BB: Bortoni Blog

Review: Aperturent.com. A Place to Rent Lenses in Atlanta & Everywhere Else

Mar 5

Posted by ed in Photography, Reviews | No Comments

When I first got my Nikon D40, it came with the 18-55mm kit lens. I thought this lens would be all I would ever need. Nikon then released the 35mm f/1.8 prime for their DX cameras. I bought it and was hooked with it’s great low light prowess. 2 lenses, who would need more right? Well, I was now bitten by the lens bug. I had tasted the sweet nectar of fast lenses and now I’ve been reading up on a bunch of other lenses.

Recently the opportunity came up to shoot a wedding for a friend, and this was the perfect chance (i.e., excuse) to try out a new lens. I’d heard that there were places online where you can rent lenses for quite affordable prices. When I found out about the wedding though, there was not much time to order something online, so I started looking for a local place here in Atlanta. I was disappointed to not really find any options nearby. There was one place, but it charged ridiculous rates. Then I found Aperturent.com. These guys run a rental website site that is based in Atlanta, and conveniently, they offer local pick up.

I browsed their site and settled on the 70-200mm f/2.8 and gave them a call. I spoke to Oscar and he was very helpful. When you pick up locally, you avoid the shipping costs and the shipping time, so it was perfect for me. I arranged with Oscar to pick up the lens and he was there right on time (actually, I was a little late). I tested the lens and found it to be in perfect order.

I used the lens for a week and then met up with Oscar to return it. Overall, I was very satisfied with Aperturent.com and would recommend them to anyone, specially if you are in Atlanta and are looking to try a new lens or perhaps some lighting or even a camera body.

Tags: Reviews

So You Want To Build A Hackintosh?

Feb 22

Posted by ed in Mac | 9 Comments

I have a couple of friends that have been asking for a Hackintosh parts list, so here it is. This configuration works well with Snow Leopard and has some Quad Core goodness:

Mother board: GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
Video Card: GeForce 8800GTS 512MB
RAM: 8 Gigs 2 x (4GB (2 x 2GB)) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
Ethernet Card: TRENDnet TEG-PCITXR 10/ 100/ 1000/ 2000Mbps PCI Copper Gigabit Network Adapter
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive
DVD-Drive: Pioneer Black 2MB Cache SATA CD/DVD Burner
Case: Antec Sonata III 500 Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply
Cooler: XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 120mm Rifle CPU Cooler & XIGMATEK ACK-I5361 Intel Core i7/Core i5 compatible Bracket Set
Thermal Compound: Artic Silver

Tags: Geek

No Pressure Wedding Photography

Feb 19

Posted by ed in Photography | No Comments

A friend of mine is celebrating his 25 year wedding anniversary tomorrow night and is having a ceremony and reception to commemorate the event. He casually asked me if I could take some pictures. Now, photography is a hobby for me. I like it, I want to continually improve my skills, but I’m by no means a professional. Because weddings are very important life moments, I would n0t try to shoot one for money as it would be too much pressure to deliver great results at this stage of my photographic development (pun intended).

This is the reason I’m excited about tomorrow, it’s no pressure! I’m not charging, so I don’t feel the pressure to deliver something great. It’s not a real wedding, it’s more like a “take 2″. It also will allow me to practice in a “real world” situation.

Just because it’s no pressure doesn’t mean I’m not taking it seriously! On the contrary, I’m taking it very seriously. I see this as a view into the future, and as a test to see how far along am I with this. So here is my plan:

I’ll be shooting with 2 Nikon D40’s (mine and a friend’s). Two reasons for this, it’s critical to have a backup camera, and I know how to use it well. It’s a crop sensor, but it’s all I have access to.
Weddings usually mean low light, so I’m taking two pretty fast lenses: a 35mm f/1.8 prime, and a 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom. I plan to put these on the 2 camera’s and just change cameras as needed for the shot.
Taking plenty of storage capacity in multiple cards. I plan to shoot A LOT, thus giving me many pictures to choose from and be able to deliver the best takes.
I’ll be taking two flashes, my Nikon SB-400 (small and light) and my YongNuo YN-465 (a more powerful flash with variable rotation on the head).
Shoot RAW. I usually shoot JPEG as it’s more convenient, however, for this key event the post-processing flexibility will be critical.

I’ll post a follow up after the fact with some select images. Wish me luck!

Photo Credit: Bob AuBuchon

Memory Colors

Feb 19

Posted by ed in How To, Videos | No Comments

Excellent article in ProLost today.

… skin tones are just one of a small handful of what I call “memory colors.” Memory colors are colors that are, in the minds of your audience, inseparable from certain common objects or events. For example, the sky is so associated with blue that you might feel that you see those two words together as often as you see them individually. The same goes for green and grass.

The most basic idea of color correcting is that you are making colorscorrect, which is to say that you are making objects on the screen appear to be the colors that we know them to be.

I’ll keep this great info in mind when color correcting video or stills.

Thanks Stu.

Tags: Color

Effective Final Cut Pro AVCHD Workflow on Macs

Feb 15

Posted by ed in How To, Videos | No Comments

AVCHD is quickly becoming a more common way to record footage in consumer and other mid to higher tier camcorders and cameras. It has many advantages, the primary being that it compresses high quality video into smaller files, thus allowing for more footage to fit in inexpensive flash storage. AVCHD has also been a source of extreme frustration for Mac users who wish to edit, organize, and archive their footage. In this post I’d like to provide some guidance based on my experience working with the Canon HF10 (similar to the HF100) camcorder.

The first thing that folks new to using AVCHD devices need to know is that although recordings from your camera are digital and are files in the storage card, they are stored within a structure such as this:

As you can see, the videos are not just at the root level of your card, but rather part of detailed structure made up of the videos themselves as well as other files that contain information “about the videos.” This brings us to our first challenge. Let’s say that you went to a party and recorded 45 video clips. In all likelihood there will be some clips that you might not want to keep. Well, if you go through each one in your camera and delete them there, then the other files in the AVCHD structure will be updated and you will be fine. However, if you copy the entire directory structure to your mac and later decide to delete a few of these videos, you are in trouble because the other files in the structure will not be updated to account for this deletion. Why does this other data matter? Final Cut Pro does not support editing AVCHD video files directly (as of FCP 7). The clips must be transcoded to an intermediate codec. Usually, ProRes (LT). FCP imports / transcodes AVCHD footage via the “Log and Transfer” dialog. The unfortunate thing is that FCP will not work with your video files if the AVCHD directory structure is not intact.

So how do we overcome this problem? The best solution is to find a way to transcode that does not require the entire directory structure. With such a tool, one would be able to selectively keep individual video files knowing that they could be converted to a FCP-friendly format without much trouble. There are several tools that can do this, the best two are VoltaicHD and Toast Titanium 10. After much trial and error, I found Toast to be the preferred choice for this for reasons that I will outline further on.

Before continuing with solutions, there are still a couple more things that need to be understood about working with AVCHD in general, and specifically with the Canon HF10 (or HF100) camera. Frame rates.

Tags: AVCHD, FCP, Final Cut Pro, HF10