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360 degrees of Slash

I recently had the opportunity to work on a project with one of the top Rock guitarists in the music industry, and it was both very exciting to be working with Slash from Guns ‘N Roses and Velvet Revolver fame, as well as to be working on a project that was paving a new road through digital photography, capturing 360° images to be processed into user-interactive camera angles.

Slash has just finished recording an album of new songs with singer/guitarist Myles Kennedy, drummer Brent Fitz and bassist Todd Kerns and part of the release will be an interactive video of the band playing the album complete, and recorded on 6  – 360° cameras. The user will be able to choose which camera to watch and have the ability to control pan and tilt. The camera technology that makes this possible comes from a couple of really smart guys at MATIvision. The album is great, and it is just an added bonus to have a front row seat to the recording of it.

UPDATE June 17, 2012

The album Apocalyptic Love has officially been released, as has an iPhone and iPad app from Mativision containing the 360 degree video.

Here are some photos I took during the process.

 

Day For Night shooting

[vimeo 35448689 w=500 h=281]

Day For Night shooting from Jeff Gatesman on Vimeo.

Day for night is a classic way of shooting a night scene without expensive and huge lighting setups. Instead you shoot during the day and use various techniques to create night in post. I made this image as a test for a short film I am planning to shoot soon. It is best viewed in full frame mode.

Still from original footage

Here is a still of what the original footage looked like before processing. The cool thing about using post techniques to create night is the virtually limitless palette you have to play with: you can create any kind of night look you want, from zombie apocalypse to warm and romantic.

Baby Shower – The Doritos Spot

Baby Shower from Jeff Gatesman on Vimeo.

This is the 30-second spot I made for Doritos’ Crash The Super Bowl competition. It did not make it into the top 5.

Now, I’m not going to say that whoever makes the choices over at Doritos has no sense of humor, or that they lack taste or vision, or that they are just down right terrible at making decisions. No, I’m not going to say any those things. I’m going to take the high road, and just say congratulations to the well-deserving filmmakers who produced the five spots chosen by those “decidors” over at Doritos.

I would also like to mention Jennifer Cobb and Laya Portillos who came up with the concept and wrote “Baby Shower”, and who are the two lovely stars of the spot. Without them I would probably have just done something with dogs.

Even if you’ve seen this on the Doritos site–it was highly compressed and the audio suffered from it. Here it is in High Def with a better sounding mix.

Two Pontiacs entered into the Spider Awards

The Black and White Spider Awards is the leading international award honoring black and white photography. This year I submitted two of my car images, both classic Pontiacs. Click on the thumbnails to get the full view.

Photographing cars has always been one of my favorite things to do outside of actually driving them, and classics are the best kinds of cars in my mind. I just love their curves and all the chrome, I mean if Bling is your thing, the makers of these cars did it over the top and yet, with some elegant style.

I think these two images in black and white are a testament to the timeless beauty of these machines. I hope you agree.

My new Stage Zero Dolly

So I got my Stage Zero dolly kit from Dynamic Perception, built it and figured out to make it work. Of course, by the time I was finished it was too late to take it out and set up a shot somewhere (or I was too lazy) so instead I made a shot of the dolly itself.

 

 

Within in the next couple weeks I will post some (hopefully cool) video that I actually take while using the dolly, until then consider this a teaser…

What I learned at Alexa School

[dc]T[/dc]hanks to my affiliation with IATSE Local 600, Cinematographers Guild, I had an opportunity recently to attend a class given by ARRI to learn more about their new Alexa camera series and though I have shot with one once already, I did learn some new and interesting facts about what is quickly becoming one of  my favorite camera systems.

Continue reading “What I learned at Alexa School”

Culver City Car Show

The car show that takes over the main street in Culver City every year is one of my favorites. There are usually a selection of George Barris creations, some cool music and of course, some great cars. Here are a couple of images I made this weekend.

DSLR.Bot and Venice HDR Images

[dc]I[/dc]n the on-going battle between Nikon and Canon owners as to which camera is better, one feature that I, a devoted Canon owner, have lamented is Nikon’s ability to bracket to 5 images as opposed to Canon’s 3, which becomes a real drawback when making High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. But now there is a new iPhone/iPad app that allows me to extend the number of images captured for HDR to as many as 20, and I have only begun to experiment with it. Continue reading “DSLR.Bot and Venice HDR Images”