m filming, a lesson I should have learned from photography.

Even beyond editing, I’ve got new equipment problems. While the DSLR is great for shooting photos, shooting video with it means holding it out far from me, which makes steady shooting hard. You get jumpy, jerky footage (as you can see in the Us at the Zoo video I put together from this weekend); zooming with a lens is great for photos, but crappy for videos.

In part, this is my choice of tool. The DSLR is a fine camera now that I’ve learned to use it, but it’s not clear that it’s the best tool for shooting video, but it’s what I’ve got for the moment. But even ignoring that, I’ve got the bigger problem: Shooting candid, entertaining video is an entirely different ballgame.

I’m enjoying learning new tricks, and producing slightly more compelling footage and editing. I’m enjoying this new medium; I’ve been watching lots of other people’s videos, to learn how to do it right — or at least better. (My favorite candid family gathering video is this Easter video that someone posted in one of the quadcopter forums due to its use of a quad for a couple of the shots. This has actually been a primary motivator for me to get out there and see what I can do.) So far what I’m learning more than anything else is “This is hard work!”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2014 at 7:23 am and is filed under default, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.