Sports Media

Over the break, a father asked me to videotape his son's football game and edit the good plays he makes into a high-light real. He gave me a hand held camera and told me the different angles to shoot at for where his son would be on the field, whether it was defense or offense. This was by far the hardest event I ever shoot at. Football is such a quick game and i was constantly losing concept of where the ball and Jon were. Jon played the running back position so he was pretty much on every play. Jon's father wanted me too be zoomed in as much as possible and to always have his son on camera.

Towards the second quarter, my hand was already starting to get tired, and there was nothing i could really do about it. A tripod would have rally been handy. After halftime, Jon rushed for a 47 yard touchdown, breaking three tackles and diving into the end zone. The best part was that he was running towards me the entire time, so the shoot does like pretty cool as i zoom out and refocus during the play.

In post, I added some music and labeled what each short bit was before playing it. Mr Struss, Jon's father, was very please with what I accomplished and said that if Jon's team makes it to the championship, he would ask me to do the same thing again. Then it hit me. There are so many parents that spend a tremendous amount of money to have highlight tapes shoot for their son or daughter. So currently, I am making a website that will be linked on my old school's website for parents interested in a highlight tape for their child's college resume. I already have gotten few phone calls, and have 3 jobs for when I go back home after christmas. I think I might really have something here. Once the site is finished, I'll post again and have a link to the main page.

Your New Desktop Background

I was shown this video yesterday of a Canon camera commercial. Now I know the whole thing is designed to advertise Canon, but the images they come up with are so cool. I'm not going to give anything away, so you have to the video for yourselves.

The Optical Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer, Art of Painting, c.1666-67

canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

This is a response to Francesca's post about camera obscura used as a perspective aid in painting.

Vermeer is without doubt my favorite painter, having seen a very complete exhibition of most of his known paintings in Amsterdam, I can, without embarrassment, say that I had tears streaming down my eyes, caused by the enormous "aura" of his work. I mention aura as in Walter Benjamin seminal work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which you can (and should) read HERE.

I was not the only one, the exhibition was very crowded and many people had the same reaction as myself. One thing is to see (mechanical) reproductions of his, or any other artist's work, and another to be in the presence of the actual piece that contains in its very manufacturing and creation a substantial part of a genius life embedded in its pigment particles and jewel-like crystallized varnish, not to mention the time captured by the object itself.

If it is true that according to Benjamin, mechanical reproduction "frees" the work of art from place and ritual so that the masses could then benefit from its formal appearance, yet there is inevitably a great deal of loss for the viewer that does not have access to the original. There is a trade off here.

But this is about Vermeer's famous mastery of light and extraordinary quality of detail, that, when observed up close, reveal abstract patterns and dabs of paint that we would not, in isolation, consider realistic. However when seen in context, our modern eyes, cannot fail to see a modernity and exactitude of vision which would be hard to explain without the possibility that he used a camera obscura as an aid tool in deconstructing the elements of the scene.

Now, I know many artists that cringe at the idea that such a Master might have used such a trick. But ever since the discovery of perspective, everything we see is in fact aided by that "trick"without which we have a hard time making sense of space nowadays.

There are many studies however, that have carefully analysed his paintings according to optical laws and using actual reproductions of a camera obscura and sets replicating the conditions that Vermeer might have encountered in his paintings and from this studies one could conclude that Vermeer, might have indeed, like many of his contemporaries, used it as a compositional aid.

He of course, and this is clear in other careful analysis as well, used a variety of methods to achieve what he wanted, sometimes pinning strings to the wall and using them as a reference point, similar as the Dürer engraving of the early grid assisted perspective shows.

What is a question perhaps, is to think whether the use of the camera obscura influenced his artistic vision by showing optical artifacts that are not commonly perceived by the naked eye, such as glows around shiny objects, "circles of confusion", blurs and exaggerated scales in some cases.

The Hockney-Falco Thesis

Any discussion of theories of perspective is not complete without discussing the Hockney-Falco thesis. The thesis was developed by the painter David Hockney and the physicist Charles M. Falco.

from wikipedia:

As described in Secret Knowledge, in January 1999 during a visit to the National Gallery, London Hockney conceived of the idea that optical aids were the key factor in the development of artistic realism. He was struck by the accuracy of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and became convinced that Ingres had used a camera lucida or similar device. From there, Hockney began looking for signs of the use of optical aids in earlier paintings, creating what he called the Great Wall in his studio by organizing images of great realistic art by time period. What he saw as a sudden rise of realism around 1420, combined with Charles Falco's suggestion that concave mirrors could have been used in that period to project images, was the germ of the Hockney–Falco thesis.