My Travel Rig - - Video Gear, Cameras and Lighting

**The Art of Photography: Behind the Scenes**

As a photographer, I've always been passionate about sharing my creative process and behind-the-scenes insights with my audience. In today's episode, we're going to take a look at some of the gear and road cases that make up my setup. From lights to diffusion paper, I'll be walking you through each component of my kit and how it helps me achieve the desired aesthetic.

**The Lights**

My lighting setup is comprised of two main components: the lights themselves and their respective stands. The lights are actually a modified version of memory foam that I've cut out and customized to fit my needs. Each light has a tripod base that allows for easy adjustability, while also providing stability during use. What's unique about these lights is that they come with a handle, mount, and power cable, making it easy to transport them without sacrificing any functionality.

One of the most convenient features of this setup is the neoprene case logic bags. These bags are designed for tablets, but I've found them to be perfect for storing my lights, batteries, and other essential gear when on-the-go. The bags have a handle, making it easy to transport them, and they're also lockable for added security. This level of organization is crucial when traveling with your equipment, as it ensures that everything is accounted for and can be easily accessed in a pinch.

**The Road Cases**

Speaking of travel, my road cases are an essential part of my setup. I use two Case Logic bags to store all of my gear, including the lights, batteries, chargers, and other accessories. These bags are designed to fit together seamlessly, with a small padlock that allows me to secure them when not in use. The bag is also TSA-approved, which means it can be easily checked through airport security without any issues.

The weight of my gear has always been an issue for me. I've had to carefully consider what equipment to bring along, as anything too heavy becomes a logistical nightmare. This has actually become a benefit, as it forces me to think creatively and find ways to achieve the desired look with less equipment. For example, I often use a single light source to create multiple effects, rather than bringing along multiple lights.

**Checklists**

Another crucial aspect of my setup is making checklists. These are essential for preventing mistakes and ensuring that everything is accounted for when on set. Whether it's forgetting a memory card or leaving a charger at home, these lists help me stay organized and focused. I've found that this level of preparation has saved me countless hours in the past, when I would scramble to find missing pieces of equipment.

**The Future of The Art of Photography**

As we wrap up today's episode, I want to share some exciting news with my audience. We'll be embarking on a new project, one that will showcase the artistic side of photography. This documentary series will feature stunning images and thought-provoking interviews, all centered around the art of photography. My hope is that this series will inspire audiences to explore their own creative possibilities and push the boundaries of what's possible with this powerful medium.

**The Herold Feinstein Documentary**

One of the most exciting aspects of this project is the opportunity to work with a new partner, Herold Feinstein. As a photographer and filmmaker, I've always been fascinated by his work, and I'm thrilled to have the chance to collaborate with him on this documentary series. We'll be delving into themes such as creativity, perseverance, and the importance of staying true to one's vision. It's going to be an incredible journey, and I'm honored to have my audience along for the ride.

