Front Page

OK it is just a Local Magazine, but given that I am not in the photojournalist side of photography seeing an image of mine as a cover shot is always nice.

This image was part of a series I recently photographed for Albert Park College. This newly opened college is working very hard to attract students and professional photographs have certainly helped with raising their profile in the community.

The initial brief for the photo shoot did not include images for media release, however with a library of high quality images the college has been in a position to do press releases and very quickly respond to requests from media for photographs. My brief for the shoot was quite comprehensive as our studio was also commissioned to create their website, signage and a variety of brochures and documents, with so many end products in mind media was simple for them to accommodate.

Albert Park College being so new is in the enviable position of being able to approach the construction of the school and the delivery of its curriculum with current technology being integrated in all areas. Each of the students at the college has an Apple iPad and content, home work, even blogs are all designed and structured with this environment in mind. Visit their website we designed and manage to learn more about the college and to see some more of my photographs in use.

Shooting digital stills and video? Backup!

Many an article and post written on this topic, but after today I thought I would just add my thoughts to this.

Now that we are shooting stills and video straight to disc there is no tape or film to fall back on, we have to be organised and backup and archive.

The difference?

Backups
Our back up is relevant to our live projects and is in two forms, an hourly occurrence of our working files and at time of ingestion we back up all our digital image and vision files.

Archiving
Our archiving process, this is our chance to consolidate projects and remove them from the system, they are moved onto two external drives, one kept in the studio for ready access and the other drive offsite in case of the worst.

Does it take long, yes and no, the majority of the process occurs in the background and allows me to work over the top of it, albeit with a hit to performance of the system. The copy process takes a while, identifying what to copy, pretty quick and easy.

Quantity
Well the thing that prompted me to write this today was the fact that I am moving over 1TB of data around, archiving jobs off the system and backing up vision from a shoot. How often do I move this quantity, probably monthly, high definition video takes up a huge amount of disc space. How many drives, sitting next to me are over 30 drives, giving around 40-50TB of storage, this is then duplicated offsite as well.

Where to
We decided on using an external Hard Drive solution, whilst it may not have the benefits of tape it does have other key benefits,
simplicity of implementation;
ease of use;
data is available by simply plugging in the drive;

For us this last point was the winner, for us being able to access material quickly is critical, clients will often call asking for a job to be accessed, for any number of reasons, and for it to be turned around quickly. In reality even if they were not asking for it quickly the fact that the jobs are on hard discs reduces the amount of time it takes for us to reinstate a project making better use of out time.

Is this system infallible?
NO, NO, NO, hard drives will fail, note that I said will, that they do is not questionable, it is a matter of when not if. This is an additional reason for the offsite drive, when the drive in the studio eventually does fail we will bring in the offsite and make another two copies immediately, discarding the second drive.

Cost effective?
Yes it is, now, when we were tape based for video, no it was not, but then all vision was backed up on the original tape anyway.

The future
As network speeds and capacities increase and costs reduce I will move the backup and archiving to a cloud solution, this is already a viable option for the average home user with a few GB to look after, but the video that we now all shoot to disc based cameras, well that will still be a couple of years away.

New website

A website at a minimum is a brochure for a business and like a brochure needs to be updated regularly, at Digital Image we have just updated our site, new work, clients and services. Head over, have a look and let me know what you think.

The site has been planned by Wayne and Mark, with Mark doing the design and programming for the site and the majority of the imagery being mine.

For us the public side of the site is there to promote our services, though the behind the scenes gets far more traffic and use. We have set up secure upload and downloads areas for our clients and this service is invaluable being able to deliver design, video and photographic work through this interface. For our corporate clients to also upload material to us in a simple secure environment is also essential.

In the studio we all have dropbox accounts and use these to sync between our different machines, this system could work with our clients but for many of them in the corporate environment, in addition access to this type of service is restricted by their IT departments there is concern about the security of their data.

That said, the vast majority of our photographic work goes up onto our dedicated photographic site hosted by Photoshelter. We worked for a few ears with having images on our website in a gallery format, the restriction being the inability to search these images. For us Photoshelter is the ideal solution for delivery to our clients and our clients love it. In addition to our own site we have also set up two client dedicated sites one for Melbourne Water and another for Goodman Fielder. More on those another time.

Late night shoot

Monday night I was on location from 10.30pm through to about 1.30am at the South Wharf site of the MMSR project filming the lifting out of the TBM from the shaft.

Lifting a 50 tonne piece of equipment was made to look easy by these guys.

Shooting in such low light conditions is challenging for both stills and video and when asked to shoot both on the one night, well something has to take priority. Working with Andrew we set up a locked off video camera with a wide shot of the location and let it roll for two hours, the idea here being a sped up shot in post.

Between the two of us we then shot a variety of stills and video, I ended up on top of the crane for the lift to the truck and was able to shot full HD video on the Canon 5D mkII. Fantastic having this flexibility.

Whilst the video is do-able handheld in these conditions, shooting stills with a low ISO requires the use of a tripod, this just meant discussing with the engineers what was going to occur and then planning out where to be for the best angle. Moving quickly with tripods around a construction site is not particularly safe, better to be deliberate.

On location, group photos

Yesterday I was filming down the bottom of a shaft where a Tunnel Boring Machine, TBM, had  broken through. The precision that these guys work to is fascinating, a 3.2m cutting head, driven about 800m underground, through silt, clay and rock, and they are then able to place it within millimetres.

I was there to film the breakthrough team photographs being taken by local photographer Christian Pearson and to shoot an interview with one of the tunnellers for the documentary.

A few tips for photographing large groups.

1. Bring artificial lighting, in this environment using two remotely operated speedlights mounted on stands set one on each side is the only real option. Flash on camera is not an option!

2. Have an assistant. As the photographer you can do a bit of organising on the ground but after that you wan to be up at camera position. An assistant who understands your language and what the final product is to be will not only speed up the process but also give a more professional image.

 3. Have something for the back row to stand on and a row of seats. As this shot shows quite often location will prohibit either of these, the best thing to do here is to have everyone standing turn side on slightly, so they are facing in towards then centre. Doing this allows you to make a more compact composition and to fit more people in to a limited space.

4. Shoot more than one, start safe and then get some emotion.

As I was shooting video I thought I would show you a grab from the edit suite.