Jon Day Photo » Technology

New website goes live

jonathan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:58:56 +0000

Good news – the new Jon Day Photo website has gone live. A big thank you to everyone involved in the design, testing and launch of this fine site. There are plenty of new portfolios and album layouts too for you to view and much more flexibility for me to upload new photos after each wedding.

Flash test shoot

admin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:00:13 +0000

I spent time recently working on my off camera flash skills. I wanted to create and light a photo using multiple flashes not directly attached to the camera. My friend Alex sat as my test model. I set a low light at the front, the main lighting element was a sense of the light being shone up from the laptop screen and then I added light from behind (in front of the closed blinds) to seperate the front and rear layers of the image. It took about 15 minutes to rig up and was an interesting exercise in light control.

The wonderful thing about digital cameras is the instant feedback. You can make an adjustment to a flash light and see immediately how it changes the image on the lcd screen. Then adjust the flash units and retake the shot. Using small camera flashes to light a person and or environment is a great skill to practice and use on an assignment and can really make a photo jump from the screen or page.

Wedding Fusion part 2 Red Scarlet

admin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:31:25 +0000

I watched Wallander recently featuring Kenneth Branagh as the crumpled swedish detective and noted the distinctive style of camerawork and frequent shallow depth of field (background blurred) scenes. Subsequently I read it was shot entirely on the Red ONE system as are many projects in production or recently released. Red have made some big waves in the motion picture industry by developing and delivering the Red ONE camera. It has made extremely high quality digital capture available to filmakers of all budgets. This means the Red’s purchase price is equivalent to just one month’s rental fee on a traditional 35mm film camera. In my post in January I discussed the latest trend to hit wedding photography, Fusion. A quick reminder – the introduction of a new camera allowing both stills (photos) and moving images to be recorded on one camera had wedding photographers excited at the possiblities of merging moving images and stills together.

On this note, the arrival of the Red Scarlet has been really interesting. I’m still undecided on the industrial styling of the Scarlet but the concept of the convergence of the moving image and the still image has taken a big step forward the with the development of this camera (think iPhone being introduced in 1992).

The main selling point is it’s capability to capture still and moving footage in a high definition capability currently exceeding anything else on the market by mile. If the current chip in my camera is a big as a business card then the Red Scarlet has a chip as big a diner table with resolution to match. It has a modular design, allowing the user to add to or upgrade their system as they need to, bypassing camera obselecence. “Great” you say, “why aren’t you shooting my wedding with one then?” Well, it is not perfect as there no sound recording capability built in. The processing demands it’s files make on the pc and software needed to process the files are very heavy and storage of these huge files is also an issue.

However, I’m excited by the road this camera is leading us down – towards the capability to capture an event in two closely related artforms on one machine with no compromises.