A Newly Published Work produced in January. Shown here.

Karen Roy Talks About the Ottobock OBSS Chair Back from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

On a cold, clear day in January Ben and I had the opportunity to do an interview with Karen Roy for our client, Ottobock. I'll have Karen tell her story in the video.

Ben and I got up early and packed the car for the half hour trip to Georgetown, Texas where we would set up and be ready for a short interview in a private home. My focus early on was to set up and light for lots of b-roll (most of which we ended up not using...). Ben was on the second camera and he was getting details (which we did end up using...).

The main interview footage was done with a Sony a6300 camera recording 1080p. The interview was lit with three Aputure LightStorm LED panels and the audio was provided by an Audio Technica AT835b microphone.

We picked up additional video in a nearby park and at the offices of our client.

Since the day was bright and sunny I was happy I had thought to bring variable neutral density filters for both cameras/lenses.

While it might seem that Karen is miraculously delivering a perfectly crafted statement her interview is actually made up of audio (and video) from about nine or ten different clips. And some of the clips are interwoven in a different order than which they were recorded.

Ben handled the editing for the project. It was the last one he worked on before heading to Seoul, S. Korea for his long semester abroad.

For the kinds of projects I do I think the perfect crew size (including myself) is three. A first camera, a second camera and a sound person. That gives us plenty of hands for moving gear around as well as lighting in the minimalist tradition. More crew makes for more logistical moving parts. I like to shoot and move a lot in a day and I love a very small crew who can move with me without having to give them detailed instructions.

I'm sure that on bigger projects every crew member adds to the efficiency but on smaller, more intimate jobs, a larger crew is just more friction.

This is the last of the videos I'll share for a while as every video shared seems to drop readership of the blog by about 25%. At the rate we're going we'll be into negative numbers by the next three shares.

I guess I'll just go back to the old "Nikon Versus Canon!!!" & "DSLR Versus Mirrorless" routines. People never seem to get enough of that. Or maybe I'll explain how to use fill flash in sunlight for the thousandth time. That seems like a mystery that never gets solved....oh well.

A Third Installment of my Video Project from Canada. David's Story.

David Sims C-Leg Video. Rev. 1.2Z March 13, 2017 from Kirk Tuck on Vimeo.

I'm not sure there's ever a point at which video producers feel their editing is done. I could wake up every morning and change something on every video I've ever done. There are two things that bring projects to completion. One is budget; but if you enjoy a project budgets prove to be weak firewalls against spending more time fine tuning, or trying different approaches.

The other thing that serves as a giant stop sign in the editing process is a deadline. Hitting the deadline nearly always trumps one more set of tweaks.

As in the previous videos we used a Sony A7Rii, shooting in 4K (APS-C) mode to record the main interview footage and used a Sony RX10iii in 1080p mode to shoot our b-roll "footage."

The word, "footage" sounds a little zany to me given that there are no longer linear feet of film dragging through a film gate. We may have to revise our language around motion pictures as we head toward the future....

Everything that was lit was lit with Aputure LightStorm LED panels. Our primary microphone (into the Sony A7Rii) was a Sennheiser MKE600. We were working in the middle of an ongoing business and we could not always control background sounds but we did the best we could.

The main target for these videos is our client's website. They were not shot with theatrical distribution in mind and, in all likelihood, they will never be broadcast. The switch between black and white and color (which I also like) is part of the client's style guide.

I like David's interview because it was so personal and honest. This was a very rewarding project that put me in touch with some wonderful people. People with great stories about overcoming trauma and setbacks.

I want to do more like this.

Thoughts about recent developments in cameras such as the Olympus EM1.2, the Panasonic GH5 and the Sony a6500.

Something is happening quickly in the camera market. It's either good or evil depending on your point of view. Or your career trajectory. But it is happening nonetheless. Still cameras are tranforming (like Optimus Prime) from dedicated still photography devices into nearly full-fledged video recording devices. And the trend seems to be accelerating and punishing the laggards in the field while rewarding video-centric early adopters. 

It's easy to say that it all started with the Nikon D90 or the Canon 5D mk2 but the reality is that smaller bridge cameras incorporated video modes long before those modes made the jump up to interchangeable lens, large sensor, still cameras. Doesn't matter when it started though, the trend is here and it's moving quicker and quicker; and may determine whether your favorite camera model comes to market and succeeds, across international lines. 

This is very evident in the progression of Olympus and Panasonic cameras. The GH5, which will hit the market in a couple of weeks, is much more of a video production camera than a still camera (although the two camps are in no way mutually exclusive). It offers more flexible menu options and capture file types for video than many dedicated video cameras at multiples of its price. It will soon be one of the very few consumer cameras to

First Day of SXSW. First Downtown stroll with the Panasonic fz2500.

OMG. A post that's entirely about the still photography characteristics of a new camera. No video anywhere in sight!!! 

The Panasonic fz2500 hit the studio on Weds. and it wasn't until Friday morning that I actually had time to walk around downtown Austin and take some images with it. I grabbed an extra battery before I left the house and made all the fundamental settings to the camera, including turning down the default noise reduction by two clicks. I never seem to mind uniform noise in my images nearly as much as I do obvious smoothing from noise reduction. I'm guessing it's subjective.

The first thing I noticed was just how much difference only a couple increments of magnification make in a viewfinder. I thought the difference between .70x and .74x would be no big deal but it makes the finder brighter and more comfortable to compose in than the previous, fz1000 or any of the Sony RX10 variants. 

I found myself using the longer end of the zoom lens. Seems like my "go-to" approach to these super zoom cameras. All the images were shot in raw and converted to Jpegs in Lightroom. I think I got a little overzealous with the introduction of magenta into my color correction mix. I'll watch out for that in the future. 

The camera was well behaved and the files straight out of camera were

Initial Reactions to the Panasonic FZ2500 that Showed Up Yesterday.

I hadn't really intended to buy an FZ2500 camera but in the end my list of rationalizations made compelling sense (to no one but me) and I decided it would be a profitable addition to my little corral of cameras. In spirit the FZ2500 is very similar to the Sony RX10iii, which I hold in high regard. They are both all-in-one camera packages that have big, one inch sensors and wide ranging lenses. Both are very able 4K video machines and both are highly competent photography tools. On any given review site these two cameras get compared side by side whenever either one is analyzed. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and I figured if I had them both the they would happily complement each other. Right?

Aesthetically they are two different animals. The Sony is designed with a more lux attitude in mind. Metal everywhere and a refined physical interface. It's the product whose makers recognized the selling value of good industrial design. It's sleek....for a big, rounded brick of a camera.

The FZ2500 (from now on, "The Lumix") feels like the designers cut a few corners, spec'd a lot of plastic, borrowed from a 1980's industrial design style, and pretty much scrimped on the stuff that didn't directly effect image quality or basic handling. I'm slightly annoyed at the shiny control knobs on a camera that is otherwise finished in matte. The switches are less than elegant and the overall feel is of a company that values raw performance over finesse. But I'm okay with that because the real reason to buy either camera is to make movies and photographs. 

Both cameras use 20 megapixel, one inch, BSI, CMOS sensors, but