Here’s a few stills from some footage I’ve been shooting on my wanders around New York with my Canon 7D and 2.8 lens. I’m editing them into some shape of a video to give a flavour of New York in the summer but as with all undefined projects, when are you finished? Especially when it’s a city that keeps throwing up some amazing sights.
The two things that stand out the most for me are the camera’s low light performance which means you can capture night scenes as you see them. I’ve written about this before but it’s great to have this performance in such an unassuming camera. Then there’s the crazy weather! Stifling humidity and frightening thunderstorms. Bring on September.
The season finale of House aired about two weeks ago but I only caught it last night in HD on iTunes. I was keen to watch this one because it was shot on the Canon 5D SLR using photographic lenses, the first time anything like this has been done for a major TV show.
I’m a big fan of shooting HD with these Canons, I use a 7D after changing over from a Sony HDV. There’re compromises, pros and cons between the two. However the convenience, ease and quality of output from Canon’s HD SLRs wins it for me.
So I settled down to watch House and see what a pro crew could get out of the 5D. I gave up after a few minutes. I’ve never watched House before and the story totally absorbed me. I just forgot about the camera aspect of it, it didn’t matter. Straight away that’s a good thing. Camera heads can discuss the colours and pixels and artifacts, but the story stood head and shoulders above all of this.
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Ok, I’m a bit late to the game with this one but I’ve only come across these colour pictures of Ireland taken in 1913. Now we can see how miserable we all looked…in colour!
The stills are part of a collection of autochrome pictures taken worldwide at the time. I find them fascinating, partially because as a child I thought the world was literally black and white up until around the fifties (yeah yeah yeah, look the logistics of the presumed changeover to colour didn’t weigh heavy on my mind at the time), but also because true colour pictures from that part of the century are rare. We are just so used to seeing the past in black and white.
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…but I have been busy getting settled into the U.S.A. of America. I’ll be with you shortly.
Alan Gilsenan is the acclaimed Irish documentary director whose work includes The Asylum, The Hospice and I See a Darkness. Last week in The Irish Times he listed the 10 most important rules he adheres to when making documentaries.
While it’s aimed at documentary makers and other media heads, it’s an appealing and humorous read with some good life lessons in there for everyone!
1. OPEN YOUR EYES AND EARS
Call me old-fashioned, but you don’t make documentaries sitting at your desk. You’ve really got to get out of the house or the office or the pub. But once you manage to finally shrug off your inherent apathy and venture out into the wild blue yonder, you need to look and listen.
Really look and really listen. Listen to people. To their stories. To what is said and what remains unsaid. Listen to the sounds of the wilderness and the hum of the city. See what is actually there before your eyes, not what you imagined was there or what you had hoped would be there. See the beauty in the ugliness and the ugliness in the beauty.
Then ask yourself what is all this really telling me? What is this not telling me? And when you realise that you don’t understand any of it, that none of this makes any sense at all, but yet you still instinctively feel that it may have some inherent importance, then record it.
Document it. Preserve it. You can sort it out later and maybe even begin to understand it (this is called editing and it is a dark and secret art).
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Here’s a a short clip of some time-lapse photography I took in Kilkenny City last night. While time-lapses are fun to watch, they usually consist of life (humans, nature, engineering) sped up to show slow progress over a quick period.
However, instead of a time-lapse showing people scurrying about the place, I wanted to show the earth itself rotating, because when everyone is done moving for the day and stationary at home in bed, the world continues to spin.
Digital cameras make it easier to do these slow-shutter lapses, so I pointed my camera at the clock tower of the Kilkenny Design Centre and then directly across the road to the entrance gate of the castle itself. Photography like this is slow, it can take an hour to get enough pictures to make 5 seconds of video and that’s why the clip is so short.
To break it down, depending on the time-lapse picture you’re capturing, it can take up to 30 seconds to get one picture (you leave the shutter open for 30 seconds to let enough light in to capture the stars). In turn, it takes 25-30 pictures to make 1 second of video.
I was lucky last night. The redesign of the area outside Kilkenny Castle means the harsh orange street lights that usually populate urban areas, and drown out our view of the stars, have been removed in favour of more subtle lighting. While that helped, the subtle lighting then shut off shortly after midnight. Whether that was for energy saving reasons (which I applaud) or whether they went on the blink (which wouldn’t surprise me!) the area was left covered by moonlight which was unusual but perfect!
http://www.vimeo.com/11271906
I like this picture of a French customs officer playing with his sniffer dog in a deserted Charles-De-Gualle airport as the ash from the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull-göes-bööm, continues to ground flights across northern Europe.
