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