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Posted by Toby on 07/05/06 08:27
>
> Interesting idea about the "blue hour." I generally like to shoot later
> because I like it when a location is less populated -- there's something
> about a single, lonely person walking away from camera. I'd need a pretty
> long dusk, though, as the "At Night" series usually take a minimum of 3
> hours or so each to produce 2-3 minutes of usable footage. My wife would
> kill me if I spent more than one evening on a project like this --the
> first one I did was the result of developing an abscessed tooth in Venice,
> not being able to sleep and deciding to go out and shoot. It's probably
> one of the better ones that I've done:
>
> http://travelersvideo.com/venice%20at%20night.wmv
>
> Whereas I'm merely a dilletante at video, China is something I know well.
> My wife is Chinese (I met her there on a business trip 12 years ago), so
> we go back quite often. If I go this summer, it will either be to
> Beijing, for which an "At Night" video would be quite difficult in just a
> single evening's shoot, or Shenzhen, which is about as unphotogenic a
> place as I can imagine.
I lived in Italy for some years and I know Venezia very well. You did a nice
job of capturing the feel of one of my favorite night places, although I
have to say that it looks even nicer when the fog rolls in.
You do definitely need a level. It's very difficult to eyeball it through a
viewfinder or on that small screen. If you have a tripod head that can be
leveled then I would suggest getting a small circular bull's-eye level and
finding a place to mount it on the head. If not, it sounds like you will
have to mount it on the camera shoe. In that case, as I mentioned, you don't
want a circular level, you want a tube level, since you only want to true
the horizon, not the tilt. Check this out:
http://www.adorama.com/TPBLS.html
You probably couldn't make one for much less than that.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you level the camera instead of the
head, you are not necessarily going to get level pans (in fact if would be a
huge surprise if you did). Leveling the camera will work for pans only if
the camera is exactly parallel to the plane of rotation of the head.
I'm not familiar with your tripod and head, but if it has a ball and cup
arrangement for leveling with only pan and tilt axes, then it would work,
since the horizontal relationship between camera and head is invariant, but
if you have the normal kind of photo head with three axes, where the head is
on an elevator and the angle in relation to the legs is fixed, then it won't
work. Obviously you can set up fixed shots by checking the level, but as you
turn the camera that changes unless by chance your tripod is exactly level.
But I notice that for the stuff that you shoot you aren't doing many pans,
so a little level like the one I mentioned would do you a world of good. I
guarantee you that after a little while, when you can just level the camera
and frame the shot without having to try to eyeball it, you will wonder how
you ever lived without it.
Toby
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