Justin Kosman Photography

The Local

Local shoots are always a blessing.
90% of the time a job begins with me stepping off a plane and crossing my fingers that most of the gear made it through security and that no bulbs or battery fuses are missing.  This week I have four days book solid and will be stomping around in my own backyard shooting some lifestyle and knockouts on location. Today I will be meeting up with the art director to scout the locations that we have penciled in for the next few days.  Of course I am bias, I think that anyone who has been to San Diego and doesn’t move here immediately afterwards is nuts.  With eh exception of the thirty-year hail storm we had last week, the weather is amazing year-round. And for a photographer, this place really does have a diversity of locations.  The beach is obvious, but there are places in North County and La Jolla that look like they could have been plucked from Colorado or Utah.  Looking forward to visiting some secret locations I’ve logged int he GPS.  A shout out to the End Search crew for shooting with me yesterday, Ty had a banger video line that will be in the video for sure.

San Frantastic

Hammers in Norcal photo shoot

I spent the last week in San Fran shooting with Kevin Kiraly while he was throwing down some hammers for his Deadline video part.  I only get to shoot with Kevin once a year if I am lucky and it always raises the bar.  A couple last minute tickets on Virgin America and we were shredding San Jose and Sac for 4 straight days. We ran into the Emerica skate team in SJ and are pretty sure we had a Boss sighting.  Here is a shot of one of the rails that we lit up the first night I was in town. Cheers to Yaburns and Ince for helping out and throwing down throughout the trip.

The DSLR (R)Evolution

7D or HPX?

There is a really interesting article over on Sportsshooter.com about a broadcast producer who used the 5d and 7d over in China for some location projects.
Andrew Watson made some good points about each camera compared to shooting with a typical broadcast set-up and really summed it up well in his final evaluation. Since the DSLRs have a limited range of audio quality, AW had to record the audio separately, which lends itself to great audio, but adds another crew member and seems to cancel out the convenience of using a small, quick DSLR set-up in the first place.  I’ll let Andrew say it best: ”neither the 5D Mark II nor the 7D are ideal substitutes for a video camera, the amazing images they produced make up for it. If you need to shoot hours and hours of video with sync sound then the workflow to these DSLRs still might not be realistic, but if you have some patience or the extra resources Canon’s 1080p, DSLRs are a great option. The minute Canon comes out with a DSLR that has XLR inputs, manual audio controls, headphone jack and multi frame rates, I’ll sell off my broadcast camera package”

Check out the full version here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/2331

That being said, I bought a 5d earlier this year and sold it a few months later.  I will say it was great for some behind the scenes clips and is not as intimidating as having an HVX200 stuck in your face. Ergonomically speaking, the DLSR leaves a lot to be desired if you are shooting long lens action and even wide angle action.  Probably the best case scenario is that you would use the DLSR with dollies and jibs, situations where you will be running manual foucus and won’t be pull focusing.  The consumer look of the unit lets you get away with filming in some private locations, where even a hand held DV camera in your hand will get you kicked out of places asap.  So I did miss having the quick draw of a DSLR and ended up buying the 7D last night.

New Vans Ad for Guettler

LBC X AUS

I just got an e-mail from the art director at Vans with the new BMX ad for Vans Shoes.
The featured athlete is none other than Australian sensation Ryan Guettler hanging a 360 nac-nac in the Long Beach ditch.
The action photo and the portrait were shot on the 1Ds MKII using ProFoto lights.  The portrait was shot with the Canon TSE-45mm lens, and one ProFoto beatuy dish outside a bar down by sunken city in San Pedro.

Elbow drop with the best of them

He built a vert wall going up the stairs and he wanted to alley-oop up and over the balcony.
Sounds ridiculous for any normal human, but if you have any knowledge of what Taj has done one a bicycle in the past 15 years- this looks possible.
But it didn’t happen and Taj came crashing down into the narrow space between the banister and my head.
Somehow his head missed the corner of the metal desk that we had turned on it’s end for Will to film from. Look how far away Taj is an the end of the clip and it puts the stairwell in perspective.
This clip was snagged from the Odyssey Electronical trailer where Odyseey took Taj to an abandoned school in rural Kansas to film his video part.
Thanks to Odyssey, and Ron for all the help with this project.

Here:
http://archives.justinkosman.com/elbow_droptajtokos.mov

Or here:

Taj elbow drop on Justin from Justin Kosman on Vimeo.