Pete Ashton’s Blog

Tomorrow sees the first day of the Moseley Folk Festival and I’ll be there as an official photographer, which is nice as it means I can wave my cameras around with impunity. Here’s my photos from last year which got me the job. Back then I’d just got my Nikon D70s and was road testing my first TTV contraption, so it’ll be interesting to see how this year’s photos compare.

If you see someone waving this beastie around, that’ll be me.

Do say hello!

Number something in an irregular series: The Butt Biting Bug.

Apparently it makes no sense in Japanese either.

via BoingBoing which I’ve just started following again after an extended break.

Due to the involvement of Screen WM, our local film agency, I’m come across My Movie Mashup, a big MySpace thing run with Film 4 that hopes to produce “the world’s first user generated feature film”. To get involved you upload audition videos to MySpace which will be judged by a panel of experts.

Regardless of the merits of this enterprise I think this signifies that the concept of “user generated content” has jumped a number of sharks.

This is not a user generated feature film. This is using the internet to find new talent which will then be involved in making a feature film. One would hope the distinction would be obvious. I rather fear it isn’t.

Of course, user generated content is a fucking awful term anyway so we’re probably better off without it.

The latest development in the ongoing war against Pete’s absurd sleeping patterns is a medical one, specifically a prescription for a sleeping pill with a quite fantastic name. Zopiclone! Sounds like a… well, I’m not sure exactly what it sounds like but it doesn’t connote the drowsy.

I’m on a pretty low dose with instructions to only take it when necessary. Given that I woke up at 4pm yesterday I figured there was a necessity so I popped one last night about 11pm. The last time I took a sleeping pill it knocked me out in minutes resulting in a complete lack of dreams, which made me realise how important dreams are. Zopi seems to have the opposite effect, inducing the most incredible hallucinogenic dreams I’ve ever had, though this might have had something to do with the fact that my body was trying really hard to stay awake. I can’t remember any of them but they sure were a lot of fun. Much better than lying in the dark thinking “must get to sleep now, must get to sleep now…”

And then I woke up at 4am, which wasn’t so bad, and I’m feeling kinda relaxed, which is good. Hopefully I’ll make it through the day without crashing. Given I’ve built up a resistance to tea it might be time to break out the hangover coffee.

In related news I asked the doctor about CBT and have an appointment with a specialist tomorrow. Which is pretty soon. How long it takes to actually start some CBT is another matter.

It had been noted that I hadn’t done any Through The Viewfinder photography for a while now. This has been corrected.

Yes, Cannon came out with one a while back but it’s all about the lens fittings in this game so I’m only noting it when Nikon release a new camera that has a sensor the same size as 35mm film. This means that not only does it have a much higher resolution but it also means the mm measurements on lenses will be correct. For example, the 50mm prime I like to use is in actual fact a 75mm because the sensor in my D70 is 2/3 the size that the lens was designed for. This is great if you want extra zoom but does mean getting a decent wide-angle lens for a digital camera has been very expensive if not impossible until now. (More on sensor sizes on Wikipedia.)

Here’s a review of the new Nikon D3 with the shocking news that it has a max ISO of 25,600, although the specs say “Default: ISO 200 - 6400 in 1/3, 1/2 or 1.0 EV steps. Boost: 100 - 12800 in 1/3, 1/2 or 1.0 EV steps, HI2 = ISO 25600″ and I’m not sure I know what that really means. I suspect there’ll be a lot of noise in there.

Still, at a suggested retail of £3399 I ain’t getting one soon so this is mere speculation. But it’s good to see the age of the smaller sensor in SLRs is coming to an end.

I’m thinking that at some point in the next few months I’m going to need to invest in a decent camcorder for work. What I’m after is something that’s of “good enough” quality but not horrendously expensive. I guess I’m looking at what in the camera world we call the “prosumer” market, hovering between high-end digicam and the low-end SLR.

The benchmark I seem to have settled on is this lump:

It’s a Canon HV10 and takes those MiniDV tapes. I was really wanting something hard drive or flash based as I don’t really trust tapes but a bit of research sold me on it. Plus the future-proof AVCHD codec that’s used by the new hard drive based camcorders doesn’t seem to be that widely adopted yet. Won’t work with iMovie for a start.

The HV10 is currently a little over £500 on Amazon. I have no idea if that’s good value for a DV camera but it’s probably my upper limit.

Taking things down a notch is the Canon MV930 which is defintiely of the “consumer” type. I can get one of these for about £150 and while it’ll do the job I have a feeling I’ll be wanting to upgrade within a year, just as I did with my Fuji S7000.

What I’m particularly interested in is quality. Since I’ve been using a DSLR camera my tolerance for low quality digital images has plummeted. I appreciate that in order to duplicate the quality I’m getting from my Nikon I’d need to spend a good £3,000 but if you put that at 10 and the crappy £40 camera at 1 I’m looking for something around the 6 mark. Give or take.

This is kinda weird because if it were still cameras I’d just ask my Flickr chums but I don’t think I know anyone who’s a video camera nerd. Except Leon. I should ask him I suppose.

Anyone got any good pointers?

An experiment in “the persistent gaze”. Or something.

Soundtrack is The Flaming Lips album Clouds Taste Metallic.

I’m quite liking Vimeo for video hosting, mainly because it looks nice. Might stay there.

One of the best magazines in the world of magazines ever ever is back from the near dead.

I’ve got my subscription in.

Heads up from John C