Fun at Callaway Golf

Okay, I love golf. I don’t play near enough! So, it was a little frustrating this week when I was shooting a video project for Callaway Golf at their test center, and I didn’t hit one golf ball all day! Geez, you might as well drag me through a chocolate store, and not let me get a peanut cluster!
Minus that little frustration, we had a good time shooting a couple of the key people at Callaway as they talked about the development process of new clubs. it’s really amazing, the art and science behind making of a golf club.

Thanks gang!

New online print and stock sales

http://rexgelert.photoshelter.com/

I’m excited to announce my new photoshelter site that host sales of my images for stock and print sales.  I’ve included some of the most popular images in the Fine Art Collection. It is really simple to order prints, greeting cards or even a jig saw puzzle of your favorite image in here.  These galleries will be updated regularly with new images, I’ve just started the process.

Thanks for looking it over. I would love to hear your feedback on the new site.

 

Cheers

Rex

High Sierras

Abandon house in the High Sierras

 

 

Here are the two latest images from my trip up through the High Sierras recently. This shows you don’t always have to hike a half a day to get to your location. I found both of these right off the main highway.

Cloud Break

Sunrise at the bridge

There are times that really hit why I went into image making, this would be one of them. If I wasn’t a photographer / videographer, I would not have forced myself out of the cozy warm motorhome before sunrise to get out and set this shot up. The morning before, I found this location, but got there a little too late. I knew if I got there right at dawn, before the sun peaked over the mountain top I would have a killer view of the sun rays screaming through the morning fog off the river. I wasn’t dissapointed.

See this image in motion below:                                              * Much more relaxing  at full screen

click on 4 arrows

This was a good use of the new GlideTrack I just purchased, you can see in this shot . Note the can of Behold furniture spray, a must to keep the camera glide smoothly on the track.

Shot at Convict Lake California, near Mammoth Lakes.  I was searching for the change of color in the local Aspen trees, I found some here for sure.

BARD

I had another shoot with two of my long time clients, Cathy and Julia . I’ve been shooting with them for many years, and we ALWAYS have lots of laughs together. This shoot was no exception, although, the client, BARD Biopsy Systems handles issues that are not a laughing matter, breast cancer. We hired 50 extras to portray a great concept that my client came up with. Take a look at these shots before the final image to see if you can guess where we were going with all these people.

Why are we standing here like this?

The life of an extra

Andrea keeping up with the 50 models

Lets move the girl in pink over a bit

The client having some laughs with creative team of Cathy and Julia

Marimba and violin madness

Last week I was fortunate enough to witness this amazing piece of music played by two extraordinary musicians. We are working on a video for a client that had this piece of music commissioned for him as a gift to his wife, WOW, makes us mere mortals something to live up to right? This video is a small clip from the rehearsal performance.  I played in orchestras, and bands all through my school years, but I can’ t imagine playing this. The marimba player, (Ji Hye Jung, amazing talent)  has to read two lines of music , hitting 4 notes simaltaniously with her mallets. Watch the speed of this close up. The violin player ( Catherine Leonard ) you’ll hear in the background has just as a difficult part.

I’m posting this as a point to the appreciation of another art form other then photography or video. You have to appreciate this talent.

See video clip below:

Ji Hye Jung Marimba

►

Marimba sheet music

If you’re interested in the two artitist discussing this piece with the creative director of CamerataPacifica, check this link out on YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uTJufaOXZg

See Kim, Serena and others in motion at 1250 fps

If you saw my last post of a recent shoot with 50 extras, I apologize for posting too soon. I needed to pull that post until the client I shot for announces their new merger in early October. I’ll re-post after that is official.

Until then, enjoy this great imagery from the NY Times Magazine.

See the beauty of the power of the top woman tennis players at 1250 frames per second in motion with the Phantom camera.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/29/magazine/womens-tennis.html

ipad apps

Way too long since my last post. Along with normal work schedule, I’ve been moving my home, the schedule has been really crazy for awhile.

I want to share some of my new favorite ipad apps. By the way, yes, I love the ipad. Now that things are settling down with the move and shooting, I’m anxious to go out and show the new ipad portfolio, with video included! I’ll post when the new portfolio is up and ready.

In the mean time, these are some very helpful apps along with maybe a couple that are just fun.

First for the real killer ones for photographers / film makers. Other softwares have been around way before these cool apps that do kind of what these do, but these two sun tracking apps take it to a new level. I highly recommend for any photographer / DP that wants to save a ton of time scouting to follow sun angles for your next location shoot.  Just to geek out a bit, I typed in the Empire State building in NYC and typed in 3:00pm just to see where the sun would fall on it for this time of year, WOW, really cool. I tested it for in front of my house at several different times and it works really well. Here they are:

LightTrac: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lighttrac-for-ipad/id363963108?mt=8

Sunseeker: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sun-seeker-3d-augmented-reality/id330247123?mt=8

DSLR Slate: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dslr-slate/id374241045?mt=8

Use your ipad as a camera slate for your next DSLR film.

Infinote: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/infinote-todos-ideas-notes/id364356810?mt=8

Keep unlimited sticky notes on unlimited cork boards all easy to view. I found this very helpful for a recent project where I had multiple client email/ phone notes and wanted  to keep track of them all on one “bulletin board”.

PaperDesk:  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paperdesk-lite-for-ipad/id367563434?mt=8

Never be without a pad of paper for any kind of notes.  Can draw with color pencils to sketch ideas or just kill time on a plane playing “hang man”.

