Planning a shoot on three cameras

After a hectic week in the office, a trip to the RSPB’s farm in Cambridgeshire was a pleasant way to spend a Friday afternoon. The farm was hosting a visit from the President of the National Farmers Union, and I was despatched to cover the event across several media platforms.
Mr Kendall’s visit coincided with the ringing and weighing of two barn owl chicks that had nested in the barn owl box provided by the NFU. After seeing the chicks, Mr Kendall was then taken on a tour of the farm to see the work the RSPB is doing to combine profitable farming with protecting wildlife.

For me there were two stories: a straightforward one involving the barn owls and one involving a more detailed treatment of Mr Kendall’s visit.

The outputs are clear too:

• Photographs of the ringing of the chicks for local papers, websites, and in-house publications;
  


• A web video of the ringing of the chicks for in-house websites and farming publications;
  


• Footage of the ringing to be provided to local TV as B-roll in case they want to cover the story subsequently;
  


• Photographs of the event and the visit for archive;
  


• Video of the event for the video archive.

Fortunately, a media officer colleague came along too, so I didn’t have to worry about the written aspect of the story, this allowed me to concentrate on the visuals for once, well it was a Friday afternoon.

Disturbance
I decided to record the stills on my six megapixel Nikon D70, while recording video on the work’s Canon HD video camera, using a range of microphones, including a lavalier for interviews and the camera’s shotgun mic for general atmosphere and wildtrack. Additionally, I asked my colleague to shoot hand-held, non-sync wides of the activities on the Casio Exilim EX-F1. As we couldn’t repeat any of the action – disturbance of the birds was a major factor – we had to get all the footage in one take as it was happening, otherwise we would have breached our disturbance licence. Barn owls are a protected species and should not be disturbed at the nest without a licence. This is one reason why we decided to shoot the content ourselves rather than arranging a media photocall.

Two cameras
Shooting the footage on two cameras seemed a great idea, but it has presented me with a problem: how to get the footage from two different cameras into the same format? The Canon shoots HD in AVCHD while the Casio shoots HD in MOV. Fortunately, a colleague informed me of a neat free program called Oxelon Media Converter. This program is sheer genius. Not only does it convert virtually any audio or video file to any other format, it also batch converts, allowing you to set the program running while you can do something else, like write captions – a job I’ve always put off, but I can't any longer!

Using Oxelon, I converted the files from 1920 x 1080 MOV to 1280 x 720 AVI. This has allowed me to produce smaller files at a much lower resolution, but this is still ample for TV B-Roll and web video. I will be editing in Edius, which using a conversion program will take AVCHD and convert to AVI. I may well run the final AVI files through Oxelon to get them to the same resolution as my other files.

Coming together
I haven’t yet cut the files together, but the content is coming together well. For once, I should have plenty of cutaways, but I do need to get some footage of the adult barn owls away from the nest. I’ll take the Casio Exilim EX-F1 and Kowa scope out for a nice evening this week to see if I can get the shots I need without getting too close to the birds.

I’m content that when my colleague writes the press release in the next couple of days, that I’ll be able to provide a range of 20 supporting still photographs and several minutes of video content for local TV, newspapers, websites, magazines and in-house publications and archive; not bad for a lazy Friday afternoon!

What's the point of shooting HD video for web content?

There are times when it seems crazy to shoot HD video for web content. After all, what is the point of shooting HD video at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels when you're going to end up squeezing it into a frame of 320 x 180, or less? Well, there is one advantage: cropping. Purists might want to turn away at this point, but as 320 pixels is exactly one sixth of the width of a full HD frame, in theory it is possible to zoom into the frame by a factor of six during the edit without affecting the final resolution.


I can think of several reasons when this might be a suitable option for web video.

• I often reframe interviews in the edit suite without needing to do it at the interview stage. I shoot wide and then take a tighter crop if I need to emphasise a point that is being made.
  
• When shooting wildlife, you always want to be nearer. Cropping to the maximum extent could turn that 500mm lens into a 3000mm lens, if you're content to shoot just for low-resolution web outputs.
  
• When shooting through a telescope (as I often need to do) you can lock the pan and tilt head off completely while maintaining a loose framing, so that your subject has room to move around the frame. You can then follow the action in the edit suite rather than in the hide. Using this technique you can create smoother pans and tilts than you would by physically moving an extreme magnification lens.
  
• You could easily reuse some content within the same production by using different crops: crowd scenes, for example.

However, you have to be absolutely sure of your focus as any error is more likely to be noticed.
The framings in my photograph of a corncrake (above) show the potential for cropping into your subject at different resolutions without losing definition.