**Stay Tuned**

That's all for today's episode of The Art of Photography. If you're new to our series, welcome! We're glad to have you join us on this creative journey. Don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell, so you can stay up-to-date on all of our latest episodes. Until next time, I'll see you in the comments below, where we'll continue the conversation about photography and creativity.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody I want to do something a little bit different today um we're going we don't talk a lot about equipment on here but I've been preparing most of the week for our trip to Boston uh by the time you're watching this I'm already there um but anyway I've been preparing to go and I've never really done an equipment walkth through of kind of how I travel and the kind of equipment that I use um and this is something that's not really new that I'm doing uh when I worked for seven years at the art museum up until this year um that was part of my job was we did a lot of documentary filming with that we were doing exhibitions with and things of that nature and so um I've spent several years kind of honing this and figuring out what works best and the other thing that I think you should know too is that I come at this as a photographer first um I was a photographer way before I ever got into doing film or video um years ago I had a real interest in doing a lot of video work but you know 10 years ago video was expensive to do uh the cameras were not cheap um lighting wasn't cheap uh it was things have changed a lot even having a computer Compu to do digital video that unless you had an avid system computers were not strong enough to handle it and that wasn't even HD back then but really in the last8 Years everything changed and a lot of that started uh you know when Canon put out the 5D Mark 2 at that time that was one of the first dslrs that shot video and then all of a sudden it made video very accessible to people who were doing Ste photography and that is how I got into it so um know that um the other thing too that makes it interesting um I believe is that you know the technology has gotten not only affordable but very Compact and it allows me to do what I do now which is you know it couldn't have been done 10 years ago really uh when I was kind of starting to do this it was very difficult um and so anyway so I want to show you kind of what I've honed in on as far as what I like to take with me and what I like to shoot with um a couple considerations that I take into account when I'm filming is um one I'm usually filming at an artist studio or I'm filming at somebody's house or something like that so I don't want too much stuff around so I try to stay fairly Nimble with that for instance in a minute I'll show you my lighting stands and they're really pretty cheap but they're small and I can get around things and we can set them up really easily and so that's a consideration that I have to take into account this is not a TV commercial or a film or you know one of those kinds of Productions uh it's usually very tight uh very intimate but you know I'm found ways to do that uh the second thing too is um you know a lot of the stuff that I do is very little budget to no budget and so for instance I probably could get away with renting things when go to a city especially like Boston that has um places where I can rent lights for instance um but for me it's just easier to own them and save on that cost because just over time the the amount of projects that I do do not add up that way um you can rent to fill in holes if you have a special need for something but this is kind of what I've got it down to um that I travel with all this stuff so what we'll do is I'll kind of go around we'll look at cameras audio and lighting and I'll show you how I pack it all up and what we do so anyway come on over and let's start with cameras so let's talk about cameras um as I mentioned before I come at doing video work as being a still photographer first and you know the DSLR was probably my introduction to video um I still take my Canon this is a 5D Mark III um I upgraded from a Mark I uh it shoots Beautiful video um but it is really not perfect for the kind of stuff that we're going to be doing on here um namely because if you're doing a long interview uh dslrs have and even this one have a built-in time limit typically uh which is about 29 minutes of recording and then they shut off and a lot of people think this may be a technical limitation and it's actually not there is a European tax law which basically says that if something's going to record until you know more than 30 minutes um that there's an extra tax because it gets put in the class of being a video camera which I think is bizarre but that's the case so a lot of times dslrs as much as I like the Canon 5D um are not great for interviews they're great for running gun stuff they're great for b-roll obviously um they do a lot of things wonderfully and they shoot really beautiful video but they are not optimal for doing an interview so I typically do not use them on a subject when I'm recording a long interview I might use it as a second camera but it can't be anything that's going to cut off at 30 minutes you don't know what somebody's going to be saying at the 30 minute Mark you don't know where you're going to be in the conversation and it's one more thing to pay attention to in time and it's just for me it doesn't work very well I will take this I use it as a b-roll camera and I use it for kind of up close stuff if you know if you need a running gun or something like that uh but the 5D is is awesome as it is is not um actually perfectly tuned for video which is why I started using this a few years ago um and actually I do all of the shows that you guys watch on here on this camera uh for the most part it's either this or one of these little Sony n cameras that I'm going to show you in a minute uh but this is the fs100 which is kind of the low end of the pr line um they've had a recent price drop on these and you know they're not real cheap but at the same time if you want a really good video camera um that's going to behave like a video camera that has beautiful footage and all that stuff these are the way to go and I really do like them um typically the microphone that is on here is okay uh it's good enough to sync up audio with later I still prefer the lav mic in a pinch you can get away with using this for audio it's it's good enough for for a lot of things it's just not the greatest and I have really picky ears when it comes to audio um the other thing that's really cool um this camera is a little box-like in nature it just has this weird View finder that has limited uh coverage when you're moving it around but it does work and you do need to learn a lot of where all the buttons are when you're shooting manually which is what you want to do but once you get used to the camera it does work really nicely um one of the things I like on it is it has the ability to set uh presets of picture control and so you can do things so if like you need to