Wednesday, August 2, 2017

350 hz



I have spent the past four days creating a video for Beverly Goodman's website.  Beverly is the archaeologist I worked with in Haifa.  I still need to put on my design hat and craft titles.

I am making good progress on the rest, though I am still frustrated with some of the color imbalance.  The Mediterranean is turquoise at the coast--blue-green--but in the deep, the sea is red-blue.  Ergo, the shot flow of the footage I have from the dive boat does not match the footage I have at the shore to my satisfaction in terms of hues.

I have color corrected the best I can without turning people on the boat or the sky green, but I am still unsettled about it.   My peers here say they are unbothered by it, don't even notice, but -- they admit they are not artists.

I was able to make the SOUND much clearer than I thought I would be able to, having shot at the shoreline.  (See last post.)  I learned something very long-term useful by experimenting with equalization:  the rumble of ocean wind lives at about 350 hertz, and it pretty easy to remove.  There is another high frequency in the surf that is trickier to eliminate without messing up people's voices and such.  So the sound is far from perfect, but I think it came out pretty well for what I had to work with!

Another tricky thing I learned is, you have to plan the background of shoots very carefully if you have subjects of very different complexion hues.  (We did not do this, as we were rushed.)  Beverly has Scandinavian heritage, so she is on the far end of light.  Her grad student who shot with us is from Nigeria, and he is very dark.  So how does one select an exposure that works for both of them in the same shot, AND the bright sun and the dark shadows of rocks?  A puzzle.

Generally I aimed to expose for the rocks so as not to make one person very correctly exposed and the other very incorrectly exposed.  The compromise is that each person is a bit off-exposure.  For future reference, this could be minimized by blocking.  I noticed reviewing the footage that in some shots, Bev stood against the bright sky --light disappearing into light -- and her student stood with dark rocks behind him.  If I had realized this while shooting (it is hard to see the viewfinder in bright sunlight), I could have had them switch places for more balanced exposures and contrasts.

The other thing that would be extremely useful shooting in this bright desert and Mediterranean light:  a split filter.  About a year ago, my dad showed me a lens filter made for outdoor photographers that is partly dark and partly neutral.  Say for example you are shooting trees, which are dark, and the sky behind them is very bright.  If you expose for the trees, the sky is totally blown out.  If you expose for the sky, the trees are dark mass with no detail.  Such a lens allows one to filter the sky without darkening the trees. No sacrifice of either.

Here I have been on boats twice now, and the sky outside the boat is blinding bright while the scene inside the boat is dark. If any sky shows in the shot, it is blown out if you want to see people's faces.   I kept wishing for that filter...

Next birthday, Dad?

It always takes a while to learn tricks for a new environment.  This is part of the process of documenting while traveling. I remember my first trip to Egypt, it took me three days to get the exposure right because not only is the desert sun blinding, it then bounces off quartz sand. It makes all these tiny reflective lights.  Working with the light there was like learning a new dance.


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