CQBCity July 17th 2010 -- Day Event

A few pics and a short video for you folks this time.

As usual, the pics are on picasaweb, here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.couratier

There are 2 galleries posted. 1 specific to the games and a new general gallery called "Requests". I'll be taking requests from now on for pics after the games if you want some pics. A few rules however!!

- try to have an idea of what you want
- don't expect results (hey, I do this for free...)

Here is a tease of both galleries:

From Requests

From CQBCity 20100717 (Public Event)

The video is on vimeo again. A few fun things to watch out for:

- Milsimjunkie gets shot in the head with a tracer BB
- Someone shoots my $900 lens with a $0.003 BB (you can hear it)
- The result of a 203 fired through a door

CQBCity 20100717 from Stephen Couratier on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/13447047/

I will end this week by linking one of the most exciting things I've seen anyone do with a camera. These are soldiers that head out around the world with both gun and camera. The footage they bring back is .. a lot of things.. Cool, amazing, important, awesome. Here is the link with some of the best footage:

http://vimeo.com/tylerginter/videos

My two favorite videos:
http://vimeo.com/3327133
http://vimeo.com/6096438

CQBCity July 11th 2010 -- Day Event

I have 3 sets of media for you folks this week. First up the stills. As usual, they are up on piscaweb. Here's the link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.couratier/CQBCity20100711#

And here is a teaser!

From CQBCity 20100711

Up next, we have the video. I focused on filming during a Search and Destroy game and that's where the bulk of the footage is from. I also tried to do some corny editing. We'll see if I still like it in a couple of weeks.. Let me know what you think.

Here is the link:

http://vimeo.com/13291262

CQBCity 20100711 - Day Event from Stephen Couratier on Vimeo.

Last is something special! Chief mentioned last week that he thought it would be cool if on the very long game, he had some sort of footage of the battle with pushes from both teams. That got me thinking. A straight up 30mins (or 2 hour) video of a game like that would be too long (and boring). The best solution I can think of is time lapse! Time lapse is when you have a camera take a pic spaced out at regular intervals and then combine the images into a film. To pull it off, I bought a decent tripod (that I used this weekend) as well as universal clamp (a rig to attach a camera to tubes to 2x4s, I haven't used it yet). I then used a Ultra Mobile PC with Canon's software to manage taking pics every 5 seconds. This was the test run a few things came up..

- there seems to be an artificial limit to how many pics the software is willing to take. I had it set to 500 pics at first (which is a little over 41mins real time).

- 500 pics is also 16.6 seconds worth of footage =(.

- battery life of the UMP might be an issue as well as heat.

I'll look into an alternate solution.. but for now, here's the video. I think it's pretty cool.

http://vimeo.com/13292152

CQBCity - Setup and Brie - Time-lapsed from Stephen Couratier on Vimeo.

CQBCity July 03 2010 -- Day Event

Took the 5D Mark II to CQBCity this Saturday for a day event. Played the first two hour game (amazing how just changing the duration of the game changes the whole dynamic). After lunch I spent my time shooting with the camera, experimenting with video and taking stills. Here's the result:

Video: http://vimeo.com/13087400

Stills: http://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.couratier/CQBCity20100703PublicAirsoftEvent#

Lessons learned:

- stop being so damn resistant to using the flash

- work on white balance for videos

- record sound for videos

- don't record short clips. Go for longer stuff

- wear something red

I'm also created a twitter account to let folks know when I actually post the stuff up. If you are into that sort of thing..

http://twitter.com/Xloob

Also, make you check out the footage from MilsimJunkie:

http://www.milsimjunkie.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/MilsimJunkie1

CQBCity:

http://www.cqbcity.com/

A taste of the photos:

From CQBCity 20100703 (public airsoft event)

And here's the video:

CQBCity 03 July 2010 from Stephen Couratier on Vimeo.

New 5D Mark II

Even though I plan on focusing on taking pics and videos of people, I went out today to take a shots to get used to the camera and learn a few things.

- monopod.. I'm going to need to make this investment.

- 1080p is way to large for posting online. I'll need to test with some 720p.

- videos still look wierd on my computer.

Also created a Vimeo account and figured out how to upload videos (not rocket science..). And now I'm going to see if I can embed something!

Here it is:

Golden Gate and Nature from Stephen Couratier on Vimeo.