Discuss about shooting postitions

The shooting crew asked me to help them. I advised shooting positions, acting and camera actions.

I was not participated in the editing process so...no, I did not know how the movie will be like until they give me the file. Some parts seem a little boring (the scene the guy drives the motorbike on the way home repeats 3 times)+ the length of the movie is too long (>6 minutes).

I think some of the shooting positions can be improved in some scenes.

For ex: the scene when the "house breaker" sneak in from the front door.

Suggestion: the better way to shoot it is that we can locate the camera on the floor (in this case) or the upper corner of the room. The reason is that both positions will give the viewers a strongest feeling of watching the scene through a security video camera or the realistic feeling at what they are watching.

It was: in this video, the closed-distance camera positions may give the viewers a less realistic feeling of what they are watching or a feeling of being a second person in the room (which is definitely not what we want to deliver to the viewers).

The most, best, awesome shooting position is when the "house breaker" run out from the building and accidentally hit by the "bike theft". Simple but maximum the effectiveness.
The first camera position, which is the actor carries the camera and shoots while he is acting, in this case was perfectly applied. This is how I explain this shot: "he will run, like he has never been run faster, he escaped (bright light from the outside gives that feeling), he got hit, and he felt, for real (the camera is roll down on the road to give the sense of something felt).

In addition, in my opinion, they can take several close-up short shots rather than long and wide shots. If the actors, as viewed on video screen, are acting something that viewed can guess. For example in this case, the "house owner" walk out from the house, walk along the hall and go into the elevator. The camera position should be changed to reduce the waiting time (wait for the "house owner" end her walking) and increase the feeling time (viewed can see the feeling of the "house owner" when she picks up her cellphone at the front door - with close-up shoot - and the "house breaker" when he waits for her leaving).

It is a very sensitive issue to put the name of the one not belong to the group in an assignment so it is ok for me!

Rating

This semester is about to end so I decided to use a poll from www.xatech.com to let you guys vote for "the most fascinating and elaborated post".

I pick only the good ones and you guys can also vote for posts that are not listed.
I hope you guys will me critical selections and use this POLL on all your blogs. If this POLL is on your blog, I promise to vote and let you know which post that I think is the best of yours.

Thanks in advance!

Get your own Poll!

Photo Editting

Sometimes, taken photos are not satisfied you. A little dark, a little red, too much light, etc.
The following slide shows are pictures that I took from my Nikon Coolpix 5700 (SLR, 5MP).
The first is the edited pictures and the second is the original pictures.

Compare them as you view!
Enjoy!

Photomontage

"When you face with both front and back edges, do not forget your friends"

This is the message I want to send along with the photomontage that I made.

Iwould like to share a little experience while doing this image:

1. This is how the background part look like (from the original image)

But how I made the whole background of the image? I copied the layer, produced more similar layers and put them into appropriate positions. The background consists of 20 smaller layers, which had been merged into a single layer later on.


2. Realistic:
To make it more realistic, there were 2 things that I have done:
First, the nearest hills (from the background) are zooomed to create close distance objects.
--> Result: the image look more real because there are "closer hills", "far away hills" and blured moutains.
Second, using lightning effects on the rocky walls
--> Result: makes people think that there is a direct sun light from from the above.


3. Frequently used tools:
1. Zoom Tool
2. Magnetic Lasso Tool

3. Lasso Tool
4. Clone Stamp Tool
5. Blur Tool
6. Eraser Tool
7. Magic Wand Tool

Processed in 5 hrs!

The World of Music

Figure 1. The Word of Music: 2D layout of artist-artist similarity graph

*Click on the image

Description:
The World of Music is a visualization graph made by David Gleich (Standford University), Matt Rasmussen (MIT), Kevin Lang (Yahoo! Reasearch), and Leonid Zhukov (Yahoo!, Inc.).
The aim is to create a visualization graph based on music artist rating data from Yahoo Music service.


Data:
From the 250 million ratings on 100,000 artists from 4 millions Yahoo users, during a 30 days period.

Figure 2. Data points embedded on the surface of 3D sphere.

Method: Layout Generation
1. Construct the nearest neighbor similarity graph.
2. Embed the graph on a sphere by solving an Semidefinite Programming (SDP).
3. Unroll the sphere for a 2d layout and visualize.

Figure 3. Zoomed in view of several clusters in layout.

Implementation:
Follow the link for further explanations http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~zhukov/infovis/The%20World%20of%20Music.pdf


Visualization Results:
Figure 1. Shows the layout generated by the system for Yahoo! Music services.
Figure 2 .Demonstrates the intermediate step with data projected on the sphere.
Figure 3. The enlarged version with some artist labels shown.

Provided information from:
http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~zhukov/infovis/world_of_music.htm

Moon

With a normal KTS digital camera, it is difficult to take such closer shots like the following pics.

Manual mode
-Shutter: 1/29.9
-Aperture: F4.2
-Focal Length: f284 mm






-Shutter: 1/2.0
-Aperture: F4.2
-Focal Length: f256 mm








-Shutter: 1/2.0
-Aperture: F7.4
-Focal Length: f256 mm








This is my most favorite picture! A clear Moon's shape can be seen through this picture.

-Shutter: 1/125
-Aperture: F7.4
-Focal Length: f256 mm



*Using Nikon Coolpix 5700 (5.0 MP, SLR digital camera)

Focal Length: The focal length of an optical system is a measure of how strongly it converges (focuses) or diverges light. A system with a shorter focal length has greater optical power than one with a long focal length.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_length)