• 1920 x 1080 represents full HD
• 1280 x 720 is also a widely available HD format, available on the Nikon D90, for example
• 1024 x 576 is the standard definition for shooting for TV
• Web size in this illustration is 320 x 180

The changing role of a multimedia press officer

Having worked as a media officer for exactly 12 years, I have witnessed a great deal of change across the media landscape. A decade ago my work was dominated by obtaining media coverage around core issues. Writing features or taking photographs for in-house publications were occasional activities punctuating the grind of writing press releases and briefing journalists. The core duties haven’t changed, in fact they’ve become ever more important, but the digital age is extending the remit of press officers and PRs in several areas:

• Firstly, we are now encouraged to gather a variety of content, such as audio and video files, which we couldn’t have dreamt about a decade ago.
  
• Secondly, the growth of the number of each media outlet is creating additional demands for content.
  
• Thirdly, the expansion of media websites creates a hungry and diverse market: newspaper websites now want video as well as photos, features and news stories, while broadcasters now demand still photos and written copy as well as audio and video content.

Press officers should now be thinking about the possibilities of gathering this additional content themselves, especially when two further drivers are considered: advances in technology; and an economic climate that is favouring the multi-skilled. New technology will make it easier to gather the content, and shrinking budgets make it an imperative to get the most out of story and assignment.

A typical assignment for me will now be built around several or all of these key themes:

• Briefing and escorting journalists;
• Liaising with local staff, volunteers and partner organisations;
• Acting as a spokesman for broadcast interviews;
• Making a video for a newspaper website;
• Gathering audio for the corporate or external podcasts;
• Taking a selection of still photos for the corporate website and picture library; and to illustrate newspaper, magazine or website articles;
• Returning home with enough copy to write features for in-house or external publications or websites.
  
  The media world is changing and the world is better for it.

In praise of Notepad

As I'm producing multimedia content for a range of multimedia projects, the software I use will vary and the techniques differ accordingly.

When writing lengthy copy, such as features and press releases, Microsoft Word is essential. I really appreciate its grammar and spell-checking abilities and its thesaurus comes in really handy too. It is an industry standard piece of software and, therefore, editors are happy to receive an email with a Word document attachment.

Word is simply brilliant, but it isn't simple, and it is quite memory hungry. When I want something truly simple, I turn to Notepad. This brilliant little Windows extra has to be one of my most widely used programs and, in my opinion, it is very under-rated. Like an analogue watch, its absolute simplicity is its lasting virtue.

Desktop publishing

When producing copy for desktop-publishing programs, I write the content in Word as normal, but then I save it as a text-only file. This has the benefit of saving the written, while removing all of the Word formatting. Text-only files can then be opened in Notepad or they can be imported into desktop-publishing programs, like Serif PagePlus. With all of the Word formatting removed, you can easily format the text in your own choice of font and line spacing. If you open Notepad and then copy and paste the text into a previously-formatted text box in PagePlus, then the incoming text adopts the same format as the existing text. This makes life easy if you're producing a newsletter or leaflet with lots of text, which all has to be in the same font and style.

Contributions

I also use Notepad to incorporate content from other sources: including email contributions from colleagues. Copying and pasting into Notepad, and then out again, removes formatting allowing you to incorporate additional content quickly and easily without having to keep reformatting the text in Word. The fact that Notepad is a tiny program, taking a fraction of the random access memory (RAM) needed by Word, allows you to open the program alongside other memory-intensive software like Photoshop or a video-editing program. I regularly use Notepad to record caption details when editing pictures in Photoshop or keeping a track of video timecodes or other details when editing video. Notepad is a brilliant little program, and is probably the one I use the most overall. It's open on my PC all the time. Of course, this post was produced in Word and then copied, via Notepad, to my blog-posting software.

Using a telescope to obtain images of distant wildlife

For about a decade birdwatchers have been defying the laws of physics by producing images of birds shot on digital compact cameras through telescopes. Early exponents of the technology found ingenious ways of strapping their camera to the scope's eyepiece to produce results from the very good to the appalling.

