Film & Photography

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Windsurf & Kite Session

I took a couple of hours on Friday afternoon to shoot with an old friend of mine, Whitey . It was a pretty exceptional day for wind and sun, it was almost hard to believe when I arrived at the beach, that I was in Clacton.

For me, I wanted to try out an old, very cheap, manual Soligor lens shooting some action. The wind and direction made keeping the long lens stable a bit of a challenge, especially given the lens length and that I wasn’t using a rail set up. I put this short edit together for fun, from some of the footage, with all except the wide shots at the beginning on the Soligor. Whitey has some nice pics on his page too, so it’s worth taking a look there.

 

“Jack Plugs” CGI with Cheetah 3D

Created with Cheetah 3D, the mac only cg software. I was just trying out the new version and came up with this image, whilst working with splines. Modelling wise, it’s just a doodle, as my main goal was to try different lighting set ups. This scene is lit by 5 spheres, emitting light. The only post processing was conversion to black & white, even though the render was almost monochrome. Around an 1h30 total, with modelling, layout and rendering. I might go back and add some extra detail when I get time.

 

Scratchtapes : Glitch

I’ve just added a new pack to the Scratchtapes collection, the first of a few I’m rolling out over the next couple of months. Glitch, is a pack of 20 short clips, from a few frames, to a few seconds in length. Like the Dirt collection, they are really intended to add low fi elements to clean footage, though they can be used in their own right.

I’ve called this pack Glitch, as that’s probably the best description of how they can be used. Consisting of film clutter, light streaks, video noise & interference, as well as some general weirdness, the pack is available for a reasonable $20/£13.

Here is a very short and slightly leftfield demo, giving an example of how they can be used.

For more info, check out the Glitch pack page here

Tide Mill Black & White conversion

Out testing some old lenses last week and passed by Thorrington tide mill, which is across the road from where we used to live. A great spot, backed by creeks and a lake, it doesn’t get a huge amount of visitors. We used to walk our daughter here, when she was a baby, so it was nice to stop by and think back for a few minutes.

Just before leaving I shot this and thought it would make a good subject for black and white conversion. Using Silkypix to process the raw, I played with curves, a little sharpening and then added back in a little grain, just for taste. Quite pleased with the end result, even though there is a little distortion from the lens. Smugmug are now offering a UK print service, so I might use this as one of my trial prints to check it out.

Old images re visited

I’ve been going through my galleries over on my Smugmug site, trying to weed out some of the lower resolution images. They’ve just made UK printing available for the first time, so I’m taking time to prepare some older shots, to try this new service out.
This image, was one of the earlier images that I took with my GH1, back in 2009 ( which seems like yesterday ). I’d noticed some noise in the version that was in my galleries, so took the original RAW and tried to clean it up again. This is about as far as I could get with it, processing in Silkypix, but it does seem to me to be an improvement over the first version I made back then.

The photo is of the Gorge du Dard, below Mont Saxonnex in France, where I lived for several years. Just above here is a waterfall , which i’ve filmed and photographed a few times. Beautiful spot.

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