Juhanis Blog

This was interesting. Snake River Prototyping release rig to underwater filming. The tray is machined aluminum and it has several connection points.

There are in the market other also. Some of them have lights like Sartek, Noctural lights, Tecdiving

I made post from Snake River Prototyping flat lens fix, although there are now similar ones like Backscatter, the snake river is still the one of the most interesting ones. I currently own two snake river flat ports and have been very happy with them. Actually I participated to the Eilat Red Sea Underwater competition only using GoPro cameras. Well, I did not won anything, I was still very happy to the quality of the pictures that I got from there. In all those pictures I used Snake River Prototyping BlurFix flat port with attached SWCY or CY filters. The color filters makes big difference in underwater because otherwise the it will easily clip the red from the video material totally and no post prosessing will get that back.

What I find interesting in the the tray as the called is there are so many possibilities to attach the camera. The only worry I have is that as the camera is attached front of the handles is similar as you would hold the camera with stick, even with both hands. I hope that I will have a change to test it. I would like to make some comparison then between the rigs that I have and theirs. For travellers like me this will be at least very interesting because of the simple design and as it very light(1.7 lbs/0.8kg) and that is including the camera.

The introductory price is 129.99 $, and it seems that the final price will be 150$

Here is their example video using the tray and some color filters

Information from the tray

I just wanted to inform interesting solution that Snake River Prototyping is offering. Their solution is small metal that will replace the original holder of the lens from GoPro housing. This solution makes possible to attach basically any 55mm filter in front of the lens. In most cases this is not so important but as underwater you easily lose your reds without external light. Some of these filters makes possible to boost up those reds and got nice video even without lights. Sadly this is only for single cameras, not for 3D housing. I have one that I need to test, but currently waiting for better waters…

I participated at June to Mallorca workshop that was organized by Philip Bloom, Nino Leitner and Sebastian Wiegärtner.
Although the time was limited for only 3 days, I still learned a lot. Mostly about working in team and
how videography is in the end totally different word that photography.

Our team shooed this video in one day and edited it in second day.

I had my underwater housing with me of course and used that for those underwater shots. Still in our team case the most time consuming was the figure out some idea for the movie, and of course the idea changed a lot during the workshop. The best option would have been to have ready made script that we only need to shoot it and decide more of the artistic side.
Then we would had missed totally the the whole process of making the movie. That’s why I will be concentrating on the stories more from now on.

The place was of course excellent had got really nice memories from that. Still I have to say that the biggest
gain from that was the people. Nothing compares to that of having whole group of similar people with the same passion.

I have had the new housing for just couple months and did small test in June.

I have had very busy with work so not much doing blog, let’s try do more of that.

Anyway I had change to make small 3D video during my workshop with Philip Bloom, Nino Leitner and
Sebastian Wiegärtner.

The camera still seems to be skipping some frames in timelapse mode so it means that it goes out of sync in longer timelapses.
I had to manually remove these extra frames to get them somehow sync. Still there remains a few frames that are not in sync between left and right.

The conversion to 3D footage is not easiest to use, and sometimes crashes, it still relative easy.

This film was edited using Adobe Premiere CS5 and I actually was using the Cineform plugin that comes with the Neo SW.

In the end, very nice housing, but lacking underwater possibility because of the out of focus problem that is actually now in the 3D housing as well.

This video was originally started by wanting to participate Moby’s music video competition but they didn’t accept this. The idea of behind this was to express feelings of leaving my social cat at home always.

It started about year ago but this year I figured out that I have some kind of allergy for the cat so I had to let him go. I’m currently more and more away from home so I trust he is now better in his new home.

When Moby added his original version of "Wait for me" song to the MobyGratis, I decided to re-edit it and upload it. I love the song. Most of the clips are shooed year ago, only one this year.

Maybe get some pointers to make it better.

Music is licenced from MobyGratis.com and it’s the song called "Wait For Me"

My Athens trip turned out very nicely, although I do feel bit sad of economic situation of Greece. So I do feel that There is something that I can do. For my it was no nice to see good people struggling on several jobs just to get so income. Special thanks goes to  Aqua Divers Club that picked me up from the center of Athens and took me to their dive center just to make two dive and I was the only customer diving. The dive center is located about 35km from center of Athens. We ended up misunderstanding of the second day scuba diving and I missed the underwater car cemetery, but then again that day was raining all day so somehow I don’t think missing so much. Also special thanks to Virve who lives currently there and showed me the city.

Scuba diving was actually very nice in the Greece. The equipment’s were very good shape and the water was clear. Although there are not so much live in the sea as like red sea has but at least comparing to Finland, well almost everything is better There are parts of my video from it. They are filmed with GoPro HD heroes, I’m starting to love these small cameras.

In the city there are lot of cultural activities but somehow I didn’t end up watching those, because somehow I have learn that where ever I go. I’m more interested of the people and what they do. Athens is a big city, people are very busy. Day to day jumping from bus to metro is not for me in long term but for a while it’s ok.

Nowadays it seems that where ever I go, I end up shooting pictures and video. They are different way of expressing oneself and don’t exclude each other.

You can find my portfolio from Athens here.

And what comes to video, It’s filmed mostly with GoPro cameras, but there are used Canon 5Dmk2 with Canon 100/2.8L Is macro as well. You just can’t do all with GoPro cameras.

I was visiting at my friends at Brasov, Romania and decided to make my first video only using my mobile phone. The phone is Nokia N8. The lightness of the phone made it difficult to make stabilized video even I had my manfrotto travel steady cam with me. The time lapses was still successful for my opinion.

Programs I used

• Adobe Premiere Pro CS5(Main Editor)
• Adobe After Effects CS5(for stabilization of some footage)
• Adobe Lightroom 3.3(Data manage and Timelapses)
• Neat Video Plugin(for reduce noise)

Edit: I forgot to tell how to Interpret the footage before adding to timeline. So basically you need to interpret the footage if your framerate is showing like 500 frames per second. So select all video clips and select modify-> interpret footage and write frame rate to 25 frames per second in Europe at least. In US you might need to use 30 frames per second.

I had my GoPro attachments that I used to attach my mobile phone to tripods, suction cup and steady cam. The program I used in the phone for time lapses was FastMotion that I bought from OVI store.

My Mobile phone custom Rig

Tripod attachement

Tripod in use

Suction cup(GoPro)

Suction Cup in Use

I was traveling in Australia and New Zealand for a month, taking pictures and shooting 3D videos with my rig. This started my project to get one short film from every city I visited. This is the video I made in Sydney.

After the airplane, next scenes are filmed in Hyde Park and in there I met Michael from Germany. He is the bicyclist that told me that where ever he goes, bike comes with him.

After Hyde Park the next scene are from shopping mall and another park following scenes.

Just next to Sydney Opera house there was these music artist with didgeridoo. I really liked his music, bough one CD and filmed him a bit. I also got permission to use his music in my video.

After that scene there is the strange person that I don’t know what he was doing, but as far as I understand he tried to earn some money to start some kind of religion. He had lost his foots in somehow.

The beach is Bondi beach.

In the end Sydney was kind of nice place for as a metropolis.