Marketing potential
In the last few years, the major manufacturers have realised the marketing potential of this technique and have produced special digiscoping equipment, enabling cameras to be more easily coupled to scopes. Now Kowa and Casio have teamed up to produce a set up that's believed to be an ultimate combination. The focal lengths achievable with this rig are astounding. Using the full zoom on the Casion camera you get an equivalent focal length of 432mm, but placing that behind the Kowa's x13 eyepiece gives an unbelievable 5616mm lens. When you consider that the camera, the Casio Exilim EX-F1, shoots an extremely high burst rate and has full HD movie capability, you have an outstanding piece of equipment. Using a Canon XL1 video camera, I still would have had to have access to an 800mm lens to achieve the same framing, and any footage would have been in Standard Definition (SD) rather than HD. I was fortunate to be able to take the gear (loaned by Casio) on assignment to Wiltshire where my mission was to try to obtain photos of the great bustard and its chicks. This was a major news event as this bird hasn't nested in the UK since 1832, but this year on Salisbury Plain two pairs had nested after a lengthy reintroduction project.

Secret location
At the secret location, I waited patiently for the bustard female to walk into shot with her chicks. The attached image might seem below par, but when you consider that it was taken at a distance of about 280 yards on one of the hottest days of the year, I think this pic shows the potential of the kit. Along with the cameraman from the BBC's Springwatch and Al Dawes from the project, I think we were the first to photograph great bustard chicks in the wild in England, because when they last nested in 1832 photography had barely been invented. The pictures were used on several websites including the Independent and Birdguides.

Free Video Cutter
I shall be working on other projects in the next few weeks in East Anglia and the South Pennines, so I'll have more to report later. I haven't yet fully tested the movie function as its shoots MOV files which are unreadable by my video editing software. However, I've downloaded Free Video Cutter, so that I can convert files to AVI or WMV for easier editing. I will be reviewing the equipment later in the year in Birdwatch magazine.

More information on the great bustard reintroduction project is available from the Great Bustard Group.

Kodachrome on the slide

Today's announcement of the demise of Kodachrome will come as a shock to many photoenthusiasts like me. However, I have to confess, that until I'd heard that Kodak had stopped production I hadn't realised that you could still buy it. I haven't bought a roll for at least five years, and its death hasn't spoiled my plans for tomorrow.

Honour
We have to honour the roles that Kodachrome and the 35mm film camera gave to photojournalism. High quality film and 35mm cameras allowed photographers to capture the world and show it to the rest of us. Its legacy will remain, but its usefulness had waned. Purists will recognise the film's unique qualities and colour rendition, but another view of the world is that digital photography allows us to capture the world in an interactive way, continually allowing us to get a glimpse of the image we've just recorded and see if we can improve it.

Capture
Kodachrome has captured many of the world's greatest images, but digital photography will capture more. Three weeks after taking them, how many of us have looked at the cardboard-mounted slides and thought: "If only I'd moved to a faster shutter speed or changed the angle of view?" With digital we can interact with a scene by looking at what we've captured and change it while the subject is still in front of our eyes. We can now capture a slice of life at 1/1000th of a second, examine our results, make alterations and within three seconds we can capture an improved image - we could never do that with film. Life moves on.

What's the dream kit for a multi-media journalist?

Working in a media team for a conservation charity, we are encouraged to try new ways of gathering new media content, especially when on assignment away from the office. While in Malta last year, covering illegal hunting, I was capturing content for a variety of in-house and external media, including print, TV and the web. Outputs from this content appeared on the Guardian, BBC and Birdwatch magazine and Birdguides websites, as well as Maltese TV.
Carrying several different camera systems is not ideal, but until a manufacturer comes up with a truly integrated system for capturing stills and video, then I guess a bad back is an occupational hazard. My stout and trustee Billingham bag has seen action in several parts of the world from the Falklands to the Flow Country in Scotland, but each year more and more kit gets added and I fear it won't be able to take the strain much longer - and as I'm getting older, neither will I: something has to be done. Writing this post has encouraged me to think about my ideal multimedia kit and how my kit bag could go on a diet.

Base photography kit
Producing many more stills than video, my base still photography kit is built around my key workhorse; a very forgiving Nikon D70 with lenses from 18mm to 300mm (about 28mm to 450mm in old money). Although it only shoots at six megapixels, I find this camera most times can turn in stills of sufficient quality to illustrate most stories. At 300dpi a landscape-format photo can still be reproduced at more than the width of an A4 page in a quality magazine. One cropped image even provided a double-page spread in our magazine (with a bit of work in Photoshop), so it can't be that bad. However, although it's still functioning, I feel the D70 badly needs a younger sibling to keep it from getting old before its time.

Tempted by the Nikon D90
Looking at newer cameras in the Nikon range, I have been tempted by the now withdrawn D200. This would have one advantage in that I would be able to take light readings with my old manual-focus Nikkor lenses. However, I'm now thinking like a heretic and that I should add the D90 to my gear, which would allow me to ditch the video camera because this new Nikon is the first DSLR to have HD video as standard. Potentially that would allow me to have two DSLR cameras with different lenses attached for stills work: a wide-angle zoom and a telephoto zoom. Another advantage is that I'd be able to put my Nikon F3 into a museum, as the days for a back-up film body have gone. The D90 should also allow me to shoot video of sufficient quality for the web and even occasional broadcast use.

