My Blog

This is long overdue but here is our fancy schmancy wedding “trailer”. Our wedding videographer is truly an inspiration to me for the value of good editing and story telling. His cinematography is awesome and I’m not just being biased. Check it out, I think you’ll enjoy it especially for being a wedding video…even if you don’t know me it just looks and feels suh-weeeeet! Go ahead…HD and full screen that B!

Wedding Trailer | The Biltmore – Phoenix, Arizona

My friend, Tracy, is starting a dance company called MarioCo.Dance. She is a contemporary jazz dancer and with the new company, she needed new head shots and dance/fitness photos taken and I had the privilege to shoot it! We shot it using mainly available light and a reflector with exception to the “Box Office” shots which we used 2 flashes for. One 480ex II for the background and a 580ex II in a soft box to light the subject. Thanks to my wife, Chrissy, for having a creative eye for a unique picture and for coming up with the idea to shoot the Box Office shots!

We went to Tempe Center for the Arts last Saturday and braved the 114 degree heat. It was brutal, but I couldn’t complain because Tracy was the one jumping up and down on a trampoline for nearly 3 hours. I still like to whine about it though.

Here are a few of the shots we came up with:

I had a grand idea about shooting a bunch of footage while on our honeymoon and putting together this awesome film and telling a story about our time in paradise as a married couple. Instead, we laid around, ate and drank all day. However, I did manage to get SOME footage though and I finally got around to slapping it all together.

I took this as a chance to mess around with color correction and came up with some pretty fun shots. So the video is pretty pointless with no story to tell, but rather a collage of the things we did while in Hawaii: Eat, Surf, Shave Ice (Anyone know why it’s not called ‘ShavED’ Ice in Hawaii?), Lounge, Cruise, Drink, Hold Hands! Siiiick!

I also added a photo of us in the end to prove that I was present during this honeymoon as well.

Song: Jack Johnson – Moonshine from “Thicker Than Water” soundtrack

One of the best time lapse videos I’ve seen. Amazing!

As seen in his video description on vimeo, “A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April (bit.ly/​g3tsDW) and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes.

Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. ”

One time when I was at Tennis camp my coach got really upset with me because I decided it was a good idea during our break to set a tennis ball on fire.

On that note, here’s a little promo video we shot for Stunglasses. It’s got some FIRE and SLOW MOTION! All that’s missing is an explosion and you can call me Michael Bay. We chose to light these on fire because these pair are called “Coal“.

A couple days before the shoot, Peter helped me build this little fancy looking gem made from left over skateboard trucks he had and some sweet pink wheels and bearings I got off ebay for a couple bucks. We went to Home Depot and picked up a metal plate for around $7. Drilled some holes in it and it came out looking pretty good.

We had to do this several times. The first time we did it, once we lit the fire it blew everything out and you could barely see the sunglasses at all. The second time we did it, the fire looked good, but you couldn’t see the logo at all. So bottom line was that we didn’t have enough light (2 work lights). We regrouped and used 4 work lights the third time around and it made a big difference. Here she is…I really hate how youtube doesn’t let me embed in HD when using a custom size. So if you want to see it not look crappy, change it to 720p before you watch it.

We’re currently running a promotion on Facebook for the company I work for called the “Snack Bowl”. It’s a user generated promotion where fans submit their recipes. We decided to choose one of the top recipes that we liked and film someone making it. With Chrissy’s art direction we chose my lil’ sis Amanda (who is taller than me by a lot) to be the host and she was a friggin’ natural! The plan is to do more of these if not for my company, definitely for her blog which is coming soon. Chrissy and Amanda are preliminarily planning to make user submitted cooking videos and this was a great reason to test it out. Stay tuned for her blog, epicurasaurus.com to launch soon.