Adobe ideas:  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-ideas-1-0-for-ipad/id364617858?mt=8

Very similar to above PaperDesk, but I like the ability to do multiple undo’s with this app. You can import a picture from your library and draw directly on it for notes to clients, or make lighting notes. Unlimited uses for this. By the picture from Adobe below, you can even sketch out your favorite dress. I’ll stick with lighting diagrams thank you Adobe.

It’s an App world we live in now, lets embrace it and  use them to their fullest potential to make our life a little easier and more fun at the same time.

Happy Apping

BritWeek Los Angeles

For the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to be asked by the British Consulate to document BritWeek in Los Angeles.  www.britweek.org This is really a departure from the commercial work I do, so it is a nice change of pace and style to mix things up a bit. This is  much more of a journalistic approach to shooting. At times it’s very frustrating though because I’m used to having total control in my commercial shoots, not so much here. I have to really let loose of the reins a bit and think and move quickly, nothing wrong with that to keep the chops up right.

Another fun part of this job is I get to be surrounded with a lot of very interesting people. Whether they be celebrities, prominent business people or politicians, it really keeps it interesting.

I’m right in the middle of the job, with several more events to shoot, but I wanted to share as I go.

Although, most of the shooting is grab what you can, and fast, sometimes I get to spend a little more time in the set up. One of those shots was to shoot the LAX sign at the entrance to the Los Angeles Airport. In recognition of BritWeek, they had changed the colors of their lights to a combination of red, white and blue. I had to park myself and camera for a bit of time right at the entrance on the middle island. I was a bit worried that a police car would drive by while I was shooting this because I’m not sure if I would be allowed to shoot there. It was a very cold and windy night so I bundled up with a big jacket and black beanie cap. I looked a bit like a bank robber / terrorist. With this security concious world we live in now, this wasn’t a good look at the airport. I did get this pretty interesting look at the famous LAX sign though, that’s all that matters.

On the tech part of the image, to keep the balance of all the different light levels I composited several different exposures to hold detail in the plants in the foreground to the bright lights themselves. I did try doing this in a HDR plug-in, but did not get the results I wanted, so I just processed the raw file a few different times and made a composite manually.

NAB 2010 gadgets

I just got back from a couple days at NAB in Las Vegas. I wanted to share with you some of my findings.

There were two very prominent topics in this years NAB show, and they were everywhere:

3D AND DSLR FILM MAKING.

On the 3D side, I went to the Panasonic booth for their 3D experience. I really wasn’t all that impressed. I just don’t feel like the steroscopic 3D is quite there. I had a slight headache watching some of the footage. Things will be changing in this arena very fast though.

Before I get to DSLR film making, I wanted to mention the other hot topic of , online content.  Online content is king. We all know about the advent of the online magazines and the devices that read them, I’ve mentioned this several times on older posts. With the release of Apple’s ipad, that topic is hotter then ever. One major problem is that Mr. Jobs over at Apple doesn’t want to play nice. He seems to be playing strong arm with the content creators, device manufactures and software developers. It’s “my way or the high-way” type of mentality. It’s quite frustrating on a lot of levels. The big issue especially for me is the non-compatibility of Flash on his new baby. We want full feature content on the ipad, including motion graphics and video. The problem is most of that content for web is Flash based.

I had a talk with a person at The New York Times booth about their introduction of the NY Times online version that will be readable through their Times Reader software powered by Adobe Air. They are very excited about it, as well they should be. Although, for the time being we won’t be able to view the full features of this site with our new ipad. That’s a shame because that’s excactly why we want the ipad.
You know there are developers in their offices, workshops and basements all over working on this issue of ipad compatibility.
I did run into one company at NAB that was working on just this.
They are simplifying the publishing of mobile video assets for ALL devices, INCLUDING the ipad. I am going to be learning a lot more about this company in the coming months. Stay tuned for more on this in coming posts.

Here are a few of my favorite booths and speakers from the show.

It was great to have hands on experience with a lot of the manufactors of the tools I will be using in the DSLR film making side of things.

The first is Red Rock Micro, they make the rigs that make it much easier to turn our 35DSLR ( Canon 5d MK11) into a very viable film making camera:

The cinema bundle with follow focus control

The brand new remote control follow focus, WITH YOUR IPHONE!

Redrock Micro remote follow focus with YOUR IPHONE
http://www.redrockmicro.com/microRemote.html

Another leader in the DSLR rigs and gear is Zacuto:

Zacuto DSLR rigs and viewfinders
http://www.zacuto.com/

Viewfinders and rigs for the DSLR

Here’s a new jib / slider combo rig I really like by Porta Jib. To be able to have a two-in one device like this could be very useful on a lot of shoots. You normally would need two different rigs for this application.

Slider and Jib all in one, “Sweet”

Porta Jib Explorer:
http://www.portajib.com/explorer.html

As far as favorite speakers, I would have to give that to Shane Hurlbut. Shane is a veteran cinematographer shooting for major motion pictures that has made a mid-career change to shooting very high level films with the DSLRs, specifically Canon’s 5 and 7 D’s.

Beautiful work and a very entertaining energetic guy, way to go Shane.

http://hurlbutvisuals.com/blog/

Another great presentation was from Alex Buono, Director of Photography for NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

Alex is in charge of shooting all of the pre-show titles, new talent intros and mock commercials for the show. He showed us a reel of all the latest work he just shot for the show, all on the 5D and 7D. Those motion shots from the top of the taxi cab at the beginning of the show, 5D!  This camera is really changing the world of cinema.

See some of it here: http://www.dslr-cinematography.com/news/2009/9/29/saturday-night-live-shoots-canon-7d-and-5d-mark-ii.html

Stay tuned for my new demo reel, I’m all pumped up!