if you're in a situation like indoors where you want the contrast to do a certain thing but you don't want it to like Crush black you want to do that in post you can set a picture profile to do that um you know I don't shoot raw video obviously we're just shooting um to the codec of the camera and uh for me uh you want to have it look a certain way because you're going to edit it a certain way and color correct later so that's really important it's nice to have those presets because I can do an outdoor preset an indoor preset a cloudy preset you know I have presets for various situations and then I can modify them on the go but it gets me in the ballpark and you can control gamma color contrast everything uh which is really nice other thing that's really cool about these is you know I'm not exactly made of money and the camera didn't exactly come out cheap but I do like the Sony stuff because it has this n ex Mount which is a lot like 4/3 it's a very tight distance between the the flange and the sensor so you can put an adapter for just about anything on here and this is one of my favorite lenses of all time this is the it's a Canon FD lens so it's a manual focus lens which for years you know Canon changed the mount on these and they were you know basically boat anchors you couldn't use them on anything but old Canon film cameras but 35 m mm coverage this is a super 35 mm size sensor so it's plenty of coverage and this is the 85 mm 1.2 and uh I am just absolutely adore this lens um it's one of my favorites uh and it I love the fact that I can get an adapter and I can put I can repurpose all the lenses I already own so this includes things like your old Nikon manual focus lenses um you know Pentax lenses whatever you can get in adapter for and you can probably find just about anything you put like a lenses on here if you've got them um it's really nice or you can use the newer Zeiss and Sony lenses that are designed for the camera now you do lose autofocus you it's manual aperture only so you have to keep that in mind um so if you put a lens on here that doesn't have an aperture dial like something that's you know one of the newer Canon lenses or something you're going to have some trouble unless you have a way to power that so anyway um just a couple subtleties on there but I really like being able to use whatever lens that I want on here it's a it's a huge help so that's the main camera that I use the other cameras that I will take along in addition is usually the Canon 5D and then I am absolutely in love with these cameras and I've shown them on the show before I think this is one of the best deals out there I have filmed some of the podcast episodes that you guys watch just with these cameras this is a Sony NEX ex6 and I'm actually filming right now on a Sony nx5 and I really love this NX series it's already out of date they've changed the name to I think it's the a6000 and I realized that there are better Sony cameras right now there's you know the A7 series you know there's the a7s and 2 and R and all that stuff but there fullframe still cameras and you know these are designed for Stills as well I know they all do video but these are much less expensive than the stuff I'm talking about with the Canon 7 and so the A7 so these work really well for me the other reason I really like them is that they are tiny this is just the smallest thing in the world so if you're if you're trying to get a tight shot somewhere like I mentioned earlier I shoot a lot of times at artist Studios or in people's homes and it's really difficult sometimes to you know get cameras around to do b-roll and so I really like these cameras for that uh they are not the greatest cameras in the world but the picture is beautiful um they tend to shut off the five will get warm after a while and and sensor will overheat and it just stops shooting video so you wouldn't want to do these for an interview or anything but for b-roll they are absolutely awesome um the six is probably the best in the series and you can get these used now really cheap so if you wanted to make video on a budget um this is the camera I would probably go for depending on what you're making you're not going to do long interviews on it but if you're doing you know internet video or shorter Clips or segments or just b-roll kinds of stuff I really really love these and the picture works really nicely uh they syn up nice with the fs100 so there's not a lot of you know post I have to do on stuff like that so these are really a dream to shoot with and I know that they're few years old and they're not really hip and cool right now to be using but I you know they work and I love them I think they're awesome they also have the same Sony nexx Mount so same adapters that go on the fs100 you can put any lens on here you want this is a really wide um Sony lens that's on here right now it's a 16 mm 2.8 it's okay but you can use it with all of your uh your Nikon lenses your old Canon manual focus uh if you can get an adapter you can you can work and it's the same adapter that you used on the fs100 so for me it's a really comfortable camera to switch between so next up I want to talk about audio and I believe that this is probably one of the most important factors in a video production and the reason I say that is think of it this way people will probably sit there and watch a video if the video is not so good but the audio is clear people will not sit there and watch pristine video with bad audio um bad audio is just especially when you're doing an interview situation uh it's something that you need to pay attention to um for this reason you know you can use boom mics and stuff like that I prefer when it's an interview type situation to use lava ler mics and this is what I use every week on the show um I'm wearing one now you just clip it on and then you pop it into a recorder and I record all my audio separately on a recorder the one that I have here and this is one that I've I'm not crazy about I and I'll tell you why but this is the Tascam dr60d and the idea is that Tascam wanted to make a recorder that had decent preamps in it that would kind of go well with a DSLR and it's designed to as you can see even when he mounts under your camera you pop that on the top and then you have full access to your controls as you're recording um there's some pros and some cons to it the pros are that it is kind of cool um you can stack it on the bottom of your camera and so when you're the onean show and you're operating audio and video it's really easy to work with it's got XLR inputs um the the cons of this the reasons I don't like it by the way the preamps are excellent in here so the mics always sound good you capture really really good audio with very low noise on here and so Tascam did a wonderful job on that I don't like the fact that it's made out of plastic and it's kind of cheap and it's no secret that this is stuck in here because it is bent and just won't come out cuz it's crappy plastic um that I don't like the other thing I don't like is this thing you put four ablea batteries in here and it eats them up in about 30 minutes it's it's awful so what you can do is use USB power on here and so that's what I do I just have a power adapter and I plug it in and then I get unlimited power but anyway I just wish that uh it weren't so cheesily put together and that the battery life wasn't so bad um I've got another Sony recorder that I like to use that I'm recording on as we speak which is this one I just plug my lav into the side and I get hours and hours of recording on here with batteries so I don't know what the difference is and that it must be the preamp draw or something but uh anyway that's the audio recorder I use I use dedicated audio and what I will do is I will blend this um Final Cut um has a really excellent way of automatically aligning audio and it works about 95% of the time and so it makes it really easy um if you're using Premiere something like that you might want to use a clapboard or something cuz I don't use time code any other Productions that I do the other thing I use um this is a Sony lavalier mic it's Overkill but it's excellent I bought this a few few years ago it's not a cheap microphone but it is excellent and it is an XLR mic um use these cable ties to keep it tidy but anyway you clip that onto your lapel uh make sure when you have a really nice mic they tend to pick up everything you do want a foam cover for this because I've had people who rustle around a lot and if it's metal it can depending on what their clothing's made of it can rub up against that uh then this is the XLR output and then I use that to Output to the device so that's typically how I record an interview just make sure everything's clean bring a pair of headphones even if it's just earbuds so you can just monitor your audio and make sure that you're getting clean audio and that every everything sounds good um as far as that goes okay so on to lighting equipment and I travel with these two small this is the Ian ib500 LED lamp and I'll turn this around in a minut so you can see the barn doors and all this what I do is I actually use just diffusion paper to cover them with you don't need to buy an expensive adapter for this I use cloth pins and I just clip it to the front of the lamp um what I like about LEDs is they do not get hot which is is very cool um so you know in the old days when you had hot lamps and you'd have to let things cool before you could do tear down um and wear gloves when you move them about um these do not get hot so they're really nice to use they keep people comfortable they don't cast off heat if you're doing an interview with somebody and make them uncomfortable so a couple really cool things about these uh first of all they have a dimer on the back it's just up and down arrows and it's a touch panel so I can just press and hold and go down and I can dim that light all the way down to what it's telling me is 10% and you can micro adjust in increments of one in the percentage uh one annoying thing about this is the light does beep every time you touch it it has remote control for these two but it does beep and it is annoying and uh there's no way to turn it off so that's a drag let's turn this all the way back up CU I'm going to show you another thing that's cool about this the other thing that's really neat is that the color balance you can you can adjust on here too which is really nice if you're having to uh use this light as a supplement which you often do with natural light coming through a window or something like like that right now it's set at daylight which is up 56 and the color is adjustable too and you just dial on the temperature all the way down to 32k and so you can see I don't know if this camera is auto adjusting or not but it does get warmer or cooler depending and anywhere in the middle so that is a really nice feature of this lamp as well I've got two of these I don't know if you can see the other one behind it at all it's back there and I just cover them up with the fusion paper um that I roll up and put in my case and they work great um these are not perfect they're not very big they're they're pretty small and so basically what this means is when you're lighting somebody the lamp does need to be pretty close to their face and you know this is not optimal you'll get better lighting and a bigger cast if you have a bigger lamp and I just don't because I have to travel with these and so I just kind of make do so that's one small complaint about them but that's about it um the other thing is you know I don't have great stands that I keep these on and that actually is intentional these stands are really small and they are easy to fit in a case they're not heavy they're not great um if I break one I'll have to buy another one but I do have them and uh they work for what I'm doing with the travel setup but these lights fold down really nicely you'll see in a minute when I put them in the case and the attachment for the power comes off you plug it straight into the wall I fold those up and uh I'll show you too I have some separate bags that keep those in but basically I have two of these lamps and uh it would be nice to have a third um I just am out of room at this point you want to do a three-point light setup and be able to remove people from The Background by putting a little bit of on their shoulders sometimes and I really you know I'm a little bit handicapped there and then I have to figure something else out but uh but they work and and they're great so um in a second I'm going to show you how everything folds up together okay so everything folds down into two cases one I check and the other I carry on I carry on this top one um this is the think tank I love this bag there's not much to say about I'll show it to you really quickly but this is the airport security version 2.0 and it is phenomenal uh it's not a cheap bag but worth every penny um everything fits in here really nicely very tily uh it's got pockets everywhere and you can get all your stuff in there and it's great what's really cool is it fits in the overhead bin and it also fits in that I don't know if you have this where you live but in the United States they have that crazy box you have to stick your luggage in to make sure it'll fit which is smaller than the overhead and this fits in that as well so very cool the other case this is the one that I check all my lights go in here this is a pelican storm case this is the 2950 and uh I love it it's very cool it has basically this memory foam inside which I have cut out and modified to fit basically there's two layers in here you take out the top the second layer um second layer has a light as well top layer has a light there's a tripod on each layer for sorry these are the stands for the lights and I have a tripod underneath as well this is the diffusion paper rolled up and I keep one compartment kind of open for other stuff um these are really cool I'll link to them in the show notes if you guys are interested these are just these neoprene Case Logic bags and I've got two of these they're designed for like a I don't know a tablet or something but I like them because they put basically these lights come with there's a handle you take off there's a mount and then you have the power cable everything fits in here and I've got two of those and I also lock this and uh you want to get um it's actually over there but uh there's a small padlock that goes on the front you can get TSA approved padlocks which basically mean you set the combination but TSA does have a master key that will indeed open the padlock so they can get into it if they need to but uh eh it keeps it more secure than just checking this to where anybody could open it so anyway I check the lights it's not too heavy uh weight is another issue because if it's too heavy you can't take it you have to ship it and uh it's a big pain so anyway that's pretty much um the gear and the road cases and how I travel I hope you guys have found this interesting and useful on some level and this is just the setup that I use right now it's not perfect um I would like to change some things out and expand over time but within my budget and what I have to work with right now this does pretty well um you know there's some little things that could be different like I would like to have larger lights I'd really like to have a third light so I can do three-point lighting setups when I travel and it just you know it's more money to do that one right now and two it's more stuff to carry so I have to be very careful about that but I also think and this is because I come from a photography background working within limitations sometimes uh is not a bad thing it forces you to be a little bit creative and think of things a little bit differently so I would say too with you know your own setup in your own equipment the things that are the most important is being able to understand the limitations of what you have what you're able to do what able to not do and sometimes be creative within that like I was just saying and two it needs to be something you're very consistently using um nothing can waste time and kill things faster than if you're not familiar with how your lights set up for instance because you don't use them that often or if you have new gear all the time you don't understand how it works or how to put it together um and you know you probably understand how to put it together but if you can't do it fast um it can waste a lot of time so that's really important is to to understand um that in terms of setup um the other thing is making checklists I really didn't talk about this too much today but I've done this because I've done this in the past it's an easy mistake to make where you forget one little piece of gear that completely can kill a shoot if you're not careful um you know if you forget to grab a folder of memory cards and you don't have enough or you don't have any you forget a battery you forget a charger something like that um then you're scrambling around on set to try to find things to make it still happen I've done those in the past I think we all have but um you know trying to stay organized and pretty meticulous about that is is very key uh anyway by the time you're watching this like I said I probably already up there filmed most of this but uh I'm really excited about getting to do this um the Herold Feinstein documentary is kind of the first and this thing I've had in my mind for a long time that I wanted to do with the show it's going to be a lot different than what you see on here during the week it's going to be a very special thing and what my hope is is that we can kind of continue this and do special things every 3 or four months or so so stay on the lookout for more of that anyway guys I'll see you next week in our regular episode once I'm back in town and once again this has been another episode of The Art of Photography and thank you all for watching I'll see you latereverybody I want to do something a little bit different today um we're going we don't talk a lot about equipment on here but I've been preparing most of the week for our trip to Boston uh by the time you're watching this I'm already there um but anyway I've been preparing to go and I've never really done an equipment walkth through of kind of how I travel and the kind of equipment that I use um and this is something that's not really new that I'm doing uh when I worked for seven years at the art museum up until this year um that was part of my job was we did a lot of documentary filming with that we were doing exhibitions with and things of that nature and so um I've spent several years kind of honing this and figuring out what works best and the other thing that I think you should know too is that I come at this as a photographer first um I was a photographer way before I ever got into doing film or video um years ago I had a real interest in doing a lot of video work but you know 10 years ago video was expensive to do uh the cameras were not cheap um lighting wasn't cheap uh it was things have changed a lot even having a computer Compu to do digital video that unless you had an avid system computers were not strong enough to handle it and that wasn't even HD back then but really in the last8 Years everything changed and a lot of that started uh you know when Canon put out the 5D Mark 2 at that time that was one of the first dslrs that shot video and then all of a sudden it made video very accessible to people who were doing Ste photography and that is how I got into it so um know that um the other thing too that makes it interesting um I believe is that you know the technology has gotten not only affordable but very Compact and it allows me to do what I do now which is you know it couldn't have been done 10 years ago really uh when I was kind of starting to do this it was very difficult um and so anyway so I want to show you kind of what I've honed in on as far as what I like to take with me and what I like to shoot with um a couple considerations that I take into account when I'm filming is um one I'm usually filming at an artist studio or I'm filming at somebody's house or something like that so I don't want too much stuff around so I try to stay fairly Nimble with that for instance in a minute I'll show you my lighting stands and they're really pretty cheap but they're small and I can get around things and we can set them up really easily and so that's a consideration that I have to take into account this is not a TV commercial or a film or you know one of those kinds of Productions uh it's usually very tight uh very intimate but you know I'm found ways to do that uh the second thing too is um you know a lot of the stuff that I do is very little budget to no budget and so for instance I probably could get away with renting things when go to a city especially like Boston that has um places where I can rent lights for instance um but for me it's just easier to own them and save on that cost because just over time the the amount of projects that I do do not add up that way um you can rent to fill in holes if you have a special need for something but this is kind of what I've got it down to um that I travel with all this stuff so what we'll do is I'll kind of go around we'll look at cameras audio