The new ultimate budget video camera: Rebel T2i (aka 550D)

Forget the 5D and the 7D. This is the new hot shit in the market: Canon's Rebel T2i (aka 550D).

For $800, you will be able to get a great camera to shoot your masterpiece. You have no excuse anymore to not shoot a short movie, or a music video to help out your local rock bands.

The T2i supports all the frame rates that the 7D does, at similar bitrates. It has full manual control, and an audio jack. No new video-focused abilities are present in the cam compared to the 7D, however, it's a camera that's half the price. The still picture side of it is not as powerful as the 7D, but when it comes to video, it's up to par with it (sample). It's also a smaller/lighter camera than than the 7D, using SDHC instead of CF.

Add in the mix a large-aperture prime, a wide-angle, and a zoom lens, and you'll be in business. My [photographer] husband would suggest instead three prime lenses: one wide, one normal, one long (a good combo is 24-35-50mm). You should be able to buy the camera and three lenses of your choice for $1500 overall, which is a great price if you think that a high-end Canon AVCHD camcorder, or the 7D body alone, costs as much. Honestly, I think the Scarlet is in a bit more market trouble right now — even if it's a much better camera. "Good enough" is what sells more actually. I see plain camcorders to also be in real trouble now. Except wedding photographers and travelers, the camcorder market will down-size significantly in the next few years.

Canon also announced their new digicam line today, which actually let me down. Their SX200 IS replacement digicam, the SX210 IS, is now 14 MP — at the same sensor size. The SX200 IS has low light problems, so stuffing more pixels in it will make things even worse. They added "zooming while recording" and a "stereo mic" as new abilities for the movie mode. Personally, I find these useless as a filmmaker. Actors only have one mouth, and zooming while recording is as cheesy as 70's B-movies were. I would have preferred to see a 10 MP sensor instead, and the ability to also record at 24 fps in addition to 30 fps. That would have been more useful to the kinds of video I shoot (i.e. not random family videos).

So as far as P&S HD video digicams go, the SD780 IS remains the best bang for the buck for $180. Except of manual focus, it still has all the video features that the SX-series have.

"Solomon" by As A People

Official music video for "Solomon", by the San Francisco rock band As A People. You can download the song for free at the band's site, or the HD video at Vimeo.

I had immense fun shooting this video, the band was really cool, and the song rocks. I consider it the most complex, and best video work of mine so far. I learned a few new things about the process, and I believe that the next step for me as a videographer is rigorous story-boarding, and having a grander plan. It's the only way to avoid weak spots of continuity, like the ones found on the first 30 seconds of the video.

I shot the video with a Canon 5D Mark II, at 30 fps, and then slowed it down at 24 fps. I can't wait for Canon to at last release the 24p firmware, it's a long time waiting. It was my first major video with the 5D. Overall shooting time was 3 hours.

On location tools: a tripod, and a shoulder rest. A single Canon 50mm f1.4 lens was used. Software tools used were Sony Vegas Pro, Cineform, Magic Bullet (tools that didn’t always want to co-operate very well, so editing took quite some time: crashing, and bugs).

Many thanks to my beloved husband, Jean-Baptiste, for his support and feedback. I wouldn't be able to do jack without him.

Why radio stations won't play most indie music

I heard a lot of people wondering: "Why doesn't the radio play less known artists? There are some amazing songs out there that are lesser known and need to be heard. Commercial/ClearChannel radio sucks."

However, it's not the radio that sucks. It's the listeners.

Consider the following: The music director at San Francisco's Live 105 (owned by CBS) is Aaron Axelsen (who I'm a fan of). Aaron decides what's get played by the DJs during the day, but he also has a show of his own on the station: Soundcheck, every Sunday night. In it, he plays the kind of music we are longing to listen to during daytime: From Manchester Orchestra, to The Temper Trap, to Surfer Blood, to many local Bay Area bands that caught his ear (scroll down for his latest playlist).

However, the rest of the daytime programming is terrible: the same 20-30 hit songs are playing on a rotation. How many times it happened to me already: driving for sushi lunch, Phoenix's "1901″ would be playing on our car's radio. Coming out of lunch, and Phoenix's "1901″ would be playing AGAIN. The rotation is so fucking short that it's not even funny.

Now, it's easy to put the blame on Aaron or his corporate overlords, but it's not really their fault. They are just doing what makes sense for their business. And what makes sense is to keep the listeners from switching channels.

You see, the vast majority of the radio listeners don't listen to music. They hear music instead. There's a difference. They put the kids on the SUV, and drive them to school, and turn on the radio in the meantime. Or, they're stuck in traffic, pissed off, and need to listen to "easy" music to pass the time. Or, they're sitting on their sofa, reading a magazine, and have the radio ON as a background.

Very few people actually drive somewhere in order to turn on the radio and listen to music. Or sit on their sofa, closing their eyes, and listen to just music. Normal people instead, are so busy with their lives, their problems, the quick pace of this civilization, that simply don't have the time to discover new music. Listening to unknown kind of melodies, or new kinds of sub-genres altogether, takes them out of their comfort zone. Listening to something like Dan Deacon instead of Lady Gaga, for example, while the kids shout at each other at the back of the car, makes it difficult to level your head. Not only you have your problems, but you have this new ‘annoying' music playing instead of the music (or kind of music) you already know so well.

Basically, commercial radio works as a kind of a depressant for the masses. At first, it feels like music is exactly the opposite: an excitement that is, but in reality, in the large scheme of things, as far as FM radio is concerned, it's nothing but one of the ways that helps you kept in check. No, this is not a conspiracy theory, it's just how things work. Listeners want it that way too.

And that's the reason why you'll never be able to hear Fever Ray, Antlers, or Local Natives on commercial radio, during daytime, at least in the US. Unless indie bands hit it big on their own, their music will play only late at night, or at specialized radio stations like college radios, KEXP, and Indie 103.1.

So stop hating the radio stations for doing their job. Either hate the system, or the listeners, or don't hate anyone, and listen to your favorite music in your own accord. But don't expect the population to follow too. They won't. They have mortgages to think about rather than HEALTH's awesome off-beat noise.

Geographer interview

I shot the following interview with the Bay Area band Geographer last Sunday, for The OWL Mag. One of the tracks heard on the video below is unreleased as of yet. I shot it using the Canon HV20, since I had to save the battery of my Canon 5D MkII for the As A People music video that I shot an hour later after this interview. It was a busy Sunday. But I loved it.