Leica

The Leica brand is THE brand in still cameras.

My Dad had a Voigtlander still camera which was a very good camera.

Here is a link into the Leica website taking you to the Leica Q.

I have not used one. I saw this one in a catalog.

What I like about this, which I have no experience as to whether or not it is true, is it claims it will get a great photograph in terrible conditions.



https://us.leica-camera.com/Photography/Leica-Q/LEICA-Q

Because I know very little about making films and...

Because I know very little about making major films and most of my schooling has been about taking a story direct to video, I started doing research today about the direct to DVD market, which is what I was taught to do in college.

It makes sense as costs are much smaller. It gives you, the creator of the film, a market test to see if your story will work as a movie.

I found this interesting article in Variety Magazine online.

The last paragraph is important, Nolan Gallagher states that the distributors like to place independently made movies in the Video on Demand (VOD) market first to see how it performs.

My thinking is you have to have an opening scene that will force people to tell other people to come watch your movie. And then a story to back it up.

Another search today offered this from the world of PBS.

The Lytro Still Camera

Continuing with the last few days about Lytro cameras, today is about the Lytro still camera.

I have used the Lytro Still camera and I have to say it is a great camera to use after you get used to how it works.

I mention this because I finished shooting some video last week and one of the cameras I used auto focused and locked onto a wood railing in the foreground of the subject I actually wanted in focus, so the main subject is a little fuzzy, and now there is no way to reproduce the moment nor fix the focus.

And I expect to be paid for the shoot anyway. I have issues with that piece of video but I do have other video, thankfully, that captured the whole scene.

I will make it work, but...

That's why you buy a Lytro. After-the-fact, fix-it-in post refocusing a scene.

That is a nice feature the future has brought to us.

Lytro 755 Immerge

I began yesterday writing about the 755 Immerge Lytro camera, and then I went off on a pessimistic rant.

'Sorry about that.

The new Lytro camera does have this interesting ability to capture the vector light rays in a scene in a 3 dimensional mathematically based form and house them in a computer server.

By doing so, film makers, and I believe anyone that needs to work with a 3D image, like a heart surgeon might with a heart, or a brain surgeon, or anyone working in a 3D space will be able to reach in with an editor and remove, quite nicely, anything the media resolves, and replace it with something different.

A flower pot in the scene might become a hair dryer, or a lamp, or a hovering bird.

It will lead to new design advances for architecture, and any construction medium, cellular to landscape and beyond.

Here is a link to TechCrunch, notice that it states the Lytro Immerge system is going to kill the green screen.

It appears that..

It appears that the future of film is going without the green screen:

Click here to follow to a new page...

The above link takes you to a page posted by American Movie company about the new Lytro Light Vector capture camera. The 755 Immerge.

Over the years one of the things I have heard over and over is this is the hot new tech or this is the new way or this is where we are going with technology.

I was part of a Master's Thesis once upon a time wherein the writer and I met online in a virtual world and we discussed the future of tech and virtual reality worlds in general.

I have surmised, and it seems more and more this vision is coming true... I surmised that we can make such an eye appealing world with technology that people are going to want to spend their lives in virtual reality instead of in the real world.

Call it the Matrix or whatever, as crimes become more intense, and terrorism visits us closer to home, and we become poorer, and the cycle of inflation kicks in, and we deplete the value of the dollar into 16 trillionths of a dollar of debt (the dollar bill divided by the current approximate debt of the United States), escapism is going to become more and more desirable...

People will be locked in VR worlds and the building they are living and viewing the VR in will be destroyed by some occurrence and they won't even know it happened, except a momentary burning feeling as they are blown apart or incinerated.

But I am going off on a tangent.

One of the things about new technology is that as something new comes on the scene something else seems to come along that becomes the Public's preferred way to go. And it isn't the early on predicted way.

This social phenomenon is powered by the media, trends and other factors like the economy, and so on.

For example, in the 50s cigarette commercials, one of the ads used to say "More Doctors prefer such and such cigarettes..."