and lighting and I'll show you how I pack it all up and what we do so anyway come on over and let's start with cameras so let's talk about cameras um as I mentioned before I come at doing video work as being a still photographer first and you know the DSLR was probably my introduction to video um I still take my Canon this is a 5D Mark III um I upgraded from a Mark I uh it shoots Beautiful video um but it is really not perfect for the kind of stuff that we're going to be doing on here um namely because if you're doing a long interview uh dslrs have and even this one have a built-in time limit typically uh which is about 29 minutes of recording and then they shut off and a lot of people think this may be a technical limitation and it's actually not there is a European tax law which basically says that if something's going to record until you know more than 30 minutes um that there's an extra tax because it gets put in the class of being a video camera which I think is bizarre but that's the case so a lot of times dslrs as much as I like the Canon 5D um are not great for interviews they're great for running gun stuff they're great for b-roll obviously um they do a lot of things wonderfully and they shoot really beautiful video but they are not optimal for doing an interview so I typically do not use them on a subject when I'm recording a long interview I might use it as a second camera but it can't be anything that's going to cut off at 30 minutes you don't know what somebody's going to be saying at the 30 minute Mark you don't know where you're going to be in the conversation and it's one more thing to pay attention to in time and it's just for me it doesn't work very well I will take this I use it as a b-roll camera and I use it for kind of up close stuff if you know if you need a running gun or something like that uh but the 5D is is awesome as it is is not um actually perfectly tuned for video which is why I started using this a few years ago um and actually I do all of the shows that you guys watch on here on this camera uh for the most part it's either this or one of these little Sony n cameras that I'm going to show you in a minute uh but this is the fs100 which is kind of the low end of the pr line um they've had a recent price drop on these and you know they're not real cheap but at the same time if you want a really good video camera um that's going to behave like a video camera that has beautiful footage and all that stuff these are the way to go and I really do like them um typically the microphone that is on here is okay uh it's good enough to sync up audio with later I still prefer the lav mic in a pinch you can get away with using this for audio it's it's good enough for for a lot of things it's just not the greatest and I have really picky ears when it comes to audio um the other thing that's really cool um this camera is a little box-like in nature it just has this weird View finder that has limited uh coverage when you're moving it around but it does work and you do need to learn a lot of where all the buttons are when you're shooting manually which is what you want to do but once you get used to the camera it does work really nicely um one of the things I like on it is it has the ability to set uh presets of picture control and so you can do things so if like you need to if you're in a situation like indoors where you want the contrast to do a certain thing but you don't want it to like Crush black you want to do that in post you can set a picture profile to do that um you know I don't shoot raw video obviously we're just shooting um to the codec of the camera and uh for me uh you want to have it look a certain way because you're going to edit it a certain way and color correct later so that's really important it's nice to have those presets because I can do an outdoor preset an indoor preset a cloudy preset you know I have presets for various situations and then I can modify them on the go but it gets me in the ballpark and you can control gamma color contrast everything uh which is really nice other thing that's really cool about these is you know I'm not exactly made of money and the camera didn't exactly come out cheap but I do like the Sony stuff because it has this n ex Mount which is a lot like 4/3 it's a very tight distance between the the flange and the sensor so you can put an adapter for just about anything on here and this is one of my favorite lenses of all time this is the it's a Canon FD lens so it's a manual focus lens which for years you know Canon changed the mount on these and they were you know basically boat anchors you couldn't use them on anything but old Canon film cameras but 35 m mm coverage this is a super 35 mm size sensor so it's plenty of coverage and this is the 85 mm 1.2 and uh I am just absolutely adore this lens um it's one of my favorites uh and it I love the fact that I can get an adapter and I can put I can repurpose all the lenses I already own so this includes things like your old Nikon manual focus lenses um you know Pentax lenses whatever you can get in adapter for and you can probably find just about anything you put like a lenses on here if you've got them um it's really nice or you can use the newer Zeiss and Sony lenses that are designed for the camera now you do lose autofocus you it's manual aperture only so you have to keep that in mind um so if you put a lens on here that doesn't have an aperture dial like something that's you know one of the newer Canon lenses or something you're going to have some trouble unless you have a way to power that so anyway um just a couple subtleties on there but I really like being able to use whatever lens that I want on here it's a it's a huge help so that's the main camera that I use the other cameras that I will take along in addition is usually the Canon 5D and then I am absolutely in love with these cameras and I've shown them on the show before I think this is one of the best deals out there I have filmed some of the podcast episodes that you guys watch just with these cameras this is a Sony NEX ex6 and I'm actually filming right now on a Sony nx5 and I really love this NX series it's already out of date they've changed the name to I think it's the a6000 and I realized that there are better Sony cameras right now there's you know the A7 series you know there's the a7s and 2 and R and all that stuff but there fullframe still cameras and you know these are designed for Stills as well I know they all do video but these are much less expensive than the stuff I'm talking about with the Canon 7 and so the A7 so these work really well for me the other reason I really like them is that they are tiny this is just the smallest thing in the world so if you're if you're trying to get a tight shot somewhere like I mentioned earlier I shoot a lot of times at artist Studios or in people's homes and it's really difficult sometimes to you know get cameras around to do b-roll and so I really like these cameras for that uh they are not the greatest cameras in the world but the picture is beautiful um they tend to shut off the five will get warm after a while and and sensor will overheat and it just stops shooting video so you wouldn't want to do these for an interview or anything but for b-roll they are absolutely awesome um the six is probably the best in the series and you can get these used now really cheap so if you wanted to make video on a budget um this is the camera I would probably go for depending on what you're making you're not going to do long interviews on it but if you're doing you know internet video or shorter Clips or segments or just b-roll kinds of stuff I really really love these and the picture works really nicely uh they syn up nice with the fs100 so there's not a lot of you know post I have to do on stuff like that so these are really a dream to shoot with and I know that they're few years old and they're not really hip and cool right now to be using but I you know they work and I love them I think they're awesome they also have the same Sony nexx Mount so same adapters that go on the fs100 you can put any lens on here you want this is a really wide um Sony lens that's on here right now it's a 16 mm 2.8 it's okay but you can use it with all of your uh your Nikon lenses your old Canon manual focus uh if you can get an adapter you can you can work and it's the same adapter that you used on the fs100 so for me it's a really comfortable camera to switch between so next up I want to talk about audio and I believe that this is probably one of the most important factors in a video production and the reason I say that is think of it this way people will probably sit there and watch a video if the video is not so good but the audio is clear people will not sit there and watch pristine video with bad audio um bad audio is just especially when you're doing an interview situation uh it's something that you need to pay attention to um for this reason you know you can use boom mics and stuff like that I prefer when it's an interview type situation to use lava ler mics and this is what I use every week on the show um I'm wearing one now you just clip it on and then you pop it into a recorder and I record all my audio separately on a recorder the one that I have here and this is one that I've I'm not crazy about I and I'll tell you why but this is the Tascam dr60d and the idea is that Tascam wanted to make a recorder that had decent preamps in it that would kind of go well with a DSLR and it's designed to as you can see even when he mounts under your camera you pop that on the top and then you have full access to your controls as you're recording um there's some pros and some cons to it the pros are that it is kind of cool um you can stack it on the bottom of your camera and so when you're the onean show and you're operating audio and video it's really easy to work with it's got XLR inputs um the the cons of this the reasons I don't like it by the way the preamps are excellent in here so the mics always sound good you capture really really good audio with very low noise on here and so Tascam did a wonderful job on that I don't like the fact that it's made out of plastic and it's kind of cheap and it's no secret that this is stuck in here because it is bent and just won't come out cuz it's crappy plastic um that I don't like the other thing I don't like is this thing you put four ablea batteries in here and it eats them up in about 30 minutes it's it's awful so what you can do is use USB power on here and so that's what I do I just have a power adapter and I plug it in and then I get unlimited power but anyway I just wish that uh it weren't so cheesily put together and that the battery life wasn't so bad um I've got another Sony recorder that I like to use that I'm recording on as we speak which is this one I just plug my lav into the side and I get hours and hours of recording on here with batteries so I don't know what the difference is and that it must be the preamp draw or something but uh anyway that's the audio recorder I use I use dedicated audio and what I will do is I will blend this um Final Cut um has a really excellent way of automatically aligning audio and it works about 95% of the time and so it makes it really easy um if you're using Premiere something like that you might want to use a clapboard or something cuz I don't use time code any other Productions that I do the other thing I use um this is a Sony lavalier mic it's Overkill but it's excellent I bought this a few few years ago it's not a cheap microphone but it is excellent and it is an XLR mic um use these cable ties to keep it tidy but anyway you clip that onto your lapel uh make sure when you have a really nice mic they tend to pick up everything you do want a foam cover for this because I've had people who rustle around a lot and if it's metal it can depending on what their clothing's made of it can rub up against that uh then this is the XLR output and then I use that to Output to the device so that's typically how I record an interview just make sure everything's clean bring a pair of headphones even if it's just earbuds so you can just monitor your audio and make sure that you're getting clean audio and that every everything sounds good um as far as that goes okay so on to lighting equipment and I travel with these two small this is the Ian ib500 LED lamp and I'll turn this around in a minut so you can see the barn doors and all this what I do is I actually use just diffusion paper to cover them with you don't need to buy an expensive adapter for this I use cloth pins and I just clip it to the front of the lamp um what I like about LEDs is they do not get hot which is is very cool um so you know in the old days when you had hot lamps and you'd have to let things cool before you could do tear down um and wear gloves when you move them about um these do not get hot so they're really nice to use they keep people comfortable they don't cast off heat if you're doing an interview with somebody and make them uncomfortable so a couple really cool things about these uh first of all they have a dimer on the back it's just up and down arrows and it's a touch panel so I can just press and hold and go down and I can dim that light all the way down to what it's telling me is 10% and you can micro adjust in increments of one in the percentage uh one annoying thing about this is the light does beep every time you touch it it has remote control for these two but it does beep and it is annoying and uh there's no way to turn it off so that's a drag let's turn this all the way back up CU I'm going to show you another thing that's cool about this the other thing that's really neat is that the color balance you can you can adjust on here too which is really nice if you're having to uh use this light as a supplement which you often do with natural light coming through a window or something like like that right now it's set at daylight which is up 56 and the color is adjustable too and you just dial on the temperature all the way down to 32k and so you can see I don't know if this camera is auto adjusting or not but it does get warmer or cooler depending and anywhere in the middle so that is a really nice feature