Meanwhile, staying with northern Europe and, of course, sniffer dogs, this four legged explosives expert joined his handler recently as they took part in a NATO exercise in Norway.
Man, cats seem really useless now…
I watched an engaging and funny talk today given by Ken Robinson at TED 4 years ago.
In it he talks of how the inherent creativity in young people is curbed by education systems worldwide that put academic subjects like maths and science ahead of the arts and vocations. He describes how the school system we know today came about in the 19th century to provide useful, productive workers for the industrialism at the time (you can watch the talk here).
And things haven’t changed. I was out recently with a group of friends who are secondary school teachers. They talked about how important it was to enforce rules regarding the school uniform because it prepared the students for the office place uniform of the shirt and tie. Which is a worrying thought for 2 reasons.
- If school is to prepare young people for the workplace, why is it that taxpayers fund schools and not the large employers that students are being prepared for?
- What kind of workplaces are students being primed for that make the mindless, rote learning which dominates education, a good preparation?
Well perhaps the Young Explorer answers that. Boy oh boy you can start deflating your child’s optimism for a cheery future early with this toy. A cubicle bound desk-jockey my son, that’s what your schooling will train you for.
The Young Explorer manages to make the McDonald’s Drive-Thru Food Cart look aspirational.
This blog post will change your life. Well the part of your life that you spend behind the wheel of a car. And it’s not a change for the better.
I present to you the four slowest driven cars on the road. If this pattern hasn’t stood out to you in the past, it’ll jump out at you now.
So much so that if you find yourself in the middle of a sluggish convoy, you can bet that it’s one of these cars in front. If you have a chance to overtake one of these cars, do it, DO IT! And avoid the inevitable frustration coming down the road.
Indicators? They’re optional for these drivers. An awareness of the traffic around them? Nope, not a chance. A constant 60 km/h in both 100 and 40 km/h zones. You bet!
Here’s a little glimpse into the minds of these drivers.
Yes Knight Rider’s KITT is back! At least for a 20 second ad anyway, and that 20 seconds is better than the whole series of the resurrected Knight Rider show from 2008. Voiced by the original artist, William Daniels, KITT is seen getting a tyre change and some pampering in a Kwik Fit. The ad launches this coming Monday. Hopefully this leads to a series of the ads!
The trailer for Sylvester Stallone’s new cock-a-block action flick The Expendables was released last week and while there was much excitement it. And that’s understandable, I mean Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the same film? But that’s where part of the problem is, it isn’t really Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the same film. And that’s just one of the snags.
First up, judging by the trailer (watch it here) the movie looks like an ’80s action flick and for me that just won’t do. Even in the ’80s action movies were tepid with humdrum looking and sounding action sequences. Then Die Hard came along and changed things visually. But The Expendables looks like we’re right back there with its uninspiring visuals.
Then there’s the ‘legendary’ line up, but there seems to be a lot of padding…
All the talk is of Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the same movie but, again going on the trailer, there is a complete lack of Willis abseiling through a window on a firehose or Schwarzenegger urging people to get to a helicopter.
Basically, two of the world’s biggest bad-asses don’t seem to be blowing anything up or putting bullets through peoples’ foreheads. They just seem to be, well, talking. And while that scene looks cool, it may just be the best part of the film. So enjoy that scene again and again below.
…that the director behind some of my favourite music videos is a fellow Irish man. Meiert Avis’ early work featured U2 music videos from when they were an up and coming band and went on to include my favourite U2 video Where The Streets Have No Name. But I think his best work was with Bruce Springsteen for the amazing Brilliant Disguise video.
This almost anti-music video is a one take, 4 minute long, slow zoom into Springsteen from a wide shot to an extreme close of his face. While it may be difficult to watch it really aids the song’s lyrics about the dark side of a relationship, landing on the singers face as he delivers the lines ‘God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of’. According to wikipedia it was nominated for Video of the Year and, strangely, Best Editing, at the MTV musis awards.
Check it out below and the U2 video below that.
I’m trying not to get too excited about this but it looks like the film Hot Tub Time Machine is shaping up to be THE FINEST FILM EVER MADE.