And so Doctors smoked more cigarettes.

Media influences our decisions in very powerful ways that we don't even realize.

We have been lead to believe that smartphones, and tablets and you name it is going to save us.

Growing up I would have said to you that technology is going to save us but I think we are now realizing, with malicious hackers tearing apart our social fabric tied together by technology, terrorist driving herds of stampeding people across the globe, and other such societal events and eventualities, that we may not be so lucky. I think it is quite possible that we are not so much entering the biblical end times, or an apocalypse ( revelation ), but I think we are heading towards a kind of Fermi's Paradox, wherein a kind of house of cards has been built out of credit and technology. And it is going to crumble nearly as fast, if not faster, than we can rebuild, renew, and outrun the inevitable. What ever that may be.

If you have read Bootstrapping Complexity, you will understand the analogy I am about to make...

In Bootstrapping the writer likens humanity as a surfer on a wave, always riding a crest of a wave, and with certain right turns and wrong turns the surfer will either wipeout and have to start over or will get it right and ride the crest of the wave for a nice long ride. Such are the likes of Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet and the United States largest land owner.

For the rest of us, we end up in the house of cards crumbling, for the surfing analogy, we end up in the boil. The boil is the bottom of the wave where previous waves have crashed and filled the water with air. These areas are dangerous because a human doesn't float well in them and sinks.

So our society has became filled with debt and credit boil. Our society is so filled with such that it can't hold anything up. I hope I am wrong.

The glass is half full or half empty? I want to believe it is half full, but I believe it is so aerated that nothing can float on it except those lucky few somehow already above it all.

Recently in the headlines of the news the coal mining industry gave up and went bankrupt.

Ever it seems that old tech is replaced with new tech. But it is never quite so direct as that because of the numerous factors I wrote about above.

Back to the Lytro camera. The premise this is being sold on is that green screen technology, which is so embedded in Hollywood movie making, and makes incredibly eye appealing imagery, will somehow vanish. I suspect it will become part of the tool kit, and probably more useful to the gamers world than the movie world as anything in the movie world will be able to be readily re-created into a game world.

It remains to be seen if this camera and its tech will become desirable to film makers. It is like people saying the desktop computer is gone. Not yet, not so fast.

But it is happening increasingly fast.

I don't think the green screen will be so easily abandoned.

There is too much money to be made. Except it is more like counterfeit money than money backed by anything with real value.

As I keep heading towards making my first feature film...

As I keep heading towards making my first feature film I keep building aspects of it in my mind.

Questions haunt me all the time. things like, whats the opening sequence going to be? When I look at the first Star Wars movie it had so many things going for it. A great title, a re-working of the cowboy western into outer space, awesome, visionary, and visually interesting effects...

Imagine having a government space offense/defense program named after your movie.

The list goes on.

I see several opening scenes for my own movie in mind. When I think about it I recall plays like Silent Alarm, the opening for Star Wars and that incredibly huge Imperial Cruiser chasing down the Millenium Falcon, and how long that was on screen to purposefully pull us into that moment and give us a heightened sense of action.

I see other opening sequences as well, but none that grab like SW did.

I have spent much time over the last few years shooting photographs. And my background is in commercial and public broadcasting. I understand lookspace and how to compose a photograph and how to frame up a video shot.

But how do you get off on the right foot with a feature movie?

I am not sure yet but, because I am enamored of Stanley Kubrick, I intend to make a sunrise, sunset hyperlapse video clip. I have already made a hyperlapse clip of the community I live in and a neighboring town as well. Here is the link to view it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO4Z_Xe9fb4

One of the aspects I come away with this video is when I watch it I see the way the dynamic changes when I drive into the forest area going up Harris Hill. It is one thing to drive around on flat area, and to see the quick stops and starts at stop signs. It is entirely different to see what happens during the seconds from 2:13 to 2:40. And...it has just occurred to me what might be down to enhance a hyperlapse that I don't currently see in others on the net.

I will make one and show you what I mean, maybe, or maybe I will keep it a secret.