Gear In 60: Travel Lighting & Grip Kit

I travel a lot for simple sit-down interview shoots, and commonly need to fly with a lightweight lighting and support kit for DSLR or small HD cameras. Here are two videos from our new FreshDV Gear In 60 Seconds series that talk about the two Pelican gear cases I often fly with, and the affordable tools inside. Watch below.

REVIEW:  Litepanels Sola ENG LED Fresnel Light

I’ve gone on record in the past as not being a big fan of camera-top lights.  The last thing an interview subject needs is a glaring “sungun” to impart that “deer-in-the-headlights” look.  Of course, sunguns of the past were crude tools, usually a low-to-medium wattage tungsten lightbulb that – if you were lucky – might be hiding behind a piece of bathroom opal glass.  (If you are one of the six shooters in all the world that ever had an HMI sungun… good for you.)  In almost every setup, the light was mounted directly above the lens, right on axis with the optics – a recipe for flat, unflattering light if ever there was one.  And powering this device almost always required external batteries – anyone that has ever had a battery belt pull your pants down on a shoot, raise your hands now, please.

You’ve read my writing, now hear my talking

Izzy Hyman, of the website Izzy Video, interviewed me yesterday for his “Meet the Shooter” series.

Anatomy of a Spot: T-Mobile

Over time I’ve come to respect the Canon 5D. It’s not the most user friendly of cameras, and it has some fairly serious faults, but if you can avoid the pitfalls it can make very pretty images.

Arri Alexa and Rosco LitePads Come Through for OnLive’s First National Spot

Originally slated to be a web-only spot, the first shoot day went so well that when the client saw the results they ordered a second shoot day, added an actor and made a $1m+ national ad buy.

Cine Gear Expo LA 2011

A Panaflex on a Silent Cat slider? It must be Cine Gear Expo time!

Cine Gear Expo, “the film, video, and digital expo with focus”, offered the usual kid-in-a-candy-store experience, and introduced new light-emitting plasma (LEP) instruments, new cameras, and a revolutionary new electronic shuttering device that gives digital cameras better motion portrayal capabilities than even the best mechanically-shuttered film or digital camera. [Updated 2011-06-11: removed erroneous “12 Hz” shutter rate reference.]

NAB 2011 - Plasma Lights, and The Problem With LEDs

The Photon Beard Nova, and what’s at its heart.

Here’s the coolest “new thing” in lighting I saw at the show: Photon Beard’s Nova, a focusable Fresnel-type instrument using a LEP (light-emitting plasma). It’s unlike any other lighting instrument we use—other than the sun—in that it doesn’t pass electricity directly through the light-giving element (tungsten filament, diode junction, rarefied gas surrounded by phosphors, carbon arc, etc.).

Litepanels Booth at NAB 2011

Litepanels from ProVideo Coalition on Vimeo.

LitePanels continue to deliver at this year’s NAB.  Here’s a quick glance at four different lights.

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