Arthur Harkins with Sun Circuit at the Red Brick Cafe

The Red Brick Cafe is a great place for a coffee and spending hours on your laptop (free wifi), as well as for wine and sweets. The Cafe schedules performers (music, readings) on a regular basis. The exposed brick, high ceilings, and rotation of artworks on the walls, all situated in the old stone-and-brick part of Guelph lends the Cafe a European/bohemian University-town flavour, with just a hint of gentrification creeping in. It's fantastic in a lot of ways but shooting a video in "natural, cafe" light, it is not.

It is too dark for acceptable video shoots (additional lights would kill the ambience in what is supposed to be a candid shoot), and two handfuls of people seriously hinders any movement of any sort. I was lucky in that the Cafe was only half empty on a slow Wednesday night.

When I first saw the room, my first thought was to turn around and back out the door but then I thought that this would be a good opportunity to test the limits of the Sony APS-C sensors: the stretched-to-the-limit 24MP on the a65 and the soon-to-be--legendary 16MP on the a57.

The a65 had the 16-50 f2.8, video capped at ISO1600. the a57 had the 35f1.8, video capped at ISO3200. I cannot back my conclusions with any scientific date but the a57's 16MP sensor is far and away the winner in low light. I don't care for low noise, low grain, or artifacts. To me, content is king, and everything else is  secondary. Being there, and capturing the moments, with the least amount of intrusion is of paramount importance. 

All the frames have been cropped to varying degrees, including  panning and zooming crops, and the exposure and colours are as they were captured. Most of the panning and zooming was done in post! The large sensors allow for extensive cropping in pans and zooms! I don't think this feature is emphasized enough in the camera ads.With more time, I'll be able to play around with effects, gradation, etc. There will also be 2-3 more videos from the same performance.
The audio is strictly from the  Sony a65, the stationary cam, or B-cam (the a65 is much inferior to the cheaper a57 in terms of audio capture and video quality in low light) using a Rode Pro mic. The video is in its rough'ish stage and I haven't incorporated the audio from the Zoom H4n which was situated beside and 2 feet above the a65. The audio from the H4n is to my ears, CD quality! The a65 audio may sound tinny but the music already sounded tinny in the room and the audio as it stands now is a very good reproduction of how I heard the music. The H4n shoud be the device of choice for bootlegging live shows.

I'm just now editing a wedding I shot last week where I have to sync the h4n audio with the video...fun, fun, fun

Enjoy!

Frame Grabs from a video shot

I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the frame grabs from the Sony a65. I used either the Minolta 100-200f4.5 or the Sony 16-50f2.8. Video shot at 1280x720 60P. If I had known I'd be grabbing frames, I'd have shot at 1980x1280 60P. Frame grab using MPEG Streamclip, with the stills processed in Photoshop CS5.1. Frames have been upsized to 6"x 4" @ 300dpi.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oct 4th.

2012 Booty Bash

My latest video, shot in a really, really dark venue. It's a challenge in itself but in addition, the Sony a65 I used is capped at ISO1600 for video. I wish I had the hacked GH2 with the high ISO and high bitrate.

Now that I have the Sony a57 (capped at ISO3200), I'm looking forward to my next wedding video in early October. I used 3 lenses: Minolta 50f1.7, Sony 35f1.8, Sony 16-50f2.8. Lighting on some clips was with a Lumahawk 144LED.

I couldn't use the soon-to-be legendary (and proprietary) Sony phase detect autofocus because this closes down the aperture to f3.5. I used manual focus and although the focus peaking works really well, the room was so dark I had to pull and push the focus quickly to find out where the focus was. It was a constant battle looking for focus in a fast moving crowd. I used 1980x1080 @60p.

The soundtrack needs to be redubbed as "the highlights are clipped", to use a photo term. Not sure what the proper wording is in the audio world.

A nervous cool guy

Nick is a cool guy but there's no hiding his nervousness on this very important day!

Nick getting ready from Diogenes Baena on Vimeo.

Minolta lenses!

When I switched from Canon to Minolta (see my blog entry on this), little did I know of the treasure trove of Minolta legacy lenses that remained to be discovered!

A historical perspective is in order.

Minolta was founded Japan in 1928, and along with Canon, Nikon, Konica, Olympus, Pentax, Fuji, Bronica, Yashica, and Mamiya, made Japan famous for affordable (read: non-German) cameras for both amateurs and professionals. Konica merged with Minolta in 2003, and the SLR segment of Konica-Minolta was bought by Sony in 2006.

Minolta lenses have a well-earned reputation for superior optical and construction quality and these lenses, particularly the AF lenses, are 100% compatible with the latest Sony SLT bodies. More importantly, these lenses can be had on eBay and on craigslist for a fraction of the price of comparable Canon L and Nikon Nikkors. In addition, the older Mnolta MD and MC lenses may be mounted on the current Sonys with very inexpensive adaptors.

In the last few 5 days, I have obtained 5 really good, bordering on great, Minolta lenses: a 35-105f4-4.5 and a set of 50f1.7, 50f3.5macro, 28f2.8, and 100-200f4.5 in exchange for a Canon 40D+grip (my last Canon to go). A quick test of these lenses reveal that the coatings are unblemished, the aperture blades are oil free, the zoom doesn't creep, and best of all, they are all tack-sharp!!

Special thanks to Stan Yip for taking my excellent-but-unwanted 40D in exchange for his surplus Minolta glass!

Sony a65 with the 16-50f2.8

Sony a65, non-macro Sony 16-50f2.8 at 50mm, 1/8sec handheld, made possible with  SSI (Steady Shot Inside) and the articulating finder with phase detect Live View, ISO1600. Notice the area defined by blue; see below for detail:

Amazing combo!!! I have never had so much fun with photography! No sharpening. Feb 26th.

Hockey-in-the-Woods

At the Guelph Arboretum, under tall maples, birches, poplars, and cherries are areas that are flooded in the winter and spring. I came across two U of G students, Joey and Ben,  enjoying a game of hockey on an unseasonably warm early February day.

High Definition version

The credit for the music should be:
JS Bach, 23 French Suite No. 6, BWV 817, E major_ Sarabande
(A newer version with the right credits will be uploaded next week).

2 cars and a truck

 

 

Chinatown. Jan 28th.

The colours of Kensington Market.

A grey, cold and overcast day made for a sparse crowd (and super saturated colours) in Kensington Market. Images from the back streets around Dundas and Spadina in Toronto's Chinatown.

 

 

 

 

Jan 28th.
More photos here!

Nikon fused vs. Sony Twilight mode

Fused-image from 3 images (-2V, 0, +2V). Shooting the bracketed exposures on a tripod, to processing in Photomatix, then Photoshop CS5 took approx. 15 minutes.  RAW, Nikon 5100, 16-85 f3.5-5.6G, 2sec, 1/2sec, 1/8 sec f5.6, ISO400, tripod.

Straight out of camera jpg using the the Twilight Mode on the Sony a65. Shooting handheld and opening in Photoshop CS5 (for resizing for web) took approx 1 minute. Jpg (no RAW option), Sony a65, Sony DT16-50f2.8, 1/60, f3.2, ISO6400.

Woman's rant against the atrocities committed in The Democratic Republic of Congo

A participant in a demonstration (Queen and Bay, Toronto) against the atrocities committed in The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as a result of the mining of Coltan. The DRC supplies 75% (!!!) of the world's coltan. Without Coltan, none of the hundreds of millions of cellphones would function.

One more video on the what is happening in the Congo: