G'day from Brisbane Australia

[Tony Jay]

Hi my name is Tony Jay.

I am new to shooting video but not new to photography in general.
Although shooting with the fx300 per se is easy in terms of setup, focus, exposure etc (courtesy of a good understanding of stills photography) I still feel I have a massive amount to learn.
Shooting "movies" is most definitely a different paradigm.
Sound I also understand the principles but, again practicalities need to be learned.

Outdoor photography is my passion and this holds for the video side as well.
I expect many months of trial and error will be needed to get into the swing of shooting for story-telling, there are some parallels with shooting stills but also, it seems, many differences as well.

Nonetheless, a whole new world of both technical and creative challenge has been unlocked for me and my partner.

Should be fun!

Tony Jay

[Mark Watson]

G'day Tony!
A couple things I learned about video, 1 - use a tripod as much as possible, 2 - get a tripod that costs a lot more money than you want to pay, 3 - video means audio and audio is a whole new animal, so get interested in how to get good audio.

Last time I was in Brisbane I was shooting stills of some nice architecture and this Aussie comes bumbling along the sidewalk and was very friendly. His name was Tony also, We went bar-hopping all night as he showed me his town and all night long whenever he introduced us to others he'd say, "I'm Tony (then he'd point to his toe and say "Toe", then he'd point to his knee and say, "Knee", "To-ny", and then, ".. this is Marcus." He was a short guy and couldn't spot the single women in the bars so he'd ask me, "What do you see up there, Marcus." "We're hunters and gathers Marcus, hunters and gatherers. And right now we're hunting women." Yeah, we had a good time. I'll be hitting the Gold Coast soon for a little business and then hope to get a few days to go sight-seeing. I've already shipped my camera gear (XF305 and 7D to my Brisbane hotel). At least the weather should be pleasantly cool this trip.

Carlton Coldies await!

Mark

[Tony Jay]

Well, Brisbane is an interesting city!!
Your pleasantly cool may well be my version of bloody cold.
I am a bit of a tropical animal so 'pleasantly cool' is not my scene.
Nonetheless you should enjoy yourself - maybe even more the second time around!

Thanks for the tips.
I do have a tripod/fluid head combination that is not only very expensive but seems to work well.
The mics I am using are from Rode - an NTG3 for on camera shotgun. I will probably also buy Rode for Lavalier mics as well.

As mentioned though, the whole thing is a big learning curve.

Tony Jay

[Martyn Moore]

I loved Brisbane. You could see the Castlemain Brewery from my house.

That guy Tony, with the 'toe', 'knee' shtick. It wasn't Tony Handcock, was it?

If so, he didn't show you all of the actions...

[Mark Watson]

LOL!!! He only demonstrated the two actions, and I'm sure if he had that last name, he'd have been doing all four actions all night long! I was surprised he never got punched out that night. He'd get up real close to a women, totally ignoring the guy she was with and start showering her with compliments, After ten minutes of that, the boyfriend would say "Bugger off now! Can't you see we're together here?!"

I just spent a week there. Great time, pleasantly cool weather.

[Martyn Moore]

I'd like to go back and see how Brisbane has changed since 1986.

Getting back to Tony Jay.

Your stills experience will stand you in good stead, Tony. My early video work suffered from too much panning and zooming. As soon as I got into the idea of treating shots like a sequence of well-composed stills with movement in them, my films improved a lot.

I even resisted moving the camera altogether for a while.

Now I'm allowing it to come back into my work, using sliders and a crane, but in a very subtle way.

I have two Rode mics, the NTG-1 for my video cameras and a Stereo VideoMic Pro for my DSLR.