Author: Paul
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Putting the Xacti VPC-CG10 camcorder to work DIY style
As I’ve blogged before, I’m having a blast using my Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 palm-sized HD camcorder. I’m starting to hear about other videographers who appreciate the CG10 not just for its cost, size and HD, but also for its manual control over exposure and focus. I just read a quick post at the Frugal Filmmaker…
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Pencam shoots and scores
I was pleasingly surprised to find out that a picture I took this weekend was selected to be featured in Today’s Photos on Chicago’s Windy Citizen yesterday. The interesting thing is that I shot this using an inexpensive “lo-fi” digital camera, the Aiptek Pencam SD. The design of this little cam is about 10 years…
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What video camera should I buy?
One of the most common questions I hear from educators looking to start producing video is one that I suspect a lot of readers have heard: “What camera should I buy?†On the surface it’s quite an innocuous query, seemingly simple to answer. Yet, bundled up in there is a very common and pernicious assumption,…
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Sony teases me with their new, but frustrating NEX digital cameras
Digital photography turned me into a photography enthusiast. Although I’ve been shooting video ever since I first got my hands on a black-and-white 1/2″ reel-to-reel VTR as a kid, for some reason still photography never interested me much in high school or college. But in 2001 when I got my first miniDV camcorder which also…
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Audio, Audiophiles and the Aesthetic Experience of Medium
Back in December I bragged about predicting the onset of the cassette revival, and five months into 2010 it looks like that revival is in full swing. Articles about the renewed interest in the lowly compact cassette have appeared in as wide variety of sites as the Chicago Tribune, UK Guardian and Pitchfork. Much of…
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Mediageek Can Never Get Enough Pirate Radio
Last night I finally watched Pirate Radio (a/k/a The Boat That Rocked) on HD pay-per-view, as it seems I can never make it into a regular movie theater these days. I quite enjoyed this romp through the short life of a fictional 1960s UK pirate radio ship, inspired by the infamous Radio Caroline. While the…
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From miniDV to dSLR – Contemplating the New Era of Digital Video
When I saw the first miniDV digital camcorders in the late 1990s I was blown away by the edit-ready broadcast-quality picture they captured on tapes half the size of an 8mm videocassette and on cameras smaller than ever seen before. Yet, I couldn’t predict that only about a decade later we’d see the ability to…
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Zine Weekend
This past weekend I attended the first Chicago Zine Fest, which also happened to be the first zine fest I’ve been to in almost five years. Attendance seemed quite high for the events that I went to, which was great to see. Friday night’s zine reading at Quimby’s bookstore was standing-room-only from the stage at…
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What I’ve Been Up To Elsewhere
It looks like my challenge for 2010 is to see how many simultaneous writing projects I can keep up. What I’m learning so far is that the projects involving other people seem to gain my attention better than my nine-year-old blog here. Also, I enrolled in distance education certificate program that is also soaking up…
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Rocket Blower, I Love You
Seems that photography is a topic the moves me to write at the ‘geek. So let me get in a quick post about a simple little device that has blown me away, pun intended. I’ve been shooting, developing and scanning my own black and white film for about two years now. And one of the…