tech talk: equipment we use
For those curious about which tools we use, here are the essentials:
photography
- Nikon D3 (with a D1x as backup) for digital work, using raw format
- Canon G9 (great packet-camera and backup) for digital work, using raw format
- Hasselblad 501c or Nikon F5 – great cameras for film work, but rearly used anymore…
- Sony HVR-V1P for HDV or DVCAM video is a beautiful camcorder with a Carl Zeiss 20x zoom lens
- Nikon’s 17-35mm f2.8, 24-70mm f2.8, 50mm f1.4, 105mm f2.8 macro and 70-200mm f2.8 for the Nikon cameras, while we tend to use a 120mm for the medium format Hasselblad body
- field work sometimes demand fill-in flash due to the hard tropical light, and the Nikon SB-910 does a great job softening the shadows
- Sony HVL-20DW2 video light does decent fill-in for the video cam
- Multiblitz has a portable set with two 400ws lamps which I use on locations (given an electrical outlet available…)
- Gitzo G220 is a portable tripod, equipped with a Graf Mini Studioball head or a Gitzo G2380 fluid video head, and gives great support for any of our cameras
- Shure SM-58 supplies the all-important sound from the talent
- Nikon Super Coolscan 8000 ED for 4000dpi film scans (incl of 120 film)
computer
- Apple Macintosh MacBook Pro (2.66 GHz Core i7 processor, 8GB internal memory, 500GB disc, 15.2” wide screen and Mac OS X 10.7 unix based operating system) gives elegant portable power
- Apple 23” Cinema HD display adds a nice wide screen view for editing photos and video, and whatever
- Apple Aperture with nik filters for editing (supplemented by Adobe PhotoShop with nik filters) and cataloging of digital photos
- Apple Final Cut Studio 2 or FCPX for editing video
- Adobe Illustrator for illustrations, DreamWeaver for web authoring and InDesign for print lay-out (i.e Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium)
- BBEdit 10 for text editing – supplemented by iWork (and when unavoidable, Microsoft Office for word processing (Word), spreadsheets (Excel)), etc
- Epson Stylus Photo 2100 for quality photo prints
- HP LaserJet 1022 is a great little thing for other printing
- LaCie d2 500GB and other external hard disks, connecting using FireWire800
- backup with SuperDuper! by mirroring the internal disc to a partition on an external LaCie 500GB FireWire disk, and Apple Time Machine for incremental backup to another LaCie FW disk
- 3com Gigabit Switch 8-port and Apple AirPort Extreme wi-fi keep the office connected (and Apple AirPort Express helps when traveling)
- Kensington Orbit Optical trackball is so much better than a mouse (even if my Apple bluetooth mouse is sooo cute!)
- iPhone 4 syncs with the computer
Keep it simple and portable — we try…