Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Wine & Dine...

Testing my gear and practicing my shooting skills, I teamed up with my friend Patrick who happens to be a film maker (it's good to know people ;)) and also volunteered another friend's cozy wine bar to do a little test shoot...you can see the rough cut here, I will re-edit this later and make a few more sequences using other footage we got.



I learned a lot about what works and what works less...I have the Canon 70-200 F4 lens, NO IS, normally I shoot in the studio so I never had the need for image stabilization and when buying it decided to save a few hundred $$$ and go without the IS. Worked fine until I started moving the camera zoomed all the way out (@200), oh boy, now I really understand camera shake...had to be super careful...thinking about getting the IS version...

Patrick had his 5" SmallHD monitor with him - monitor is a must have! (both SmallHD & Marshall Electronics make great monitors to go along with your DSLR or video camera, Sony has a nice 5", full featured monitor as well at a very competitive price).

The SmallHD, being a pro monitor had a lot of useful features like focus assist, false colors, etc and will cost accordingly.

Although Marshall also has high end monitors, I decided to get one of their 7" monitors I saw at NAB 2011, it has non of the pro features but gives a great image and helps determine focus and composition a 100 times better then looking at the screen on the back of the camera...(costs half of the SmallHD or other more "pro" monitors! but you do get half the features).
Another option is to use an Electronic View Finder like the Zacutto and similar brands (comes in handy when outside in bright light) but your face has to be glued to the camera, some people don't prefer that type of workflow...

Lighting - I brought 4 Dynalite heads with me and only used two of them, with the sensitivity of the 5D2/7D sensor, we only needed to compliment the available light, not to over power it so the 250w modeling light of the Dynalite worked great!

We had to work around an active bar/restaurant that in-spite of it being a Sunday (supposedly a slow night) was packed at one point!
(no customers were hurt in the making of this video ;))

All the footage was edited with Adobe Premiere pro CS 5.5 - an amazing new tool I just started to use and get familiar with - slowly becoming addicted...in a good way :)

Here are some behind the scenes footage so you can get a better feel for what was going on :)

Patrick working the camera:



Me "doing" the food - btw, we got to eat everything :)



Special thanks to Mike & Mike (owner and chef respectively) for being super hospitable, accommodating & just cool in general!

If you like a wild wine and beer selection and prefer freshly cooked, delicious food, check out Vino 313 in Manhattan (corner of 31st street and 3rd Ave), let the mikes know we are friends ;) Vino313

2 comments:

  1. Freaking awesome I wish I was there with you guys I want to go shooting so bad please let me know next time ill be happy just to be a helper great work ^__^

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  2. Absolutely, you are on! would love to have you on board - great energy & skills!

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