Saturday, June 20, 2009

Failure can breed Creativity?



So I posted very recently that patience is a MUST have for any photographer to survive the profession. This is very true. You may also recall that the photo shoot at Ultrasun was canned because of a broken wheel on a rotator stand for the tanning beds. Well, after going to the hooters to visit our friend Rachel we decided that taking photos downtown would be the best way to pass some time on a night we had expected to be working late anyway. Crazy thing was that I remembered a video that I saw in the last few weeks where a guy made a video out of a bunch of still images from the interior of his car. Being as we had awesome weather that evening, and we were in a convertible going to head to downtown Indy; I was inspired. The video I saw which inspired this, had done it inside his car which was cool; but how cool would it be in a convertable?

(Photo by Brad Clampitt)

So we mounted my brand spankin new D700 onto a tripod in the back of Brad's SL500 and went for a drive down Highway I-65. I'd be lieing if I said I wasn't a bit nervous; especially with Brad driving..... For the few nerds out there that might read this, I set my camera very similarly to the way the video I saw that was similar was set. The camera was set to 6400iso and Shutter Priority at 1/3 of a second. The camera also had an exposure compensation of +1 stop to make sure that from time to time we could see the inside of the car. I wish i was able to shoot wider than 18mm but that's the widest I have now since I dumped my 10.5 fisheye. I must say I'm very pleased with the results though. The neat part about Nikon Camera's is that they all have Interval timers built into them. So you can set the camera to take 999 shots at almost any interval. This particular one was set to take a shot every 3 seconds. Canon cameras don't have that feature. Sony camera's don't have that Feature either. As far as I know Nikon is the only one that includes it in their bodies. Honestly.....I don't know why nobody else does it's just a simple bit of programming. For something like this you need a BIG memory card. I had the camera set to JPEG with a Kingston 133x 16 gigabyte card. In the end I took 1689 shots.

We drove downtown where we discovered that Brad was so excited about this project he left his Sony A700 at home and he couldn't take any photos downtown. We laughed for a bit, and decided to call it a night considering that we both had a long day to follow. The Q8 no longer failed, and we finally got all the photos shot of it today. I shot about 8 gigabytes of parts photos for Ultrasun as well. Then at about 8:30pm we proceeded to go back to Hooters to edit the video. Why did we go back to Hooters to do this editing? Because who does that? Seriously. Apparently I do.

(Photo by Brad Clampitt)

So I finally got it all edited, I found some music that seems to fit nicely with it (music by Bush: "History [The Dub Pistols Mix] Special thanks to them for sure), and we have a video. For the Record NO I was not sitting facing the wall all night, we moved tables because the waitresses section moved and we are pushovers like that. We had a much better spot overlooking the place but she had to move, and this table had an outlet. Final Cut doesn't like batteries. Eats 'em 3 meals a day as well as a snack. I guess the long winded moral of the story is to go with your inspirations. We could have gone to a bar, or all dispersed to go home to bed, but instead we created something a little different. I may not be the first to do this, but just like the Dancing man; get inspired, break the mold, and you never know what you're gunna get.
Take 5 minutes, enjoy the video, more soon.

2 comments:

  1. This was such a great idea and an awesome video!

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  2. I met you a couple of times last summer. Saw your blog via Brad's Facebook. Was watching your video listening to "Clocks" by Coldplay, and realized that the beat and the video matched up almost identically...just in case you needed some more background music.

    Nice vid! Big fan.

    Ben Nicholson

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