“That’s just crazy..!”

       The Making Of Hose.

WHAT CAMERA TO CHOOSE?

Its always a good idea to ask around to find out what people who have experience in these matters think. So I called up a great photographer friend of mine, Simon Harsent , who I knew was embracing digital at a time when some photographers were still looking down their noses at it. He advised me to go with the Canon D20, 8.2 mega-pixel SLR. I was leaning towards the bigger D1s, 16 mega pixel camera, which he talked me out of, based on price and the amount of data we would end up with. I will be eternally grateful to him for that, especially since we ended up with 26 LaCie 250GB drives full of information.

The website DPReview.com was also amazingly helpful. On the site you could do side-by-side comparisons of various camera options and read reader feedback. We also looked into Nikon’s D5 camera, but ultimately were persuaded by the Canon’s reliability, CMOS sensor, superior digital lenses and software that allows direct capture to a laptop. That turned out to be the single best reason for buying this camera.

When shooting animation, its beneficial to never have to touch the camera once you start shooting. The Tic-Tac-Toe sequence was shot onto 4GB compact flash cards early in the shooting process. Halfway through the shot, we ran out of space and had to remove the card, resulting in a slight movement of the camera. Also physically pressing the shutter creates a slight change in the position of the camera. These problems can be resolved (thanks to the fact that the image is almost twice the size of an HD frame) but its not ideal. Its better to capture remotely.

The Canon Capture software also allowed us to change the size of the browser and scroll down quickly through the frames, effectively allowing us to ‘watch’ the animation. In addition the histogram at the top gives very accurate information about ‘clipping’ in the image and we soon learnt to trust that more than our eyes or a light-meter. Once information is out of the range it is lost forever. If the image looked a little dark we knew that once we processed the RAW files we could get a beautiful image but if areas were outside of the range, there was no way to get that info back.