Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The future of television



I'm a motion guy at heart and plan on shooting a reel sometime in the future. One thing I'm doing till I find the time to film something is wasting away in front of www.channel101.com and acceptable.tv (like watching Operation Kitten Calendar above). I could go on about how it works but you can just check them out yourself:

www.channel101.com
www.acceptable.tv

There's also http://ny.channel101.com/ which is the NY version of the original Channel 101.

I'm a big fan of Yacht Rock, Water & Power and most recently, the Wonder Years spinoff: Making Mistakes.

And I tried to resist embedding another video on here but I couldn't help it. If you only watch one thing this week, make it Homeless James Bond:

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Portfolio Update

I probably should be a little more creative with the titles by inserting a pun here and there whenever I announce an update to my site. But really, I'm lame enough in real life. I don't need to do it here, too. Trying not to be lame though... Really, lame.

Now that I dug myself into that hole, on to the images!

Here's a shot of a BMW logo:

BMW Logo

It's on a '35 roadster. Basically, the car looks like an American 30's car, just shrunk down to about half the size. Sort of weird but that's why I like it. What originally started out as an experiment shooting the wheels of the car turned into shooting this logo at the top of the grille. Originally, I didn't think of shooting it at all since it was rather beat up (click here for the "before the retouch" image)

After looking at it though, I decided to put some time into it and clean it up a bit. To be honest, I like the un-retouched version a little better. It has soul and character. Like it's on a real car and has seen some driving. Something a lot of the classics don't exhibit due to over restoration.

I lit it with a softbox just directly overhead. Pretty darn simple, actually. Some of the best images are lit simply.

The next one is an image of a '56 500 TR/625 LM Ferrari.

'56 500TR/625LM

The car was rolled into the loading area and I was doing some video work with a few hot lights so I dragged them over to the car to get a better look at it (it's rather dark in that area). As I was walking around the car I saw this shot. The lights were already pretty much in place but I had to adjust them a tad to get it just right. After putting a circular polarizer on the lens, I shot away. Cleaned up a couple specular highlights that the polarizer didn't quite eliminate and the image was done.

Seeing as how I almost always use flash and never direct, undiffused hotlights, I will definitely experiment with this form of lighting in the future.