Those of you who follow my blog may have noticed the lack of entries over the last couple of weeks - was this due to lack of work? Nope, I've been very busy but haven't had finished work to show off.

First, I was asked by Judgeday, who produce live music and manage some musicians, to video Nicole Fermie and her band, first at the Embassy, Mayfair in London, then at Real World Studios in Box. In between those they also asked me to video a show reel of David Rhodes who is doing some solo work (he's been Peter Gabriel's guitarist for 25 years, amongst other things).

Second, I've been doing some family portraits in the run up to Christmas.

Third, I've been shooting a short film with some of the actors I know. I'm now editing this but it won't be ready for public viewing until sometime after Christmas (and probably New Year).

Not a bad way to end a year!

A couple of weeks ago the Rondo Theatre Company performed Jim Cartwrights' 1987 play "Road" at the Rondo Theatre in Bath. I got to do both promotional and production photos. Unusually, the promotional shots were taken during a rehearsal - I set up three speedlights (because the ambient light in the theatre is horrible flourescents) which worked surprisingly well.

This Saturday was a washout but on Sunday I met Andy Liszewski (of the band Roadshow) busking by the new Southgate buildings in Bath. Used a new shotgun mic (because the stereo mic picked up too much background) but I made the huge mistake of not listening on headphones while I recorded, so I didn't notice until later that I had picked up lots of wind noise at one point (because I was moving around to get different shots). This is exactly why I'm putting in all this practice - try to get all my mistakes out the way before I shoot the short film I'm working on. Of course, it won't work - I'll just make different mistakes when I shoot the film :)

Roadshow are playing at Moles on Monday 23rd Nov 2009, at 8pm.

Shot on Canon 5D Mark II with 50mm f/1.4 lens, hand held. Uses the Zacuto Z-Finder (for focusing and stability), FaderND 58mm so I could shoot at 1/100s shutter speed and f/1.4. Rode NTG-2 mic on the hotshoe but plugged into my Zoom H4n.

More video practice. Wandering around Bath on Saturday I found a group of lads busking (guitar, drums and violin) so I shot lots of video from lots of angles, ensuring I recorded the entire audio for at least one song. Then I edited the video and showed it to the lads. They liked it but asked if I could use their studio track instead (much better audio quailty, of course). This made for an interesting challenge because the live performance was 1 minute longer than the studio performance! I'm not entirely happy with the result (some of the video is clearly out of sync) but I promised the band I would have it up by the end of yesterday.

I learned a lot more about editing video in Premier Elements 7, including that I needed to convert the 5D Mark II video from H.264 to an uncompressed format. I tried Cineform NeoHD on some of the video and it works wonders, so I'll be using that for everything in future!

Once again the Zacuto Z-Finder helps enormously when focusing and in keeping the camera stable (though an image stabilized lens also helps, of course).