With reviews like “Hot Tub is a balls-to-the-wall Hard-R comedy complete with tasteless humor, nudity and foul language” (cinemaobsession.com), “Hot Tub Time Machine…succeeds beyond any expectations suggested by the title” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) and an “idiotic movie to go with its willfully idiotic title” (Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune) it’s shaping up to be the film your girlfriend moans most about being dragged to see!
Check out the trailer below or, if you’re not in work, the cruder red-band version below that.
In sci-fi films the s**t usually hits the fans around about the time that the computer or robot becomes ’self aware’. Well photoshop has become almost self aware except this new tool is called ‘content aware’.
This video from Adobe shows how the new tool goes beyond the usual retouching tools to actually reimaginging and creating imagery in your picture where there wasn’t any before.
The first photo example shows how handy this tool will be, but skip along to towards the end and the last two examples. It’s gets a bit creepy for me.
A great singer-songwriter Pete Fagan asked me to record his performance at the Apollo Sessions last night in The Bleeding Horse, Camden Street, Dublin. I saw Pete perform for the first time only a few months and I was amazed with his voice and his performance. Here his is playing a brilliant new song he wrote called Smile.
http://www.vimeo.com/10362342
I’m sure you remember the wonderful rendition of Afternoon Delight by Ron Burgundy and the rest of KVWN-TV’s Channel 4 News Team from Anchorman…
So anyway there I was, last night, at the Apollo Sessions in The Bleeding Horse on Camden Street in Dublin, shooting footage of singer-songwriter Pete Fagan playing some of his new work. When he finished, I packed up my cameras, stuck them in the car, parked up and headed back to the pub for a drink.
Then, towards the end, an unassuming American was invited on stage. It turned out to be a Mr Bill Danoff who wrote the well known Country Roads (seen here performing it with John Denver) and the even better known Afternoon Delight! he starts off the song explaining how it ended up in Anchorman (Will Ferrell and the guys were waiting around on set and started singing) and all I had on me at this stage was my iPhone…
Still, I wasn’t expecting that from a Sunday night in Dublin. By the way, that’s not my voice you hear singing right next to the phone!
The song really reminds though me of this scene from one of the best TV shows ever made Arrested Development!
It’s a universal remote control that also opens beers. Keep it simple, stupid.
(Via Gizmodo and Myclicker)
Let’s set the scene; The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is the third movie in the billion dollar grossing series of films based on the Twilight novels and isn’t due for release until June of this year.
Meanwhile, The Eclipse is an Irish film directed by Conor McPherson and shot in Cobh, Co. Cork. It gets a limited U.S. later this month.
Now guess which one of these films the Irish broadcaster R.T.E. showed on St Patrick’s night and guess which one of these films R.T.E’s graphics department thought they were showing on St Patrick’s night…
**SHAMROCK SHORTAGE SOLVED.**
In the meantime, Ireland’s harsh winter has left the country looking like 40 shades of brown and, according to the U.S. media, a lack of shamrocks. However, news comedian and Irish man Stephen Colbert has found a substitute. A five leafed, mind altering substitute…
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
**AND FINALLY…**
Well it’s not really St Patrick’s Day related, but I think someone wasn’t at all happy to be stuck in work, manning the newsdesk at R.T.E’s website that day. Click below for a snap of a story the site published and it’s accompanying graphic:
Couldn’t the person publishing the story have gotten some stock pictures of chickens on a farm or something? Chickens are strange looking enough but chop their heads off and strip them naked…well all I can think of is this:
I’m trying to resist littering my blog with the videos of my favourite songs, this this one is different. If I Should Fall Behind was released on Springsteen’s album Lucky Town in the ’90s. That version had a big country twang about it but it still stood out. Years later Springsteen stripped the song down and got the rest of the band involved in the vocals to produce this version. It’s a brilliantly simple video and a version that everyone seems to fall for straight away…
Yes it’s St Patrick’s Day again, the one day of the year that the western world aligns itself with the Irish so it has an excuse to go on the beer. It’s Paddy’s Day at Cheers and hostilities between Sam Malone’s bar and Gary’s Old Town Tavern have kicked off again to see which bar makes the most profit that night. Sam hopes the Irish band he has hired to play rebel songs will kick start the craic…
EVERYBODY! “Limey scum, limey scum, I toss a bomb and still they come…”
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