This is one of the saddest photos ever. This is Paddy, our friend’s cat. Paddy went blind in one eye, and then had it removed. Paddy then went blind in the other eye, and had that one removed.

While this photo makes me sad, it’s also a great photo, which makes me happy. I alternate between happy and sad. It’s such an awesome photo, but such a terrible thing…

I’ve shared this sentiment with Paddy’s owner, and it’s all good. So find sadness, but also find happiness.

Good Luck Paddy… Hang in There!

If you’re on location with the RED, it’s a good idea to have a Digital Imaging Technician Station (or DIT Station) which will allow you to backup up all the footage you are shooting while you are in the field, and will also allow you to view the footage and make sure it’s all good before you leave the field.

If you’ve got an unlimited budget, I’d recommend the top of the line MacBook Pro (which can easily run $3,000-$4,000+ depending on how you deck it out) as well as a few external drives. Look at the G-Technology offerings, as they have various solutions depending on your budget and needs. The G-Raid mini is a nice, small, bus-powered drive with a quad interface (FW400, FW800, USB2, eSata.) Get a few of these. You could go with the 1TB, but the 500GB might be fine. You want your data in two places, and not “RAID two places” but “two different physical drives” places. The RED Drive holds 320GB, so if you are dumping a full RED Drive, you could just dump it to a 500GB drive (well, two drives) and mark it as “DONE” and move on. Oh, and since we have gobs of money, pick up an ExpressCard with eSata on it to put in your new MacBook Pro.

For the “dumping” of data, you can either use something like R3D Data Manager which does all sorts of checksums for the data, can backup to multiple locations at once, and has other nice features, or you can do a standard Finder copy. R3D Data Manager is $79, which is not too bad… again, what is your footage worth? If you want to fly in the Finder, and can review everything you dump, that can work too.

Speaking of software, RED has provided a number of excellent tools for free. Grab REDCINE-X, RED ALERT! and whatever else you may need at RED’s support site. REDCINE-X is a nice little app for checking the footage you just shot.

So where’s the “Low Cost” part come in? Well, let’s say you don’t have the budget for the top of the line MacBook Pro… that’s fine, get the bottom of the line MacBook Pro (at least get a Pro, you want Firewire 800!) and with that get some drives. I still really like the G-Raid minis, but you could probably find USB bus-powered drives that are cheaper (and slower!) if needed, but again, we do want as much speed as we can afford. (Bus-powered drives are nice because you never know where power will be when on location… if there is power at all.)

If you are shooting to CF Cards, do yourself a favor and get a Sandisk Extreme FireWire Reader (about $65) which will dramatically speed up transferring of footage compared to a cheap USB Card Reader. (The low end MacBook Pro has just one Firewire port, but you can plug the Firewire CF Card Reader into the the back of the G-Raid mini, which has two ports.

So we’ve go the MacBook Pro, which is $1,300 before adding AppleCare (but here’s a tip, you can get a refurb, plus AppleCare for it, for about $1,295) add in two G-Raid minis (the 500GB) at about $450, and a CF Card Reader for $65. We come in under $2,000 for this set up, which is not the ULTIMATE portable RED DIT Station, but it’s a Low Cost one, that is effective enough to get the job done.

Work can be hectic, work can be stressful, but work can also be fun.

I got the chance to fly out to Arizona for a shoot last week. When we left Milwaukee (at 5AM) it was 0° and a few hours later we were in Arizona where it was about 65°. A nice change of pace from the harsh Wisconsin winters. We also went out to the desert for some shooting while we were there. Sure, it go cold at night (in the 40’s) but we survived.

The first day I think we wrapped just before 1AM, and since we’d gotten up around 4AM to get to the airport, well, it was a loooong day. The second day was a bit more laid back, but we still hustled and got everything shot.

This was our first out-of-state shoot with the Red One and our biggest worry was traveling with it. Scott Bourne’s blog post Traveling? Better Get a UPS Account had me a little worried, and we decided that checking in our baby was not a good idea, and shipping it all was not a good option due to the tight schedule of the project, so what we ended up doing was buying a ticket for the Red One. Yup, it ended up being a passenger, with it’s own ticket, and it’s own seat. (Sadly, it didn’t get it’s own carry-on or snack.)

We had two other crucial pieces of gear, and since we had 3 people flying out there, two of us just took the gear as carry-ons. This let us know where the gear was at all times, and as I said more than once “equipment is more important than clothes!” meaning, we could buy new clothes, but lenses, filters, matte box, etc. would be near impossible to replace if it was lost along the way.

Making sure the Red One could go on the plane took quite a bit of legwork and phone calls. Between the TSA and the airline, we got conflicting information, but eventually we were armed with printouts from the TSA web site and reassurance that what we wanted to do would work… and it did.

