CA's Great America 4th of July 2013

For this year's 4th of July festivities, we headed out to California's Great America. The only bummer was that there were no fireworks. They saved the fireworks for Friday and Saturday.

The last time I was at Great America was when it used to be owned by Paramount in the 90s until mid 2000. Not much has changed except for a few new rides and some of the same rides have different names since the ownership change. The Top Gun ride is now known as Flight Deck. Even though it's a suckier name, the ride itself is still one of the better rides. The latest ride is called Gold Striker. It't the fasted wooden coaster. We rode that first.

We just rode those two rides and the rest of the time we spent eating and playing games. I had to play the game where the worker guesses your age, weight or month of birth. I chose the age. Let's just say I won. Now Mooby has a new stuffed animal to gnaw on.

For the longest time we where checking out the ladder climb game. For sure you have to do some counter balancing. The worker guy makes it look so simple. None of us tried but we should have just to capture video of one of us failing.

If I was 16 again, I'd be all over this place with a season pass n what not... Overall good times that brought back some memories.

http://youtu.be/xdpv0GC5Uic

side note: I used the trusty Sony HDR SR-11. I was planning to shoot some stills but ended just shooting a bit of video. The last 2 night clips I used the gf2  with the 35mm 1.4. turned out ok.

Father's Day Weekend 2013

It's a pretty action packed weekend. My bro graduated this Saturday. He's already got a bachelors in kinesiology and now a degree as a physical therapy assistant. The graduates today had a ton of energy.

After the ceremony we went straight to the academy for our BJJ ceremony.

We each earned an additional stripe to our belts. Below is a pic of the adults and kids that attended. Great turnout. 

Time for a ton of grubbing tomorrow, Chinese food to be exact.  Happy Father's Day to all the fathers!!

Jiu Jitsu By The Bay 11: Island Combat

Our academy threw another great tournament this past weekend. We had around 500 competitors that competed in Gi and NoGi.

I had fun shooting the matches. I shot with my GF2 and the SLR Magic 35mm 1.4. I can't wait till the Panasonic G6 comes out. I'll have that as my main body.

I chose to use my manual lens for most of the shots because of the focal length ( I didn't want to get close enough to bother the competitors with my wide auto focus lens). A fast zoom lens with quick auto focus is typically better for these types of situations. I had a few miss focuses and some not intended motion blurred shots but most were good and got the job done.

After I get a good wide angle lens, a nice zoom lens would be great, preferably that expensive 12-35mm f28 constant aperture that Panasonic has.

I was able to get over 200 photos for this event. For future reference, I don't mind people using my photos but I'll start watermarking them as I shoot more of these types of events.


Here's a few of the images. Full set of images here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/apgfoo/sets/72157634053608815/

Sergio raffling off a Wii for kids who placed.

Team Mongolia brought a strong team this weekend.

I didn't do much video for the tournament. It's very difficult to shoot a ton of stills and get a ton of video at the same time. It can be done but I think once I get a bit more efficient I'd have an easier time. 

Behind The Scenes with Wen's Short Film May 2013

The long haired gentleman named Wen has been working on his short film that will premiere the last day of his class this Saturday May 25th. This first set of pictures are from his 1st day of shooting. Things went well. 

Wen and his group of friends are very ambitious in their film making interests. Expect to see more projects from them in the future. Most likely another project this summer before Wen heads to Cal State Long Beach for the Fall. 

Pics below are from Wen's latest day of shooting. 

Me going back to the shaved head look(thank the almost summer heat for that). I play a bad guy in Wen's film and I have a line. Although I can't make it to the premiere, I hope to catch his flick before then to see my little acting debut lol. 

Wen's experienced a ton of obstacles shooting this film and I'm glad I'm not going through it again ha!

Francheska's Cowgirl B-Day

For Francheska's 8th birthday, she had a cowgirl themed party at the house. Themed parties are awesome. I haven't been to many when I was younger but it's a great way to have fun and play dress up.

The kids had a ton of activities like a scavenger hunt, potato sack races, and a pin the moustache on Cheska game going on and of course with lots of prizes.

It was a bit windy that day as it has been almost all week but that didn't stop anyone from enjoying the sun and hanging out.

Here's a few pix and videos from the party.  

I should have shot more stills with the 20mm. Very fun and capable lens.

Seems like because of song choice, the vid may not be playable on a mobile device but works on a desktop/laptop. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuPbdMpanOk
https://vimeo.com/64179646

Side Notes:

Lighting was inconsistent which made it difficult to set my exposure each time before recording. Especially difficult since the GF2 doesn't have manual ISO in video which also accounts for slight flicker in some shots. Used a fixed ND filter outdoors with the SLR Magic 35mm 1.4 in order to keep aperture wide in bright conditions. A variable ND filter would have suited much better in this situations.

Focusing was a lot easier this time around with the SLR Magic since I've been using it for a while now. Even the slight focus hunting I do is smooth and natural looking. My hand held pan shots are smoother now as well. No jarring movements. all shots were hand held 

I was going to use my Zoom H1 for sound but it would have been tedious to sync audio manually. I'm thinking of getting PluralEyes to make it less daunting and so I'd be more apt to use the external recorder. Nonetheless, the in cam stereo mic was solid. 

I had a few stuttering cuts in the vid but not sure exactly why. Possibly due to too many effects in a clip or maybe the video format I used to edit. We'll see. 

I didn't really need titling for this video but for future reference, I gotta play around with creating cooler titles. 

I didn't adjust color. All I did was use RGB curves to make highlights brighter n low lights darker a bit. Also I'll try to get my hands on Magic Bullet Looks or Colorista so I'd be more inclined to color correct/grade.

2 things on my wishlist is a good 12mm and a 2nd body so I can permanently affix my 20mm onto my GF2 and another lens like the SLR Magic onto a GH3 or possibly a GX2 whenever that will be out. This will allow for quicker and more efficient shooting.

All in all, fun video to edit. 

Color Grading Practice

Even though I've taken a couple video editing courses, we didn't spend too much time on color correction and color grading. What time like the present to learn how to do it on my own. 

On YouTube I'm subscribe to http://www.youtube.com/user/OliviaTechVideos. One of her videos asks her viewers to color grade a video clip so I decided to try it out. 

I watched a couple YouTube tutorials on color correcting using RGB curves and started playing with color on Premiere CS6. I've never used it till today and it's awesome. I've edited in the past with PowerDirector(limited at color correction) at home and FCP 7 and 10 in school. 

My grading turned out how I like it, with the blacks super crushed. 

After getting more familiar with the Premiere interface, I gotta work on my cousin's GoPro clips that he took while he was on vacation!

Another New Year

I was thinking of going out out for New Year's Eve but I've been feeling a bit under the weather for the past few days but was able to hang out at my friend's parents place. Took some pics of Evelyn. She's really adorable. She had enough energy to stay past midnight!

I really like this shot even though I slightly missed focus