If you’ve been following my blog for a little while, you probably saw the post about my friend Nick Dong’s art installation at the Renwick Gallery (the Smithsonian Museum of American Arts and Crafts). At that shoot, Nick shot a quickie video of the piece using his point-n-shoot camera. The video quality was somewhat disappointing. He’ll be back in town tomorrow for the exhibit opening, and I’ll be going over to the gallery after hours to shoot video, which I hope to post here when I have it edited. Nick’s need for a video of the installation, plus several personal projects I have in mind (some instructional videos on platinum printing, a Kickstarter funding request, and some artist interviews at Glen Echo Photoworks).

I’m still learning my way around the camcorder – a Canon Vixia HF G10. The touch-screen controls are fairly intuitive, and they get easier the more you play with it and start learning the control layout, but certain things being buried in touch-screen menus is frustrating to someone coming from analog still photography where all the controls are exposed all the time as knobs, buttons or dials. At least this one does have a nice fat manual-focus control ring right around the lens, making it easy to pull focus, and the zoom speed is easy to manage as well. You can vary the zoom speed from almost-imperceptible to WHAM! in a fluid manner instead of having just two or three zoom speeds.