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Shoot for the edit or How to shoot a man walking through a door

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I’ve run many, many workshops and one-on-one sessions for photographers who want to move into the world of video. Wherever I am and however experienced the photographers are, one of the biggest questions they all have is about editing. For many of the photographers that I deal with, they don’t plan on editing their own videos. Rather, they plan on shooting the videos and then getting someone else to edit it for them.

So, of course, those photographers who don’t plan on editing their own footage don’t need to learn how to edit, right? WRONG! And here’s why.

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Making it work on real life budgets and why Content is King

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“Content is king” is what people say. Well, recently I delivered a video clip that was part of a series of clips I produced for a client. I wasn’t 100% proud of it on a technical level.  So why did I still deliver it to the client? This was, after all, only one part of a series of clips. I could have delivered all the rest and explained to the client that this one wasn’t quite perfect and so would rather not release it.

I still sent it to the client because I knew that the content in the clip, the story if you would, was very engaging. And if you have a great story and decent audio, I believe you can get away with it if some of the shots aren’t perfect.

First, let me explain why the shots weren’t perfect. This was a corporate shoot and, very often in corporate shoots, you don’t have full control of what and how you’re going to shoot.

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Promise Pegasus3 R8 Bay RAID review

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With more and more of us shooting 4K footage, fast, large storage is becoming a must-have for those of us editing this footage. For the last few years, I’ve been using the Promise Technology R2+. It’s a two-bay thunderbolt 2 RAID array with a cool feature that it has a third bay that you can swap out. I normally have a card reader in there as it allows me to copy footage from cards at the fastest speed.

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Seagate Ironwolf Drives to store all those photos and videos

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I was surprised when Seagate reached out and asked me if I’d like to review some of their Ironwolf hard drives. I mean, how much is there really to write about hard drives? I’ve generally been pretty agnostic about which drives I use for my editing and backup. But once I started reading about the feature of these drives, I found there was a fair bit of info I hadn’t considered before. It’s worth remembering that storage is more and more important for us creative types. 

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ThinkTank Photo Airport Roller Derby review, after 4 years of use

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First, full disclosure: I know a few of the team at ThinkTankPhoto and I really like them, they’re a really nice group of people. So you may think it’s because I really like the people that I like their bags so much. Except I really like my dentist but I don’t like what he does to me every six months for my check up. I suppose this is my way of saying that I can be objective even though I am reviewing something that is made by people that I like. 

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Moment lenses for Smartphones: Thoughts after a month

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You may remember that a little while back I wrote a first look at the Moment lenses (these: Moment lenses) and I was pretty impressed with the build quality. The image quality was pretty good too. One of my concerns, though, was that they are pretty large and heavy compared to other lens systems that I’ve used in the past and I wasn’t sure whether that would affect how I used them or not. We all know the old adage of the best camera is the one you have with you. So I thought that maybe because of the size and weight, I would eventually decide that I couldn’t be bothered to carry them around with me, which would make them not that useful.

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