dealing with vagaries

Shooting still images with the Canon 5d Mark II is pretty fantastic. Shooting moving pictures with the Mark II is basically an extension of that, and equally cool. The only difference is that you have to figure out several different workarounds to make the camera fully functional as a high-def piece of film equipment.

By itself the Mark II isn’t stable enough for hand-holding moving images. It’s too light with too few points of contact to make for steady shots. The folks at Zacuto make precision pieces of rigging equipment that allow you to mount all the necessary ancillary pieces of gear (sound recorders etc.) while giving you a stabilized rig perfect for verite shooting. I cut this piece below to show some clips from a recent project I directed in Turkey as well as how I’ve set up the Mark II for seamless capture of moving imagery.

But as always – don’t forget the tools are just a means for realizing your vision.

Thanks to Zacuto for their support of my work! Full gear list below…

Visual Recording:
Canon 5D Mark II (x 2)
Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens
Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens
Canon 50mm f/1.2 lens
SanDisk Extreme CF cards

Audio Recording:
Tascam DR-100
-50db attenuated audio cable
SanDisk Extreme SD cards
Lectrosonics 100 wireless kits (x 2)
Schoeps CMIT5U shotgun
Sanken COS-11DBP Lav

Stabilizing Rig:
Zacuto Double Barrel rig
Z-Finder 3x magnification anti-fog viewfinder
Z-American V3 articulated arm
Miller 1643 Solo DV tripod

Post Processing:
2 x 1 TB Lacie Rugged Drives (1 mirrored drive)
MacBookPro
Final Cut Pro
Plural Eyes

If you find yourself lulling about Tuscany over the next few weeks looking for something to do, head over to FoFu Phot’art 2010 (The Fucecchio Foto Festival) in the beautiful Tuscan town of Fucecchio to see a print exhibition of my “China, Dreamt” work. The show will be up until November 7th.

More of China’s capital…

There are quiet moments of drift across every block of every city in every part of the world.  Distorted waves playing out across concrete sands.

Typing from the airport in Istanbul – about to trade kebabs for dumplings as I leave Turkey and fly direct to Beijing for another project there.  It’s been an intense time here in Turkey over the last couple of weeks – I’ve been shooting a film documentary.  Can’t share too many details now, but I’ve included some frame grabs from our project below.

Absolute thanks to everyone involved.

I would love to shake hands with whomever invented the line.  Point A to Point B – a restful tension, sharpstraightgeometry.

Underwater but on land.  Above Singapore but below the surface.

Just landed in Singapore for a few days to do a couple of talks for The National Geographic Channel. Made the jumps from LEX/DCA/IAD/LHR/SIN in one long, transcontinental streak, but at some point over the Smoky Mountains shot this image on the pocketable iPhone. I like the pixelation – in fact, it’s given me an idea for a new essay…

Check out this cool write-up in the Boston Globe A&E section on a group show my “Yichang, China” image is part of at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mark Feeney:

“Jeff Hutchens’s “Yichang, China’’ shows some orange peels on a car seat. That doesn’t sound very promising — or Chinese. But the moody expressivity of citrus on gray surface is both elegant and arresting. Hutchens’s handsome use of color reminds us just why oranges are called oranges…Hutchens makes the banal seem exotic…”.

Japan. And Japan.