Friday, December 22, 2006

Tremble at my new pic-taking ability!

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This was just to test my new digital camera, a Kodak Easy-Share that I got as a christmas bonus from my workplace (well, actually it's a few bonuses put together - their idea of a bonus is a Wal-mart gift card!). I love this shot... it has that whole Calvin Klein thing goin' on, it looks like somebody with a camera (with a bright flash) just busted in on something naughty. I hope I can get this kind of feel in the film when I shoot it.

I've also added a few pics to the post about Shelley's christmas puppet a little ways down... feast your eyes folks!

7 comments:

UbaTuber said...

Hey, congrats! Which model did you get, I have the z740, a couple of years old.....it takes awesome pics but I can't figure out how to remove the crosshairs, to use it with StopMoPro...

Darkmatters said...

Mine's a Z650. Heh... sounds like we're talking about motorcycles!

Yeah, I suppose you could use it with a framegrabber through an A/D converter. It only connects to the computer (directly) through USB though, so that's the only way I could see doing it.

mefull said...

Ah yes the paparazzi caught those Radke puppets and good!
Not to worry, I am sure the Darkmatters Studio public relations deptartment has already started spinning this story to make their stars come out smelling like roses :-)


Nice shot, seems like the camera will focus pretty close, the depth of field is not too bad either. I am not familiar with that camera do you have any control over aperature?

Darkmatters said...

He thought she was over 18 - really! And... the cocaine belonged to somebody else!

Ok, maybe the Darkmatters crew better stick to making movies and leave the spin to somebody else.

I'm still learning how to access all the features. I'm slowly getting decent manual control, but not sure how far it will go. That shot was with the flash, I've since learned how to turn it off (though I do like that snapshot effect for that kind of shot).

Funny yoy mention depth of field.... it was actually quite shallow in that shot - that's why her face is slightly out of focus (what I love most about the shot actually). It makes his face sharply defined and rugged while hers is soft and almost angelic... in fact she looks a lot like a religious icon... some sort of Madonna or something.

But I can get a much better depth of focus if I want. I know for realistic stopmotion you want a lot of DOF to approximate a larger scale, but I like the shallow depth for these puppets.

Darkmatters said...

Ok, I messed around with the camera some more and I do have completel manual control. It's almost a shame I won't be using it for stopmotion! I got this just for taking pics with, both in and out of the studio. In fact, I think I'll take a lot of shots of post ice-storm damage and Flikker 'em.

But it's nice to finally vbe free of that electronic tether that leashes my animation camera to the Mac. And I can use this camera for handheld shots, where as the other one is always on the camerajack. I also like having 6.1 megapixels to play around with! That shot at the top of this post is actually a small detail from a much larger picture that I cropped down. It's easy to see why people get so excited about using a digital still for animation!

Anonymous said...

DSC's are exciting as hell, and the pictures you've taken so far look awesome. I can't wait to see them move!

-Pram

a guy in a gorilla suit said...

The Photographer you related to (somehow) is Terry Richardson... strong (and more adult) stuff he does. But very interesting