Ionce got a call from a woman who said she was the editor of a magazine called Endless Vacations. Endless vacations! The very name gave me a thrill: a vacation that never stopped. I could be seamlessly whisked from a safari in Kenya to a Club Med on the Riviera to a temple dance in Bali. When I calmed down I realized that what was endless was the number of vacations being recommended by the magazine, not the vacation itself. But I was hooked.
The editor explained that a regular feature of her magazine was a 300-word essay, on the back page, about an iconic American site. She had seen a review of my book American Places, a journey to 16 such sites, and she asked if I would write some 300-word icon pieces for her. I said that after two years of traveling and writing I was through with the icon business, but that she could buy any of my chapters and I would condense them into 300-word excerpts. I believe that anything can be cut to 300 words.
The language is highly compressed. Facts are crammed into one sentence that I would normally spread over three or four sentences, adding rhythm and grace and some agreeable details. But nothing fundamental has been lost; the grammar and the syntax are intact.
Blowing with compressed air is common in industry when cleaning, drying, cooling, sorting or transporting objects. Silvent air nozzles are used in fixed installations and make efficient use of compressed air. All Silvent air nozzles feature the optimal combination of high blowing force, low energy consumption and low noise levels.
Air knives are most commonly used to blow away liquids, grime, airborne debris, etc. from surfaces or objects. Silvent air knives create a broad and effective flow of air that produces a pneumatic scraping effect without mechanical contact. All Silvent air knives feature the optimal combination of high blowing force, low energy consumption and low noise levels.
Manual blowing with compressed air is common in industry when cleaning, drying or cooling objects. Silvent air blow guns make efficient use of compressed air. All Silvent air blow guns feature the optimal combination of high blowing force, low energy consumption and low noise levels, at the same time as they are ergonomically designed for professional use.
Some industries and processes need more blowing force than a regular air blow gun can generate. Therefore, Silvent has developed air blow guns with high blowing force. The blowing force ranges from twice as strong up to 30 times stronger than a regular air blow gun. All Silvent air blow guns are safe, quiet and efficient, and are developed for professional use.
The noise from compressed air valves is extremely hazardous, but equipping valve discharge ports with pneumatic mufflers often causes operational disturbances. Silvent pneumatic mufflers have integrated warning indicators. The technology basically entails that the pneumatic muffler itself sets the optimal combination of flow capacity and noise suppression thanks to the dynamic internal filter, which subsequently minimizes operational disturbances and eliminates clogging. Read more about Silvents Pneumatic Mufflers.
To optimize blowing, it is sometimes necessary to be able to make pressure or blowing angle adjustments, for example. In other cases protection against airborne debris may be needed. Silvent has different types of accessories for easily performing various blowing tasks, optimally and safely.
SILVENT 4015-LF is a unique product that combines highly concentrated blowing force with an easily maneuverable valve construction and low sound level. The patented nozzle design with a Laval orifice in the center surrounded by a ring of slots generates a low-turbulence air stream, which means a low sound level with no sacrifice of blowing force. The nozzle is made of stainless steel, making it suitable for use in practically any environment where extra high blowing force is required, e.g. the paper and manufacturing industries, steel mills etc. This air bazooka features adjustable blowing force that is easily regulated to any strength between 5% and 100%.
The very large sensor, bigger than Full Frame giving me a very shallow depth of field, especially when shooting with the Fujifilm 55mm f1.7 lens. This, plus the smooth highlight roll off, combined with a warm look that I could get by shooting using F-Log2 with the 14 bit sensor readout mode gave a very organic looking image that was a great fit for this performance which centers around our relationship as human beings with the earth, plants and nature. I really love the way the images from this camera looks. Skin tones look beautifully textured, highlights are well rounded. The shadows are full of subtle details and also remarkably noise free.
The GFX-100II is a very interesting camera with many different scan modes available from the huge 43.8mm32.9mm 100MP sensor. I did some test filming with the previous GFX-100 Mk 1 a few years ago and I loved the way the images from that camera looked. There is just something very nice from having a massively oversampled image.
For this shoot I could have used an 8K crop from the 11.6K wide sensor or a 5.8K 2.35:1 read from the full width of the sensor. But in the end I settled on the cameras 4K 17:9 recording mode which is downsampled from the full sensor width. This greatly downsampled readout mode delivers a beautifully clean yet immensely textured image at the F-Log2 base ISO of 1000 ISO. It uses the full width of the sensor so you can take advantage of the very wide field of view that even the 55mm lens will deliver. And then by shooting at 55mm and f1.7 you get a very shallow depth of field. When you downsample like this you get full 4:4:4 colour, so unlike the output from a more conventional 4K bayer sensor where there is less colour information than brightness information, the colour and brightness information from the GFX-100 II in this mode are equally balanced. This makes it highly gradeable.
An interesting feature of the GFX-100 II is the ability to change the sensor readout bit depth from 12 bit to 14 bit. When shooting video most camera sensors run at 12 bit. But the GFX-100 II can be set to a special F-Log2 Dynamic Range Priority mode that increases the bit depth of the sensor readout to 14 bit. This 14 bit readout increases the dynamic range and improves the textural qualities of the image. Considering that the pixels on the camera are very small, the dynamic range it delivers is impressively high, especially if you choose this enhanced readout mode.
You also have a huge range of codec options in the Fujifilm cameras. You can choose between internal ProRes, H264 and H265, either I frame only or Long GoP, as well as external ProRes Raw. For this project, after much testing comparing ProRes HQ with the H265 options I settled on H265 I frame only at 720mb/s. For me this gave the best balance of excellent 10 bit 4:2:2 image quality but with smaller files than I would have had with ProRes HQ. The camera records to either SD cards or CFExpress cards, there is one slot for each type of card and it can switch from one slot to the other as one fills up.
Also a big shout out to Nanlite and Prolight Direct for providing the lights for the shoot. I used a Nanlite 720B with a Nanlite PJB projector lens and gobo to create the shaft of light from the rear that is the main light source. There was a Nanlight FC-500B (really nice low cost bi-colour COB fixture) with a Fresnel lens providing some foreground fill light. To light the singer when she was sitting on the floor towards the rear I used another 720B with another projector lens and used the shutters to create a very small pool of light exactly where she was sitting. Then to add some interest to the otherwise black background I used 6x 4ft Pavotubes.
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