I was mostly playing around with settings and checking how the Automatic White Balance worked out at CQBCity. I think a lot of shots came out nice (and some.. not so nice).
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Pics from this weekend!
So I posted the pics from this weekend. You can find them here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.couratier
And a little taste!
Also, if you have not heard yet, MilsimJunkie is having tech issues. Mainly, his new camera got shoot to shit and doesn't work no mo'. If you want videos of you playing, you should help him out! Go to his post, watch the blurb, help him out:
http://www.milsimjunkie.com/2010/10/cqb-city-airsoft-october-10-2010-tm-mp7.html#comments
My video stuff will be up in a bit. Tonight maybe, real job allowing.
Cheers!
http://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.couratier
And a little taste!
 |
| From CQBCity 20101010 |
 |
| From CQBCity 20101010 |
Also, if you have not heard yet, MilsimJunkie is having tech issues. Mainly, his new camera got shoot to shit and doesn't work no mo'. If you want videos of you playing, you should help him out! Go to his post, watch the blurb, help him out:
http://www.milsimjunkie.com/2010/10/cqb-city-airsoft-october-10-2010-tm-mp7.html#comments
My video stuff will be up in a bit. Tonight maybe, real job allowing.
Cheers!
Monday, October 11, 2010
Media from this weekend
A word on the media from this weekend. I'll probably take a bit longer than usual to process it. This is because I'm playing around with a few different new ways to capture and process the media.
CQBCity is a bit of a photographer's nightmare. On one end of the field, near the doors, you have sunshine and fairly high light environment. On the other end of the field, it's a mix of fluorescent and natural light, but pretty low. The Pistol Palace is just plain dark and the Killhouse changes from mixed lowlight, artificial high amount of light to total darkness. On top of that, the wood boards make the Automatic White Balance (AWB) cry, the green netting around the staging area is hard to capture correctly (and it ends up on a lot of pics).
I used to shoot in JPEG because for the bulk of what I used to do, it was all I needed. I'm used to shooting in low and super low light, but the type of light (and white balance) stayed the same. But with the changing conditions at CQBCity, I had to switch to RAW. I have a hard time looking at the old set of pics and not puking a little in my mouth. The colors just look fucking terribad. Switching to RAW means I need to create a more extensive processing pipeline. Which I'm having a hard time doing (or doing right). And that's taking a bit of time. But it also means the color rendering (and a few other things) come out more consistent, brighter and .. well.. correct.
The pics look a lot better already. My ratio of usable/garbage has gone up (it used to be around 8%). I did really miss the burst speed of JPEG yesterday, but I can adapt I guess.
I'll be shipping a few pics over to MilsimJunkie that he took with my camera so you'll get to see those. The rest will be up later in the week.
As for the movies, I tried playing around with a few new settings. It won't be the sort of movie a lot of us are used to watching for airsoft. I was mostly trying to test out a few things to see what works, what fails, what is a total waste of time. The footage that works looks pretty cool (at least to me... ).
I also took a few request pics for some teams and I got some of my favorite pictures EVER.
Cheers.
CQBCity is a bit of a photographer's nightmare. On one end of the field, near the doors, you have sunshine and fairly high light environment. On the other end of the field, it's a mix of fluorescent and natural light, but pretty low. The Pistol Palace is just plain dark and the Killhouse changes from mixed lowlight, artificial high amount of light to total darkness. On top of that, the wood boards make the Automatic White Balance (AWB) cry, the green netting around the staging area is hard to capture correctly (and it ends up on a lot of pics).
I used to shoot in JPEG because for the bulk of what I used to do, it was all I needed. I'm used to shooting in low and super low light, but the type of light (and white balance) stayed the same. But with the changing conditions at CQBCity, I had to switch to RAW. I have a hard time looking at the old set of pics and not puking a little in my mouth. The colors just look fucking terribad. Switching to RAW means I need to create a more extensive processing pipeline. Which I'm having a hard time doing (or doing right). And that's taking a bit of time. But it also means the color rendering (and a few other things) come out more consistent, brighter and .. well.. correct.
The pics look a lot better already. My ratio of usable/garbage has gone up (it used to be around 8%). I did really miss the burst speed of JPEG yesterday, but I can adapt I guess.
I'll be shipping a few pics over to MilsimJunkie that he took with my camera so you'll get to see those. The rest will be up later in the week.
As for the movies, I tried playing around with a few new settings. It won't be the sort of movie a lot of us are used to watching for airsoft. I was mostly trying to test out a few things to see what works, what fails, what is a total waste of time. The footage that works looks pretty cool (at least to me... ).
I also took a few request pics for some teams and I got some of my favorite pictures EVER.
Cheers.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
CQBCity September 12th 2010 -- Day Event -- Pics only
Long day at the city this week. Went for a day game + private game. Since I knew I was going to get a lot of trigger time, I went ahead and put on my "Press" hat all morning and got to work.
I'm still focusing on photography (and not videos) for now. I'll get back to making videos in the near future, but I want to work on some picture ideas and techniques.
So the good news for you folks is, LOTS OF PICS! I was able to shoot around 1000 pics this weekend and I posted around 80.
At the usual place:
If you made a request, make sure you also check the "Requests" album for some pics.
Here's a quick sampling:
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| From CQBCity 20100912 |
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| From CQBCity 20100912 |
Enjoy!
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
CQBCity August 16th 2010 -- Day Event
Big day at the City this weekend. Around 150 people showed up (the most I've ever seen).
Here we go with the pics:
http://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.couratier
And the video (just a link, not embeded so you folks can go and watch it in HD):
http://vimeo.com/14203595
A few things to watch out for:
- If you pay attention, you can see a flash from Chief's blank pistol in the background
- Lots of tracer action!
- Cars do not offer very good cover =(
Here we go with the pics:
http://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.couratier
 |
| From CQBCity 20100815 |
And the video (just a link, not embeded so you folks can go and watch it in HD):
http://vimeo.com/14203595
A few things to watch out for:
- If you pay attention, you can see a flash from Chief's blank pistol in the background
- Lots of tracer action!
- Cars do not offer very good cover =(
Sunday, July 18, 2010
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:
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
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
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
Monday, July 12, 2010
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:
And here is a teaser!
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| 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:
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.
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