You’ve seen it in the magazine (havent you?! If not see the latest Perth Street Car Magazine here) and now it’s time to see it on your computer screens. Danny Williamsons 750Hp 2JZ Powered Nissan S15 Drift Car certainly earns its place on the racetrack, and the astonishing Kristal Hammond certainly deserves our attention. Check out the behind the scenes video below to learn a little bit more about this car and see both myself and Kristal hard at work! As an extra treat I have a bunch of behind the scenes photos for you too.
Mark Wallace has become pretty renowned for his educational video series on youtube on behalf on Adorama and this time he bring us a little video on working with models. It’s a basic guide from start to finish on working with a model from a photographers point of view. It certainly doesn’t cover all the angles but it’s always interesting to see how others conduct themselves through the whole process.
Thanks to a tip-off from Jay Wells I stumbled across this the other day and had a bit of a laugh! This is a huge photographic industry secret being given away here, guaranteed to produce amazing results everytime. Have a look….
Here is a little sneak peek at the behind the scenes of the 2012 Sxymma Calendar photoshoot! What’s Sxymma you ask? Only the hottest calendar you can get your mittens on for 2012!
Check out the 2012 SXYMMA Calendar HERE.
Footage was filmed by Elliott Vasilla and Luke Brooks. Thanks Gents! Also a thanks to Camera Electronic for letting us try out their new Cobra Crane.
More from the calendar soon, until then check out www.sxymma.com
GoPro have released their new HD HERO2 camera and I can’t wait to get my hands on one. The new camera has some much better features than its predecessor but that’s not the reason I want one. I’ve always wanted a GoPro camera but never got around to buying one, and to be honest never quite had the need for one.
However with plenty of action filming on the cards in the near future, and an epic 4 week long pow pow snowboard tour of Japan in February next year, the launch of this new GoPro HD HERO2 was my kick in the butt to finally get my hands on one and wear it, mount i and love it. Thats GoPro’s slogan for those that don’t know.
Check out this amazing video below shot entirely 100% on the new GoPro HD HERO2 camera. This video travels the world with some amazing professional athletes and adventurers and it’s exciting to watch. Big fan of the music too.
At Paramount Studios today in Hollywood, the much anticipated press release took place and Canon have revealed their new EOS C300 cinema video in front of the film industry elite.
The camera can come with either a PL or EF mount but not both unfortunately. It utilises a Super 35mm sensor and allows for timecode, has HD-SDI outputs and two CF card slots. So its a big step up from the 5D and designed to compete with the other digital cinema cameras out there. The general consensus seems across the net at the moment seems to be that Canon have arrived with too little, too late, for too much.
As you all know Vincent Laforet is a full fledged Director of Photography now and very close to Canon, s of course he has been out shooting with the C300 before its announcement to test it in the field. Check out this film Mobius below along with some behind the scenes. I absolutely love the film. The style of the story is exactly the kind of story I love. Check it out.
A big thanks to Luke Brooks and Peter Clarke who jumped on board to film this BTS video. It’s been really cool having someone different shoot each of the behind the scenes videos I do. This shoot was very chaotic with the weather changing on us and a small amount of time to get the photos and video we needed. It worked out ok though in the end.
I’ve always wanted to strap my 5DMKII camera to a car and record something. Well my new car rig enables me to do exactly that! I recently put together a rig for taking still images of a car at low walking speeds (more on that later), but I wanted to step things up a bit and build a rig that was more secure and could handle filming while driving around!
So this image above is it! It’s my new 5DMKII Car video rig. I guess it isn’t limited to the 5DMKII of course, that’s just what I happen to use. It took a while to research it and find all the compatible parts to do what I wanted, but I’m very happy with it. (Filmtools in Los Angeles sell an almost identical version but it was too expensive to buy and ship to Australia.) I can reconfigure the rig to be attached to just about any part of the car. My main goal was to be able to attach it to the bonnet, and the side doors for filming people inside the cabin. This was going to be one of the solutions for filming some car chase sequences in the short film “The Manuscript” that I’m currently shooting. We may not be using it for that anymore, but I certainly have plenty of uses for it and the ideas are still coming in.
Sucking on the bonnet are 3 x Avenger Pump cups one of which you can see above. I have the ones with a baby swivel pin so I have more flexibility.
Then to hold the arms, I use an Avenger D200B black grip head on each pump cup. The arms/rods they hold are 20″ Matthews arm. They are thinner and lighter than the typical C-Stand arms but they still fit into the grip head.
Then at the far end of each arm/rod shown above, there is another grip head, so thats 6 all up. Then into the grip head goes my cheese plate below.
This Cam Caddie Scorpion EX Cheese Plate has twenty-one 1/4-20 mounting holes and nine 3/8 mounting holes. I have mounted 3 Avenger 5/8″ studs to it underneath which will drop into the grip heads on top of the rig and just about make it complete.
On top of the cheese plate I just grabbed one of my tripod ball heads to hold the camera. This one is the Manfrotto 322RC2 grip action ball head. A ball head was important so I can level the camera. Trying to get the car rig itself perfectly level would take a lot of fiddling.
You will notice another suction cup product sitting on the bonnet in this photo above and the first photo. I was playing around with this on the day and I actually placed it there for a bit of extra support incase. It was a Fat Gecko mount. I don’t normally use it though.
So anyway, here’s a quick little video of me testing the rig. I strapped my 5DMKII with a 24-70mm 2.8L lens onto an adjustable 322RC2 ball head. I placed a circular polariser on the lens to help me see through the windscreen without any glare, and I also placed a variable neutral density filter over the top so I could open the cameras aperture right up to 3.5! I did this to send the background out of focus and make it a bit more visually interesting and appealing.