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Paul had a blog post titled Produce Before You Consume, which points to this original post titled Produce before you Consume, which is a call to people who make things to make things before you look at all the things other people made.

So somewhat related to that, I’ve gotten in the habit of consuming content before bedtime, that is, getting caught up with Google Reader, specifically visual design, photography, and video sites. I find it a good way to relax and ingest things after a long day…. if I’m lucky, a long day of trying to create things. This is my answer to working 12+ hours and just not having the energy to produce anything myself, I find it inspirational, and I hope that somehow it may influence my thoughts and dreams while I sleep.

Self Portrait for December 2009.

Taken with a Nikon D40 digital camera with plastic wrap affixed to the front of the lens.

(Special thanks to Dischord Records.)

These are photos I shot with a 35mm Canon film camera back in college at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. I’d estimate the year to be 1991 or 1992. I did not develop the film (it was black and white) but made 8×10 prints in the darkroom. I don’t remember what grade I got in the class, but I remember that I enjoyed going out and shooting. Thinking about it now, I’m actually surprised how long it took me to get back into photography after a long hiatus. (I blame Z2 Photo.)

I really enjoyed the environment and serenity of the darkroom. The actual waiting to see what would come out. Sometimes I think that’s missing in the digital world. Nowadays you take a shot, or 5 shots, zoom in on them on an LCD screen, see what looks good, and what doesn’t and then do all sorts of digital manipulations back at your 27″ monitor. Yeah, I do miss the simplicity of it all…

I don’t think I’ll shoot film again, but I may make an effort to get into that film mindset from time to time when I’m shooting digital. I think it may help the image making process…

I’ll try to upload more of these as I scan them in. Keep an eye on my Flickr stream for more…

Yeah, it’s pretty amazing…

The Red One (seen here with the Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 lens mounted on it) is a digital cinema camera. It just can’t be considered a “video camera” by any means.

It’s interesting how much of what you know from photography and film seems to come into play when using it, as opposed to what you know about video, and your old fashioned video cameras.

Not that I’m much of an expert yet, as I’ve spent just a very short amount of time working with the Red One.

But I do have to agree with anyone who has used the word “amazing” to describe it.

Red One. Amazing.

Settings in MPEG Streamclip for encoding to an MP4 file.

This is mostly here for my own reference, but if you find it useful, or have another suggestion, I welcome your comments…

Another day, another couple of links to interesting projects…. projects that are interesting not just because they were executed well, and created something worth seeing, but interesting because once again the people behind them claim that they did it for “zero dollars” or “300 dollars” or some other number that is ridiculously low.

As someone who has worked in the creative industry for many (many) years, I know it’s not true, and I’m guessing others in the creative industry also know it’s not true, but does everyone know? Does the general public know? Do potential clients know?

One project was a film that someone worked on for 6 months, and the end result was pretty damn cool, but by claiming the project cost $300 the person is suggesting that their time was worth nothing, and their equipment was worth nothing, and somehow it all just materialized out of thin air.

Another project (again, a film) said it was done with “zero budget” which I guess means the experience of the people involved was worthless, and the $10,000 worth of equipment they used was just sort of magically handed to them, and anyone could have it.

If your band wants to shoot an epic music video for free, and you manage to get your friends with the experience and the equipment to donate their time, and the results are amazing, that’s cool… I’m all for it. Just don’t devalue the efforts of all involved by saying it was done for $0.00

I’m going to assume that the people behind these things know what they are doing, and my guess is that what they are doing is marketing. To that I say well done! It’s clever, I’ll give them that.

But wait, don’t I do the same thing? I mean, I shot like 50 free portraits at BarCampMilwaukee4. I could say it cost me NOTHING but in all honesty, Sam Dodge and I spent a few hours doing the shooting, and I spent many more hours editing and posting the photos, and I had to buy my equipment in order to even take photos (as did Sam) and I had to put in hours to learn how to shoot portraits… Don’t get me wrong, many things can be done for low-costs, but to assume it costs nothing seems silly.

If you look at a project like Help-Portrait, it’s about giving back, from people who are skilled, and have the equipment, and want to help others. It’s only made possible by the fact that people are willing to donate their time (which has some value) and that people have the needed equipment/supplies/etc. (which was probably paid for from some other paying job.)

If it’s a labor of love, and a project you want to do, by all means do it, do it well, do it great, and talk about it. I just have an issue with people telling other people it cost them “nothing” to create something. I’m working on a film and while I’m doing it for very little cost, and even though I’m borrowing a lot of the equipment, there’s still consumables like gasoline, and tapes, and paper, and ink, and things like hard drives and software, and web hosting, and there’s the many, many, many hours I’ve spent (and will spend) shooting, and editing, and eventually promoting it.

There’s an old saying that comes to mind: It’s only free if your time has no value.