DPM FTW

Nicole and Chris

Hey folks, head to your nearest climbing shop/gym/awesome place and check out page 5 of Dead Point Magazine. My good friends Chris and Nicole submitted a letter to the editor with an image from their wedding and it got published! Photos almost never get published with letters to the editor so this is pretty awesome. I'll post up a tear sheet later.

Weekly Wildflowers 4-15

Here's the breakdown on today's find:

• Amur Honeysuckle
• Prairie Trillium
• Garlic Mustard
• Queen Anne's Lace
• Round-leaved Ragwort
• Virginia Bluebell
• Star-of-Bethlehem
• Fern-leaved Phacelia
• Spring Beauties

Weekly Wildflowers April Fools Edition

In an effort to both get out and blog more (counter-productive as it may seem) I'm going to try and post pictures of wildflowers I see as I take walks through local parks. This week I went to Hazel Landing Park and found (from top left clock-wise) Spring Beauties, Violets (purple and white), and Whorled Milkwort. Of course there was also dandelion, clover and garlic mustard, but I didn't pick those on the hike.

Spring Beauties

Bonus round: There was a barred owl hooting as well. Now for the April Fools part - The purple violets hadn't opened yet, I didn't think they were violets at first - I even took them home to ID them, and the barred owl may have been another person, but if that is the case, it's the best barred owl impersonation I've heard.

Indiana Rattlesnakes

When I worked for Brown County State Park I began working on a documentary about timber rattlesnakes in Indiana. In my spare time I would shoot B-Roll around the park, our resident timber rattlesnake, and I even drove up to Pokagon State Park near Fort Wayne to get the story of the Eastern massasauga rattlesnake.

I've had this video footage sitting on my hard drive since then. I've been waiting to finish the documentary with more interviews, more b-roll, and a nice Attenborough-esque voice over.

I decided a few days ago that I really needed to do something with this footage. A longer documentary probably wouldn't hold most people's interest anyway, so instead I made a short (2:45) video that just touches the surface of these reclusive reptiles.

Instead of making one long, all encompassing, documentary, I am going to break it up into pieces. An overview, biology, habitat, and conservation issues.

Below is the first installment - an overview of the rattlesnakes of Indiana.

Enjoy!


Rattlesnakes of Indiana from Michael Carney Media on Vimeo.

Anamorphic Lenses

I've been brought in as the Gaffer* for a short film based on the DC character Static Shock. We're still in pre-production and look to be shooting in April. A few weeks ago the director and I started looking into the possibility of shooting this project in a cinemascope, 2.35:1, aspect ratio.

Most HD cameras record video in a 16:9 aspect ratio (as are most new TVs and monitors) such as this one:




An anamorphic lens uses optics to squeeze a wider-angle image onto a piece of film or a digital sensor. Once you have the image captured you can either stretch it in your editing software (like I did) or you can project it using another anamorphic lens - thus stretching it back out optically. Here is a test with the directors new Panasonic AG-LA7200 anamorphic lens:




As you can see we now get the wider 2.35:1 aspect ratio without losing any vertical resolution or cropping. We also get those mega-sweet anamorphic lens flares that shoot horizontally across the frame.

"But wait!" You say. "There are awesome horizontal lens flares in the "Pilot Light" video as well!"

Yes, but those were added in by our visual effects supervisor and took 48 hours of hand-tracking for that 3 minute video. Now we can just do them in camera!

*I'm also talking to the director about DP'ing - we'll see what happens.

Also: hey r/photography - mcarneybsa