Friday, January 13, 2012

Paid to learn

These days I try to get paid to learn new technology. 18 years ago I was being paid to learn digital photography. I was one of the first and therefore have more digital experience than most. This time my beloved cheese client asked for a video for their new Cello website. We had been shooting still images for many days when the request came up. I went to Unique Photo, my local photo superstore and rented a Nikon D7000. I prefer Nikon because I have a large number of Nikon lenses and the D7000 can use them all; the manual and the auto focus. The set up for this shot involved locking a large 4 sided grater into 2 C-stands. The lighting was strobe modeling lights (that's right Speedotron modeling lights only) and the rest was just a matter of using a 300mm lens (450mm on the D7000) using my assistant to fake grate some cheeses, and me pouring 3 different cheeses down the grater while shooting 1080p video.
We shot a lot of "footage" and the rest was post production using Adobe Premier®, Adobe Flash®and Adobe Dreamweaver® to combine still images and video into a final .swf flash file for the website. 
It took me longer then a real video pro to get this job done, so I am billing my client for only one day instead of the 2 1/2 days it actually took. I didn't want to bill my client for the time as I learned these new programs... Here is the video:

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