of this lamp as well I've got two of these I don't know if you can see the other one behind it at all it's back there and I just cover them up with the fusion paper um that I roll up and put in my case and they work great um these are not perfect they're not very big they're they're pretty small and so basically what this means is when you're lighting somebody the lamp does need to be pretty close to their face and you know this is not optimal you'll get better lighting and a bigger cast if you have a bigger lamp and I just don't because I have to travel with these and so I just kind of make do so that's one small complaint about them but that's about it um the other thing is you know I don't have great stands that I keep these on and that actually is intentional these stands are really small and they are easy to fit in a case they're not heavy they're not great um if I break one I'll have to buy another one but I do have them and uh they work for what I'm doing with the travel setup but these lights fold down really nicely you'll see in a minute when I put them in the case and the attachment for the power comes off you plug it straight into the wall I fold those up and uh I'll show you too I have some separate bags that keep those in but basically I have two of these lamps and uh it would be nice to have a third um I just am out of room at this point you want to do a three-point light setup and be able to remove people from The Background by putting a little bit of on their shoulders sometimes and I really you know I'm a little bit handicapped there and then I have to figure something else out but uh but they work and and they're great so um in a second I'm going to show you how everything folds up together okay so everything folds down into two cases one I check and the other I carry on I carry on this top one um this is the think tank I love this bag there's not much to say about I'll show it to you really quickly but this is the airport security version 2.0 and it is phenomenal uh it's not a cheap bag but worth every penny um everything fits in here really nicely very tily uh it's got pockets everywhere and you can get all your stuff in there and it's great what's really cool is it fits in the overhead bin and it also fits in that I don't know if you have this where you live but in the United States they have that crazy box you have to stick your luggage in to make sure it'll fit which is smaller than the overhead and this fits in that as well so very cool the other case this is the one that I check all my lights go in here this is a pelican storm case this is the 2950 and uh I love it it's very cool it has basically this memory foam inside which I have cut out and modified to fit basically there's two layers in here you take out the top the second layer um second layer has a light as well top layer has a light there's a tripod on each layer for sorry these are the stands for the lights and I have a tripod underneath as well this is the diffusion paper rolled up and I keep one compartment kind of open for other stuff um these are really cool I'll link to them in the show notes if you guys are interested these are just these neoprene Case Logic bags and I've got two of these they're designed for like a I don't know a tablet or something but I like them because they put basically these lights come with there's a handle you take off there's a mount and then you have the power cable everything fits in here and I've got two of those and I also lock this and uh you want to get um it's actually over there but uh there's a small padlock that goes on the front you can get TSA approved padlocks which basically mean you set the combination but TSA does have a master key that will indeed open the padlock so they can get into it if they need to but uh eh it keeps it more secure than just checking this to where anybody could open it so anyway I check the lights it's not too heavy uh weight is another issue because if it's too heavy you can't take it you have to ship it and uh it's a big pain so anyway that's pretty much um the gear and the road cases and how I travel I hope you guys have found this interesting and useful on some level and this is just the setup that I use right now it's not perfect um I would like to change some things out and expand over time but within my budget and what I have to work with right now this does pretty well um you know there's some little things that could be different like I would like to have larger lights I'd really like to have a third light so I can do three-point lighting setups when I travel and it just you know it's more money to do that one right now and two it's more stuff to carry so I have to be very careful about that but I also think and this is because I come from a photography background working within limitations sometimes uh is not a bad thing it forces you to be a little bit creative and think of things a little bit differently so I would say too with you know your own setup in your own equipment the things that are the most important is being able to understand the limitations of what you have what you're able to do what able to not do and sometimes be creative within that like I was just saying and two it needs to be something you're very consistently using um nothing can waste time and kill things faster than if you're not familiar with how your lights set up for instance because you don't use them that often or if you have new gear all the time you don't understand how it works or how to put it together um and you know you probably understand how to put it together but if you can't do it fast um it can waste a lot of time so that's really important is to to understand um that in terms of setup um the other thing is making checklists I really didn't talk about this too much today but I've done this because I've done this in the past it's an easy mistake to make where you forget one little piece of gear that completely can kill a shoot if you're not careful um you know if you forget to grab a folder of memory cards and you don't have enough or you don't have any you forget a battery you forget a charger something like that um then you're scrambling around on set to try to find things to make it still happen I've done those in the past I think we all have but um you know trying to stay organized and pretty meticulous about that is is very key uh anyway by the time you're watching this like I said I probably already up there filmed most of this but uh I'm really excited about getting to do this um the Herold Feinstein documentary is kind of the first and this thing I've had in my mind for a long time that I wanted to do with the show it's going to be a lot different than what you see on here during the week it's going to be a very special thing and what my hope is is that we can kind of continue this and do special things every 3 or four months or so so stay on the lookout for more of that anyway guys I'll see you next week in our regular episode once I'm back in town and once again this has been another episode of The Art of Photography and thank you all for watching I'll see you later\n"