I have never been 100% happy with a tripod head… until now. For most of my career I have used a tilt/pan head.. and it has always served it’s purpose, but minor adjustments were always a bit tedious. About a year ago, I got a ball head for the studio stand. Some colleagues just rave about ball heads, but I never thought I would like them. And although it is very robust, I was right.. I don’t like them… My problem with them is that if your tilt just right but need to adjust your vertical/horizontal you always end up throwing your perfect tilt off by trying to fix the v/h! (or vice-versa)

Although I have barely had a chance to use it I just purchased the Manfrotto 405 Geared Head. I know I am going to LOVE this head! It is compact in that it does not have long arms sticking off of it, but it is a tilt / pan head with two types of adjustments for each movement. One for broad/rough adjustments and another for fine adjustments. And the fact that it is geared (unless disengaged for the rough positioning) means that you never loose your fine positioning. I like is so much I may even buy another! (one for the tripod and one for the studio stand)

Well after some product research and a demo for the Hasselblad rep we finally felt it was the right time to get the latest high-end medium format camera. So about 4 weeks ago we got the Hasselblad H3D II. It’s a 39 megapixel camera with some amazing glass! It came with an 80mm (normal) lens, but in addition we picked up the 28mm, the 120 macro, and the 50-110 zoom as well as the pro shade, some extra batteries, and a new tripod and head. I tell you, we could make a lot more money if we did not have to keep investing in all of this expensive equipment! With wrapping up some projects and printing new portfolios and promos we have not even had a chance to shoot a single frame on the system but we’ll definitely share our thoughts with you once we start!

About two weeks ago, just towards the end of our UHC project we bit the bullet! We purchased the brand new Hasselblad H3D II. This camera was just release and we very well may have been the first studio in Los Angeles to have one! Check out the camera web site and we’ll tell you a bit more about in the next couple of days! (Yikes!!)

Well we’ll be working through the weekend on retouching and compositing. I was hoping we could get another interesting image up today but they are all still “in process”. So check back in next week and we’ll have something new to look at. We also have a bunch of other news but need time to pull it all together. So have a good weekend and we’ll be back on Monday!

Well I do my best to try and get a post in everyday, but the clock just struck midnight and so this post counts as Thursday instead of Wednesday. So… no double duty for me I am going to accept the fact that I missed Wednesday and here is my Thursday post.

Obviously we are working late. Retouching the UHC images, trying to get them out as quickly as possible (the client is very anxious to get them).

Here is one of the ones we delivered earlier today.

This was shot on stage with a set wall. We could have just as easily shot this in a home, but we had two other sets running at the same time on the day of this shoot and consequently is was less expensive to build exactly what the client wanted rather than trying to “make a house work”.

Here is another shot from the UHC campaign. We are delivering this shot to the client with the signs blank. But to illustrate the concept we inserted some graphics so that you could get the point of the shot… alas, way too much time spent on little details!

So last Friday we finished shooting the UnitedHealthcare Campaign that we have been working on for over a month. Tomorrow we will make selects and then the retouching and compositing begins. That will take another two weeks. We did over 40 different set-ups and many of them are going to require a bit of post production work. We’ll share a few of the images with you over the next few weeks as we finish them up. Maybe show some before and afters and pieces that get put into final images. So to start things off here is one of the images (before post-production)

We’re hoping to get back on a daily posting schedule next week. We are in the thick of a huge UnitedHealthcare campaign and we finish up shooting on Friday. We have a couple of weeks of retouching to do once we are done, but at least we’ll be back in the office and can take the occasional moment to get in a post. Lots going on here both with the campaign and otherwise, so we’ll have lots to fill you in on when we return! Talk to you in a few days!