Check it out…
P.S. I didn’t really pull the handbrake, thats just me being stupid. Get used to it.
So hopefully you will be seeing some really cool on-board camera footage soon from brodiebutler.com!
Recently a buddy of mine Elliott Vassila help me film a fun little promo video for Flawless Nightclub in Subiaco, Western Australia. The video was to be showcased on the home page of their new website which went live over the weekend. Above is a screen grab of the new site with my video embedded and it all looks hot!
Make your way over to the website and check it out (http://www.theflawless.com.au/) and you can watch the video directly below:
We shot the whole thing on a Canon 5DMKII and a 7D. The lenses were mixed between a 14-40mm L, a 16-35mm 2.8 L, 24-70mm 2.8 L and a 70-200mm 2.8 L.
We used a monopod to keep the camera steady for a lot of shots as it’s very difficult to navigate through a busy nightclub with a tripod. My Glidecam HD4000 paid a visit to this project too. You will notice some of the smooth gliding style shots in the video and using the glidecam is how I achieved that. There was even a lot of hand held involved too.
Obviously it is next to impossible to light something like this, so a lot of shots use only natural light from the nightclub, shot on an ISO that was probably a bit higher than we would like. Some of the shots though are lit quite nicely and we escaped with nothing but an on-camera LED light. The one I use has magnetic filters you can add to it to achieve a warm tungsten feel or a cooler daylight balanced colour temperature. An example of this is the shot below of DJ Jackness. You can see a nice blue rim light behind him on the left hand side, and then his skin tones are brought up quite nicely on the right hand side. The blue light was already setup as part of the nightclubs lighting, so I switched that on and it looked great. To bring up Jacks skin tones and illuminate his face, I used the tungsten filter on my simple LED light panel. In this case, I actually got Elliott to hold it off camera to the right. From my still photography I’m a huge fan of off-camera lighting, and a little bit of off-camera lighting worked an absolute treat here too.
Now using a grey card can help you achieve a correct white balance, and will also help remove any colour casts that may be present in an image. However, what if you want to go one step further and take full control over all your colours in your image? Make sure your RAW files are converted accurately. Well let me show you how I do it.
I use the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.
It works just the same as a Grey card. You setup your lights if any(it works with ambient light too) and get a correct exposure set. Having a correct exposure is important in order to get an accurate reading. Then get your model or an assistant to stand in with the ColorChecker Passport and face it to the camera like in the image above. Let the passport fill the frame as much as you can and take a single photo and walla, you’re done. Now you have a reference for when you get back into Lightroom at the end of the shoot.
With the product comes a plugin for lightroom that you can install in a few minutes. This software can identify this colorchecker passport in the photo, and make sure all of the colours are being displayed accurately. Obviously, the software knows what each little square on the passport SHOULD look like, so it can make adjustments to your image to make sure they do look correct!
I was going to create a tutorial for this with more in-depth information, but Mark Wallace over at Adorama did such a thorough job I thought I would just share his video. You can find an enormous amount of information on the Adorama channel so check it out. The video is below:
Here’s a little behind the scenes videoI filmed a couple weeks ago for Fashion Heir here in Perth. Luke Brooks had the pelasure of editing the footage. Put my glidecam HD4000 to good use as you will see. Check it out…
FASHiON HEiR is a promotional company with a large experience in fashion photography and marketing. Here is a quick look behind the scenes from one of there many photo shoots.
FASHiON HEiR behind the scene video, photographed by Luo Qi, styled by Thilini Alwis, video by: Brodie Butler, edited by Luke Brooks; deisgners: POLITIX & Aime Cristie; with Mccallion Nina, Sophia Louise Margaret Rutherford, Emma Ghizzo, Blake Garvey, Troy Coward.
Music: Copperhead – When We Do http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/29983
I’ve been a big FStoppers fan ever since the beginning and it’s been great watching it grow to where it is now. If you don’t know what FStoppers is then get your butt over there now! It’s a Behind The Scenes Video Blog site featuring all the best behind the scenes videos from the photographic industry. Check it out.
So yesterday, I discovered to my suprise they had stumbled across one of my old BTS videos that my assistant Karl Pearce shot on a 7D. The video wasn’t really anything special, but we did it for the fun of it. The actual photoshoot was apart of a blog post thatwhat turned out to be an extremely popular post and still generates a lot of emails and questions. The post was: Testing out the Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS Kit in bright sunlight.
One of the photos from this shoot which is featured above, I ended up selling! More about that and the end resulting images here in Shooting for Editorial Purposes.
Needless to say the traffic has gone through the roof on the video and the count has ticked well over 5,500 hits!
Today I wanted to share a couple of images I did for Johhny Ruffo, a seriously talented Perth singer who's in the middle of putting his first album together. I've been lucky enough to score a preview of a few of the tracks and I think Johnny will be someone to watch out for!
Now using a grey card can help you achieve a correct white balance, and will also help remove any colour casts that may be present in an image. However, what if you want to go one step further and take full control over all your colours in your image? Make sure your RAW files are converted accurately. Well let me show you how I do it.
I use the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.
I've always wanted to strap my 5DMKII camera to a car and record something. Well my new car rig enables me to do exactly that! I recently put together a rig for taking still images of a car at low walking speeds (more on that later), but I wanted to step things up a bit and build a rig that was more secure and could handle filming while driving around!
