Bill Cammack

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One of the perils of doing a “daily” blog is that…. you have to do it. :D

Already, on day 2, technically day 3, since I started on the last day of last year, I missed a day of my “daily” blog. That’s because A) I didn’t have anything I wanted to post in the morning, and B) I walked out of the house, supposedly for a couple of hours and never came back! :D The next time I was around a computer was about 2am, and I wasn’t in any condition to write anything decent (or stay awake :)) AND 2am is already the next day anyway.

So… YESTERDAY, my friend Dave was off work and wanted to hang out around lunchtime. Since we were going to be downtown, I decided that this day would be a good day to get a different camera. I’ve been shooting ReelSolid.TV and E.M.S. with a Canon miniDV camera, and it’s a real drag to set up and make sure everything’s proper… That’s fine for something like ReelSolid, because those are mostly “finished” pieces, so being able to set up and do all my zooming and manual focus etc comes way in handy so I can express myself properly. However, once I switched to the format of E.M.S. (Eight Million Stories), which is really “slice of life” snippets, what’s really important is to catch that moment that’s happening right now. That’s where a miniDV camera becomes reeeeeeally inconvenient…

a) get it from wherever I’m carrying it, like a backpack for instance
b) press and click the button to turn the camera on in camera mode
c) while I wait, take the lens cap off and try to attach it to the handle, so it doesn’t clunk around and make noise
d) keep waiting for the opening graphics, blah blah blah
e) camera is online… except I found out that it doesn’t adjust itself to the light of the situation for another 10 seconds or so. I found this out on the Harlem Race shoot where I would suddenly want to tape something, then when I looked at it on the computer, it would become lighter a few seconds after I started shooting, making the original shooting worthless to me.
f) hopefully, I already checked to make sure the focus was where I need it to be to start shooting what’s going on right now. Also, the auto-exposure needs to be proper for me to get the shot. I might possibly need to be in low-light mode if it’s dark. If the focus doesn’t work for me “out of the box”, I have to auto focus at the subject, then hit manual focus unless the subject’s constantly moving (or I am), in which case I leave it auto, but I might have been shooting an interview just before, so the focus might be manual and I have to take the time to click it to auto before starting that process.
g) somewhere in that process, I might have needed to click the release and swivel out the viewer. If I were planning to be in my own shot (without a tripod), I might need to flip the viewer also, so I can see where I am in the shot.

By the time all this happens, and probably some stuff I didn’t think of as I’m writing this “off the top”, it’s not likely that the moment is still THE SAME MOMENT that it was when I got the idea to shoot it in the first place. :? Again, this is fine for something where you planned a pretty high ratio between how much you shoot and how long the final piece is going to be. If you don’t have the shot, you just use something else and make it work. In “slice of life” snippets, it is what it is, so you need to be recording WHILE it “is what it is”.

This is what happened to me on the very first E.M.S. video, “Beef in Chinatown”. Joey and I were on the way to the club where DJ Blazer One was spinning, and while we were rolling in slow traffic, there was a commotion going on in the street. A bunch of people were literally rolling on the ground, on the sidewalk, and every once in a while, someone would scream “He’s Got A Knife!” :D The funny thing was that I was still talking to Joey about what the plan was for shooting in the club, and I totally hadn’t planned for E.M.S. to start “right now”. I started going through my process I described, and by the time everything came online, people were getting back up off the floor, so it doesn’t look even 1/3rd as funny on tape as it did in person. Had I had a camera that was faster on the draw, I would have had a better representation of the situation.

So… I started researching digital still cameras that take 640×480 video @ 30fps. I googled a little bit, then I decided to search the Yahoo Videoblogging Group to see what they had to say. I saw an article by kitykity (from vlog.kitykity.com) talking about a Sony S600. She also made a video with it and posted it and I was very satisfied with her results. I knew I wanted a camera that would shoot 640×480 and 30fps. I looked for another article I had seen where Randolfe Wicker mentioned the make & model of the camera he showed us and talked about @ a recent videoblogging get-together @ Art Bar. He was very impressed with his new camera, so I thought I’d check that one out as well, the Samsung NV3.

After much googling and checking on Cnet, B&H Photo and the local electronics chain stores we have around here, I couldn’t decide between the Sony Cybershot W70 and the Samsung NV3. I could even have gone with the Sony W50, since it’s a newer model than kitykity’s S600, so that was a third consideration. I decided I’d have to take it to the street and check out the display models.

I started getting ready to go and called Dave, who was already downtown, but his phone rang through to voicemail. I finished getting ready and called Dave and his phone did the same thing. A little later, I got a call from Dave. He was in his house now, and his cell phone had run out of batteries. So much for THAT plan. :?

So… I hit the streets solo……..

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