Secrets at Brooks Institute of Photography

Thursday August 12, Brooks Institute of Photography hosted my Secrets of Video Production on what turned out to be one of the first truly sunny summer days this season. Both students and a large number of faculty attended my presentation held in one of the school’s spacious studios.  The theme was tabletop so I was able to spotlight the Indisliderpro with the Manfrotto 501 fluid head supported on Manfrotto 536 MPRO legs. Everyone was impressed with how sturdy and versatile the IndisliderPro was both when mounted on the Manfrotto legs and when placed right on the tabletop.  Everyone appreciated the value of the False Color and Peaking filters of the Marshall’s monitor and enjoyed being able to see what was going on as some of the students tried out the techniques I presented.  RedRockMicro’s support system and microFollowFocus was instrumental in demonstrating techniques like rack focus.  The cucaloris effect of the Chimera Window Patterns added life to both the background of some setups and dappled light directly on one setup illustrating a push-in technique with the Indisliderpro.  The LEDs from Litepanels were used as both main sources and kickers along with both the Lastolite Triflip and Skylite light modifiers.

Everything was shot to a RAW 16GB CF card and down loaded through the high speed RAW Firewire card reader on to LaCie harddrives supporting editing in Final Cut Pro on MacBook Pro.  Along with demonstrating a number of tabletop shooting situations, I had enough time to show a very basic NLE workflow.  Student received a Sonicfire Pro disk and suggestions on the use of royalty-free music in their future video and still to video productions.

The students asked lots of questions and quite a few got a chance to try the equipment for themselves in actual shooting situations.

Below is the tabletop wine video we did in the workshop.

Below is the tabletop push-in we did in the workshop.