Peter Belanger

I just finished working on a shot for Dwell magazine showcasing modern planters. It was a fun and refreshing set because the “plants” were all made from hand-cut paper by a designer (who turned out to be a fellow RISD alumni). Here are some shots from behind the scenes:

 

I’ve been wanting to try out a Steadicam for my Canon 5D Mark II for awhile now. I wasn’t sure which kind to get and the more research I did the more confusing it became. I finally concluded that the Merlin Steadicam was the best fit for what I needed.

I’m a strong believer in renting something before you buy. Everyone that I spoke to said that a Steadicam was something that needed lots of practice and it wasn’t something you could rent for the day. I went against my own advice and bought the Merlin Steadicam. When the Steadicam arrived I thought I was going to pull it out of the box and start filming (duh, see above about the warnings regarding practice).

I spent most of the day learning to balance the camera. Setting up the camera was much harder than I thought. Once I got things configured I went out and started filming. My assistant Michael and I tested walking, running, panning, and walking on stairs. Things were looking good, but we wanted to test something that combined all the challenges at once. We found a block-long flight of stairs to test on that would work perfectly. We needed something to track as we were testing, so of course I volunteered to ride my bike down the stairs as Michael filmed.

I was very impressed with how smoothly things looked considering we didn’t have much practice. If this had been filmed without the Steadicam the movie would have been extremely jumpy and unwatchable.

The purpose of the movie was really an exercise to see how the Steadicam would perform in a difficult situation with very little training. I was very happy with the results and am excited to see how much better it will look once we REALLY figure things out.

You can also watch the video on youtube.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbiVNb7I65Y

 

I love finding cool and fun apps for my iPhone. I just found the iTimeLapse iPhone app. You know I love making time lapse movies. It’s a great app with lots of advanced features. Here’s a test movie I made of my walk to work.

I’ve just completed the opening photo for Macworld’s annual Editors’ Choice Awards. It was a huge puzzle, because I had to take so many different photos and piece them together. The process of assembling the images is the big moment where you find out if you’ve envisioned things correctly. As it turns out, just before I took the set of the red carpet down, I decided the photo needed more depth. I took another shot of the red carpet going into the photo rather than straight across the frame. Thankfully, I was able to make this change because when I photographed the people I had them stand to the left, right and center. This gave me the flexibility to move the people around and play with their final positioning.

Recognize that hand holding the award? It’s mine. I don’t normally use my hands in shots, but because of scheduling it just made things easier.

Rob at Macworld will be adding some words to the awning in the final design phase, but other than that the image is pretty much complete. Keep an eye on news stands for the magazine sometime in mid January.

Here’s a link to the sketch that the photo was based on. http://www.peterbelanger.com/posts/46-the-sketch-that-started-it

Every year Macworld Magazine has an Editors’ Choice Awards issue. This year the concept for the article’s photo is paparazzi and the red carpet. Below is the sketch that I made while I was on the phone with the art director—I realize the sketch doesn’t convey my art school education. Today I photographed various parts that will be compiled for the photo. Here are some photos from the process:

As much as I’d love to share the behind-the-scenes details of every project, sometimes the clients don’t want to be written about. I’ve started a new series of images taken while working, but not showing sensitive content. Most days I’m in the studio shooting, and I have the curtains drawn for 10 hours. That really limits the subject matter of the images! It’s kind of a fun challenge. I’ll post my favorites at the end of each week.

I had a nice surprise in my inbox Friday when i received an email from Apple full of familiar faces. I was hired to photograph my family’s vacation in Tahoe so that Apple could use the images on various materials and in demos, etc. Apple must have sent this to lots of people based on how many friends and family have written to me saying they’ve spotted us as well.

Photographing my kids for Halloween is fun, but isn’t without challenges.  One of the biggest issues is that it is so dark that the camera can’t focus. Another challenge is that the kids move so fast—running from door to door—that it’s hard to get them in focus! In the past I’ve used manual focus with a higher aperture which worked okay. I’ve also used the flash pulse to light up the scene so the camera can focus. This also worked okay, but overall I wasn’t that happy with it.

This year I used my Surefire flashlight to light up a scene so the camera could focus and it worked great. What I like about the Surefire flashlight is that the light only stays on while the button on the back is pressed. When I let go of the button the light turns off instantly. This makes it easy and fast to turn the light on just long enough for the camera to focus. It is no surprise that this precision flashlight is what police officers carry.

It was convenient to be able to hold the light just under the lens and point it where I needed focus rather then have it mounted on the camera. Without the flashlight the photo above would have been completely out of focus. And for the record, I chose the photo above as an example simply because no faces are visible. I have more interesting shots, but not with usage permission of all the trick or treaters.

http://www.surefire.com

Recently I had a shoot that called for a dreamy, cloudy effect. I decided to use dry ice rather then a smoke machine because dry ice smoke stays lower to the ground, which would highlight the products better. It sure makes a project interesting when you have an uncontrollable, organic element in the photo.  At several points most of the floor in my entire studio (not just the set!) was covered with the fog—very surreal.

On the technical side, the dry ice effect doesn’t last very long and we had to come up with ways to prolong it. The dry ice becomes especially activated when placed in hot water. At first we used the hot water from the tap and it didn’t fog up very high. We found that boiling hot water really made the fog go into overdrive. We rented 3 large coffee carafes and used them to make gallons of boiling hot water. Next time I might even use a 4th carafe. They are power hogs and kept blowing a fuse, so we had to put each one on it’s own breaker.

Most of the time we placed the blocks of dry ice in bowls on the floor, which created a really nice, billowing, San Francisco fog look. I found that to give the fog some more shape it helped to pour it out of buckets. The fog looked great but it disappeared fast.

Overall, the dry ice and it’s fog doesn’t get things wet (hence the name dry ice). But because of the method of keeping it in hot water, sometimes when we poured the smoke from the buckets we also poured a little water on the floor. Luckily the fog covered the floor and the puddles were not visible.

Like most photographers, I send out email campaigns. They have always been a great vehicle for self promotion. About a month ago I sent an email campaign to about 2,500 prospective clients. I was happy with the results (23% of the emails got viewed). As good as the results were, it was nothing compared with the success of my cover creation video.

The above 80,000 visits are over a 2.5 month period. Compare that to the results below which reflect a years worth of traffic. During most of that year I didn’t have a blog so most of the traffic was to view my portfolio only. This further shows how important the blog is to my web site. That is why I’ve moved the link to my blog from the side menu to next to the portfolio link—it has become just as important.