Well here we are everybody, finally all caught up! It's been a little bit hectic trying to get all of these done quickly but I'm really happy with how they have all been turning out! As I'm sitting here writing this I'm enjoying a very delicious summer beverage and I am excited to share this week's shot with you all.

The prompt for this week involved the elements...weather you like it or not! Ha, great terrible pun right? Okay fine, no more puns....this week. So yeah, the prompt was "This week should be as unpredictable as the weather! Feature the weather in this week's landscape." 

As it just so happened, the weather was doing interesting things when I needed to shoot this! I had just driven home through an INSANE thunderstorm and found that by my apartment the weather was kind of just going around us. 

I decided what better way to film this than to shoot a short time lapse of the sun peaking through the clouds! So let's go ahead and watch this week's shot!

So for this week, I shot with the Sony a6300 in 4K, 24p, 2500 ISO, 1/50 shutter, at f20.0 using the Canon 75-300mm lens. Rather than shooting standard time lapse, I decided to just shoot continuously for about 25 minutes then speed up the shot in post. 

I mainly decided to do that because I was too lazy to set up the camera with an intervalometer and didn't have time to buy the time lapse app for the a6300. In the end, the shot came out really great. 

This week I want to start with the good. The best thing about this shot was that it is the sharpest shot I have ever gotten shooting with the adapted anamorphic set up.

This was simply due to shooting at f20. It's funny too because not only have I never shot at f20, but I didn't even realize that the lens went to f20 until I started stopping it down. It also allowed me to capture great detail in the clouds and sky.

The other thing I really liked about this shot was the way that the sun spread across the shot almost like an anamorphic lens flare. At first that's what I thought it was until I watched the clip a few times and paid attention to the clouds and saw that it was just the way the sun was hitting the edge of the clouds. 

Now let's talk about the one bad thing that came up while shooting this week's shot. The biggest issue I ran into was the actual weather. When I set up the camera it was dry, no signs of coming rain over us, everything was good to go.

Right near the end of the time lapse it actually started to rain and because I was already filming I couldn't put any rain gear on the camera or I would cause the camera to shake.

So thinking quickly I grabbed the nearest thing to the door to my porch (a snow shovel, because an umbrella would be too normal) and held it over the camera for the remainder of the shot. 

So beyond a few drops of rain on my camera and lens and tired arms from holding a shovel over the top of my camera, this week basically went off without a hitch! 

That's it for this week! If you are participating in your own 52 week photography or cinematography challenge, please share your image for this week in the comments below!

This shot comes to you one week late with the knowledge that we will be 100% caught up this week! The prompt for this week was to shoot a portrait where the hands were the primary focus of the shot.

So for this shot it meant that I could do a pretty standard portrait that put emphasis on the hands, or I could shoot something that REALLY focused on the hands. I obviously went with the latter of the two options.

Let's take a look at this video showing a great slow motion shot of hands at work with an acoustic guitar!

It seems that I truly have a new favorite camera for shooting with as this week was shot again on the Sony a6300! I decided to have some fun with this shot and shoot it in slow motion.

The exact specs were shooting at 1080 120/24p, 6400 ISO, 1/1600 shutter, at f4.0 using a Canon 75-300mm lens and of course the B&L vintage anamorphic projector lens. 

For this shot I decided to use a single 750 watt continuous light with barn doors limiting the light to basically be only on the guitar. I then set up a reflector on the other side bouncing in just a little bit of light to fill the shadows on the hands, but I wanted to make sure to get a good high contrast look to the shot. 

I also had to use bright lighting to compensate for filming at a high frame rate. I wanted to get the movement of the strings captured as best as possible so I shot with a 1/1600 shutter. This also meant that even with the bright lighting I had to open up the aperture of the lens.

To make sure that I had good focus with the lens being opened up like it was, I focused while the lens was stopped down first.

Since I shot this as close up as I did, I had to use a +2 macro lens attachment which helped the shot come out with a nice shallow depth of field when combined with the f4 aperture. I also like how the image came out just a bit soft because it helps rid it of the digital look. 

The hardest part of shooting this was getting the slider positioned just right. I had it tilted slightly so that the camera would tilt up just a bit due to the fact that I mounted the camera directly to the slider. 

But this was another shoot where the unique design of the ProMediaGear slider comes in really handy. The slider is curved on one side to add additional motion to the footage as it doesn't simply move the camera side to side.

The direction that the camera is pointing changes slightly while it moves in the partially circular motion. 

Overall I am really happy about how this shot turned out and look forward to sharing next week's shot with you all! 

As always, please share your image for this week's shot in the comments below if you are participating in a weekly photography or cinematography challenge.  

Here we are with week 21 in this week of catching up! This week was one that I had to decide exactly what I wanted to do. There were so many options, but when working within the constraints of the adapted anamorphic lens, some ideas were simply out of the question.

I decided that the shelf of geekdom in my living room was a great place to get a good shot. So let's go ahead and take a look at this week's shot.

This shot was done with the Sony a6300 again, shot in 4K at 24p, 8000 ISO, 1/50 shutter, f11.0 with a +1 macro lens attachment. I shot this week on my Canon 75-300 lens again as well.

So let's start off with the negative on this week. My biggest problem this week was the rolling shutter. For whatever reason, it was really noticeable to me. For those that don't know what the rolling shutter does to the image, it's also described as a jello effect.