Bemoaned
Reading the posts, reviewers have bemoaned the softness of the footage, and the lack of control over the exposure from the D90 and focusing once you start shooting.
Oh, and it also doesn't appear to have an external microphone socket, meaning that you either have to put up with uncontrollable sound from the onboard mic or you record on a seperate sound system and sync the whole lot in the editing process.

Madness
I must be mad to think that I should make my life more difficult by making my video work much more complicated. Well, perhaps, but I think there will be positives from working with the D90. Most of the footage that I shoot is for the web, so perhaps quality is not an absolutely over-riding issue, and secondly I'm seduced by the thought all those great shots that I can get with my suite of Nikon lenses that I can't get with a conventional camcorder: proper wide-angle scenics; macro shots; extreme telephoto; and those lovely interviews with a proper out of focus background - a shot that's almost impossible to achieve on a camcorder, because of the smaller chip size. The ability to shoot proper HD wides and scenics will also allow me to jetison the video camera's wide-angle converter - saving a little more weight and space and I do need a paperweight for my desk.

Edirol R-09
I'm intending to solve the sound problem by using an Edirol R-09 digital recorder and then obtaining sync in post production using Audacity. This is a pain, but it does mean that I will have access to a seperate sound recorder for broadcast use and for gathering seperate podcast content, and also I will have an audio notebook permanently in my kit bag: great for feature interviews. As well as being a hand-held unit, the real advantage of the Edirol is that it will allow to plug in a microphone (either a lav or a cardoid) and adjust the level seperately.

Four streams of content
My aspiration is to continue to use my gear to obtain four streams of content: audio; video; still photos; and written material. These streams can then merged back at base to provide outputs for print, broadcast and the various outlets on the web. I also act as a conservation spokesman for the RSPB, so gathering additional content fits in well with other work when on assignment. If I was shooting mainly for broadcast (as many multimedia VJs are doing) then my gear would lean towards higher-quality video production, perhaps to one of the Sony cameras like the EX-3. But as the backbone of my content still involves shooting stills, I think my kit bag will have to reflect this, for now, anyway.

At the current time my personal field gear consists of the following
(depending upon the assignment the kit in my bag will vary):

Billingham bag
Nikon D70
Sigma 18-55mm AF lens
Nikon 70-300mm AF lens
Nikkor 105mm f2.8 manual-focus macro lens (still great for portraits wide open)
Nikkor 300mm f2.8 manual-focus lens (even better for portraits!)
Nikkor x2 teleconverter (makes my trustee 300mm Nikkor equivalent to a 900mm lens)
Nikkor 50mm f1.4mm manual-focus lens (great when the light's so gloomy that it won't allow any other lens to be used)
Extension tubes for macro work
Metz 45CL hammerhead flash (not dedicated)
5-metre flash lead
Flash block with three sync sockets
Secondary pocket flash (great for fill in or back lighting)
Remote release for Nikon D70
Matthews video tripod
Five-in-one gold, silver and white fold-up reflector and diffuser
Polarising filter
Blower brush
Spare batteries and cards for above
Canon HF10 camcorder
Edirol R-09 sound recorder
Sennheiser wireless lavalier microphone
Cardoid hand-held microphone and windjammer (great for atmosphere and wildtrack recording) 3-metre audio lead
Headphones
White card and grey card for checking white balance and exposure
Clapper board (the old fashioned way of keeping sound in sync)
Opticron 10x42 binoculars (my work is mainly wildlife)

In the car:
Second tripod
Two 500W security lights (used as makeshift video lights) and stands
Blue gels for controlling the colour of the lighting

Being added to my own gear in the next few weeks:
Nikon D90
A really wide lens (possibly the Sigma 10-20mm) for scenics and making great photos from mediocre subjects (who says the camera cannot lie!)
As the following items belong to work, I also intend to purchase my own: Audio Technica wired lavalier microphone; Edirol R-09 and Matthews video tripod so that I have all my own gear for private projects.

Long-term wish list:
Beachtek sound mixer to allow me to gather better quality sound from both the lavalier and cardoid mics when used in conjunction with each other (great for interviews or events)
At the moment the centre of balance is on still photos with occasional video output. If the move towards solo video production continues in time I may wish to acquire a video camera with interchangeable lenses, like a JVC or a Sony.