I was working with one Canon 60D and a wired lavalier mic but we tried our best to create the allusion that there was more than one camera present. I think it was accomplished for the most part. A lot of re-shooting the same thing and editing it together. Thanks to Chrissy because without her there, there would be a ton of inconsistencies in every shot. She’s amazing with the “details”. After all, it’s part of her real job…Ch-ch-check it out!


Make sure to change the resolution to 720p HD on the lower right of the video immediately once it starts playing that way you can watch it in full screen without it looking ugly.

Did another little mini shoot for STUN Glasses, this time for an ad on another company’s website who caters to the Dubstep music community. We brain stormed ideas for props we could use relating to dubstep and most all of them involved speakers. So, we went with head phones since nice speakers are huge and we still wanted STUN to be center of attention.

We had a “You know when you’re getting old when…” moment when we had to look up some terms used in the Dubstep community. It turns out Dubsteppers like “dirty” things, including “Slimey” things, which turns out to fit perfectly with the green pair of STUNs called Slime. Man, I’m lame. I might as well have said “Look it up on THE google; this dub stepping thing.”

THE SETUP

This was shot using a work light, like the ones you would get at Home Depot for 30 bucks. You just have to be sure you set the White Balance to something relatively low otherwise it would be crazy yellow. We then used a snoot on the work lamp made out of poster board to focus the light preventing it from hitting the black background. We noticed the “STUN” logo was dark in the first photo and we wanted to make it pop. So, knowing we could merge a light photo and a dark photo in post processing, we shot 2 of the same photos, one with and another without a white reflector.

Here she is, pre-production, without reflector:

Here she is, pre-production, with reflector (notice the highlights coming from the left):

And, the final, after post-production:

One of my best buddies, Peter, (and groomsmen; only 3 months until Wedding Day!) started a classic wayfarer style sunglasses company called STUN Glasses with another buddy of mine, Ryan. They wanted to feature a photo of one of the sunglasses with a New Years theme. I took it as an opportunity to practice some product photography and the results ended up being pretty good. At least we thought so. This was the final shot we chose after hours of Chrissy and Peter throwing confetti in various methods.

Here is the edited version used on the site.

We used a home made DIY light box made with 12 pieces of wood and white fabric. For the ground, we followed Zack Arias’ lead from his CreativeLiVE workshop and went to Home Depot to buy the white panel board which gives that subtle reflection for only $12. We only used one on-camera flash for this shot. Which was surprisingly enough. I brought a lot more gear but didn’t end up using most of it. I thought for sure at least we would use the flash off-camera, but I think the lightbox did the trick for us, evenly distirbuting the light. I wish I had taken some behind the scenes photos, but I didn’t this time and will next time since we’ll be doing more.

We also took a bunch of regular product shots with blown out white and black backgrounds, but those are kind of boring so I won’t post them. They look good, but just imagine sunglasses set against plain backgrounds and you’ll have your picture.

UPDATE: We had some time to mess around so we took photos of eachother trying our best “Blue Steel” looks. So here are a couple of Peter and me. If you’re interested, I’m wearing COAL and Peter is wearing SLIME. They’re real sick sunglasses, so get a pair. Or don’t, but it won’t be my fault if you step out into the sunlight and your eyeballs melt because you didn’t listen to me!

I happen to come across something called a Flycam Nano which is basically a knock-off Steadicam. So far it looks like the only place you can find it is on eBay for $115. I don’t have any footage yet because I just learned how to balance the thing a little bit ago. It took forever initially but once you understand what it’s trying to do, I bet it’s easy to balance another one.

On eBay it says it can only handle 3 lbs. or something like that, but I was able to balance my Canon 60D with either my Sigma 28mm f1.8 or Sigma 11-17mm f2.8 on it so it can handle more than it states.

It’s built pretty well. I think the only thing it might be missing is aesthetics because it uses silver washer weights as counter balances, but who cares, it’s roughly a billion times less than getting a real Steadicam.

Here are a few photos of the build:

Sometimes I see an idea like this that is so simple/brilliant that I get depressed that I didn’t think of it.