Lebanon Vigil A short video on a vigil outside the Houses of Parliament, to protest against the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Beyond Words: Visual Literacy at the SS Robin A video report for the Times Educational Supplement on photography workshops for children organised by the SS Robin Trust, a photography gallery and media centre on a 19th Century steamship.
Shaken and Stirred A video report shot for the Daily Telegraph Travel Section website.
After eBaying my gallbladder I went out and got a Canon G9, which is turning out to be a lovely little beastie, so lovely in fact, that tomorrow I'll be using it to ahem, shoot video.
As for stills? Like all compacts, it starts shovellin' in da noize once you get past about 400 ISO, but I can't remember the last time I went above that anyway, and so far, the raw files (hoo yeah, baby) from the camera are lookin' alright.
The downside is the viewfinder is complete rubbish, and the external finder I bought ain't much better either, so I might have to get used to using it in either screen-gawp or point 'n' pray mode.
In the meantime, G9 newbies will be doing themselves a favour if they check out the Lifespy with a G9 'blog, which has plenty of practical info on the machine, with links to various handy camera nick-nacks.
Here's a short Greenpeace video I had a hand in, which was used at their sustainable seafood campaign launch yesterday.
I shot the domestic interview segments, some stuff in a sushi restaurant and a supermarket. The rest is existing Greenpeace archive footage, especially the stuff on the ocean waves, because regular blog readers (if there are any) will already know I ain't exactly got sealegs.
Is it a documentary? A feature film? Nah, its a commercial, but a lovely piece of work nonetheless, with a great understated comic performance by Martin Scorsese.
Which brings me on...some of you might have wondered about the somewhat opaque blog post titles in the past few weeks. Well, they're all quotes (er, except the first question) from movies, carefully laid down in preparation for the
SionPhoto Kristmazz Kwizz!
By way of a clue, each blog post title does have something in some way, to do with the content of post itself, so bonus points for anyone figuring out what those links are, with some other bonus questions thrown in if they come to me while typing.
The prize? I was gonna offer up a bottle of that Scorsese bubbly, but was worried about the bottle exploding in the post (or it being drunk by me first...) so, I'll think o' summat else.
This quote is too well known...so...what was the name of the man who was killed by the character who utters this line, and whose death later causes his murderer to be assassinated?
The Scorsese commercial makes visual references to many Hitchcock films - who speaks this line? What's the name of the press photographer in the flick?
And what links that movie snapper to the author of this blog?
Thats it! Send your answers to
sionphoto@hotmail.com
with 'Kwizz' in the subject line.
The one who gets most answers right wins a prize.
If nobody answers? Erm...the whole thing will be quietly buried and conveniently forgotten like a reality show voting scandal, or the invasion of Afghanistan.
Heres a little SionPhoto podcast experiment...it's the audio from an video interview with Tony Benn I shot a while ago for the MWAW film.
Very little of the interview was shown in the eventual video, so this makes use of the additional footage in another context (its also marginally easier to edit just the audio). Having stuff which can be repurposed via several outlets, is something that freelances should be thinking about, as media begins to converge.
Obviously it's something which can't be done with conventional digital stills cameras. Some people are using sound recorders with digital stills cameras, but its really only a matter of time I think, until the practical advantages of having one machine which captures multiple media (stills, video and sound) begins to outweigh having a device which only does one thing (however great that one thing is), or having to carry around multiple devices.
Multi-use devices and strategies are still in their infancy, but present trends suggest that will change, and much sooner than we all think.
Anyway, enough blah, here's the podcast. Some of the sound is a bit ropey, due to me having to create voiceover narration without having a decent microphone to hand, but you'll get the basic idea...
The original brief was just to film the whole lecture - about 'Peak Oil', given by academic Richard Heinberg, but I managed to persuade them otherwise, mostly on the grounds that nobody would be willing to sit through watching a film of the speaker on a podium for over an hour.
So we made a small talking heads intro to their audio podcast instead:
Here's the short film I chopped together for last weekends Media Workers Against the War conference. Spent all night finishing it off, then the conference projector bulb blew out in the last few minutes....typical : (
There's stacks of material that didn't make the film, so maybe if I get the chance I'll edit up some more segments.
A colleague of mine has spent the best part of a day trying to explain to some new clients why them expecting to get a whole bunch of unprocessed images on a CD to do with as they please, for a one-off fee is er...not quite the way things are done.
The response the clients gave was one of surprise, because of course, as they insisted...
Hey, what's the problem? Everybody else does it.
That response, and others I've had myself, make it pretty obvious to me that (in the UK at least) the practice known as the 'Dump & Run' - chucking the whole shoot on a disc and bunging it to a client, for a one-off (and usually low) fee, is widespread, and one of the many reasons why the idea exists in many clients minds, that we're all crummy image fodder.
The amount of image use that goes unpaid because of this practice, must run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, while the dumpers are then scratching their heads wondering why they can't afford to upgrade their gear.
We're often told we should be 'educating' clients in how image licensing works, and indeed many photographers do. But its a complete uphill struggle when many photographers seem happy to drag the rest of us down to their dumping, running, pixel-monkey hack level.
Instead of always looking at the practices of the 'Big Boys', maybe we should be looking in the mirror every once in a while, to see where the problem starts - because none of the oh-so-familiar market busting image entities would have the power they have, without photographers rolling over and selling themselves short again, and again, and again...
I've recently considered that making short-form web video (and even slideshows for that matter), should perhaps be approached by shooting like you're making a 'trailer for a film which doesn't exist' - the task is to sum up the essence of a bigger story in a short time.
Saul Bass was a master of that particular art, and a recent post on the MultimediaShooter 'blog points to a title sequence very reminiscent of Bass, from the movie 'The Kingdom', which manages to sum up the complex history of US-Saudi Arabian relations in four minutes...