So for this week, one thing that created a speed bump in getting this week's video done was the necessity to use rolling shutter repair on the footage run at a pretty high level. This not only meant extra rendering, but it also seems to slow down the export of the final video as well. 

But once the rolling shutter repair had been done the footage looked much nicer and had a better handheld look to it than before. Handheld footage as well all know can look great or awful, but I ended up pretty happy with the handheld for this shot in the end.

My favorite thing about this shot is all the color. I love how nicely all the color ended up popping in the shot once a grade was applied. I did notice that the noise was a little bit bad because I shot at high ISO and put on a pretty harsh grade, but it still wasn't unusable noise. 

I ended up just de-sharpening the footage a bit and bringing down the harshness of the grade just a bit and ended up with a nice looking shot with much more of a grain like noise. 

Much like the post for week 20, this is another shorter post without that much to say so I'll end it here. If you are participating in your own 52 week photography or cinematography challenge, please share your image for week 21 in the comments below!

Another week that fell behind but it's never too late to get it posted! Due to life getting in the way I fell a few weeks behind so let's keep this short and get on to the rest, am I right?

So for this week I had two different ideas that I was getting ready to shoot. I was going to shoot a night time traffic shot and then a shot of the Denver skyline. Walking over to where I was going to shoot the shot of traffic my fiance pointed out that the pool at our apartment complex had opened.

Seeing that glowing water ended up trumping any ideas that I had for other shots and I decided to just go with that.

So without further ado, let's check out the shot for week 20.

This week was shot on the Sony a6300 in 4K 24p in SLOG 3 at 10,000 ISO, 1/50 shutter, f11.0 using a Canon 75-300mm lens and of course the adapted B&L Anamorphic projector lens. 

I decided to shoot this week at a high ISO to test the low light ability of the camera further while also testing out a different lens with the projector lens. In the end I was really happy with the results.

The biggest challenge with this week was not during the actually filming of this shot, but instead everything that kept me from getting the shot on time. I was really busy and away from home for basically the whole week that I was supposed to film this shot. 

That's no real excuse of course, but in all honesty I just kept forgetting to go get the shot until it was too late at night. That or a few of the nights I planned to go film the weather was awful.

But I finally got around to filming it and in the end, waiting like I did led to getting a much better shot than I had planned that wouldn't have been possible when I was supposed to film this shot. 

I also really liked that when I film in 4K and output in 4K that means that I actually have to squash the video down rather than stretch it out. It seems to me that this lead to a sharper image than I have previously been able to achieve with the adapted anamorphic set up.

Overall I am just really happy with the way that this week's shot turned out.

Well like I said, I am keeping it short for this post since I am doing 2 more this week, so keep an eye out! 

As always, if you are participating in any kind of 52 week photography or cinematography challenge, please share your image for this week (well week 20 that is) in the comments below!

Well not only was this week's video late, but my god the issues that were behind its tardiness. But only a couple days late and we are here now! This week's prompt was "Take an amazing portrait of someone, make a mess while you are doing it."

I had a few ideas for this week but none of them were really going to work for what I wanted to do. Luckily what I was making for dinner would work for this week's shot, at least well enough. So I decided to shoot a slow motion shot of my fiance seasoning the raw burger meat we were about to throw on the grill.

One thing that was cool about this week was it gave me the opportunity to test out some new gear! So let's go ahead and watch the video real quickly.

So this week was actually shot differently than the rest! WOO! Change! I shot this week on the Sony a6300 in 1080p, 120fps recorded to 24fps, 6400 ISO, 1/400 shutter, in XAVC S at 100mb/s. 

Despite not shooting in RAW, this camera created great images and gave me the ability to shoot at a higher frame rate for slow motion. Also since this camera shoots 4K this will give me the opportunity to shoot at true 4K and squeeze images rather than stretching them when I am not shooting for slow motion.

I also had to shoot on a different lens than normal for this week because the a6300 has a bigger sensor than the BMPCC. This meant that not only would a 35mm not work without vignetting, even a 50mm wouldn't work! So I had to jump all the way up to 80mm using a vintage 80-200 f3.9 telephoto lens.

Now onto the shoot. The bad things for this week were all not directly related to the shoot, but affected the post production. Due to numerous issues with my computer I actually had to go into data recovery mode just to be able to post this week's video.

My OS on my editing machine got messed up and I had to reinstall it. Then the drive that had all my fonts on it, including the one I use for my titles, took a dump on me. As soon as I was able to recover the data off of the drive, I was able to make my title cards. Phew!

Other than those technical issues, the shoot for this week was a breeze.

Not only did I get to shoot with a new camera, but I also got to shoot with some new lights! Through Patti Healy-Kelly an Hanson Fong, I now have a set of continuous quartz halogen lights that put out a whopping 750 watts each. 

So for this shoot I set up one of them so that I would have enough light for not only the shutter necessary for slow motion, but also the F stop needed for the anamorphic lens. 

The nice thing about using a hot light like the one I used is that there was not an issue with flickering when shooting slow motion, but that was only shooting at 120fps.

Well that's it for this week. Again, if you are participating in a 52 week challenge, cinematography or photography, please share your image for this week in the comments below!