Leaderboard

It is tough, very tough, even now most of my well paying clients are repeat clients; I do a ton of one hit wonders like headshots, photo studio work, etc. but repeat business and word of mouth is the real secret. Of course that is the photography side of things. For video many of my customers started with photography and eventually needed video then kept coming back to me for both. My particular video niche is big events (boat races, car shows, food festivals, fashion shows, etc). That niche in turn spawns tons of side projects (photo shoots, promo videos, talking heads, training videos, etc. etc). So if I were starting over right now today I would just Google events in my area and start going to them and filming them for free. I have a branded shirt with my business name on it, I also have business cards, and I would wear my shirt and pass my cards out literally everywhere. I would shoot entire highlight reels of the events, really focus on handing out my business cards to the vendors and try to figure out who the organizers were. If I could work my way up to the organizers and main sponsors I would offer to tag them on IG and FB when the video and photos were out and give them my business cards which would ensure they saw my work. I would give it less than 3 months of that before I started having sponsors, organizers, and event attendees reaching out to me for photos and video. Within about 6 months in a reasonably large city I would have my whole network built back up. I keep stressing photography because in my niche it is so important. So many people contact me for photography and they never even considered video until I recommend it. One thing leads to another and next thing you know I've been working with that client for years. Events are also great because they are recurring year after year so that is repeat business if you work for the main sponsor or the event organizers. Almost all of my business comes from these events, people at these events are getting married (they need wedding videos), they are having kids (birthday party videos / gender reveals, etc.), they run their own business (business promo videos, product demos, etc needed), etc. etc., I shoot a ton of small stuff thanks to these events. To this day if I haven't handed out 500 cards at an event that I am filming then I am not doing it right. I never let up on the networking because events, sponsors, and attendees come and go each year so relying too heavily on any one of them for revenue the next year is a recipe for failure if they don't host or sponsor that event the next year. Of course my approach only works in a large city or somewhere where you can easily drive to a large city. Where I live I could literally shoot nearly any type of event I wanted on any given weekend (sports, food festivals, music festivals, races, fashion shows, etc.). I once shot a live concert for a customer that needed a city activities promo video and ended up shooting a music video for the band because I gave them my card after the concert. I have also had plenty of offers to work directly for the sponsors on their media team but I like being freelance, after working literally everything for the past 10yrs I am not interested in joining a team; but if that is your thing that could be the way into a more predictable career field.

2 days ago, hearing about the tragic death of Ben Kweller's son (very sad news indeed - Ben almost died from monoxide carbon intoxication when rising to success, stopped his career for 9 years, and was just coming back to form, and is a very gentle guy), I remembered that I shot videos from some song in his Rio's concert in 2012 with a Vivitar Series 1 105mm f/2.5 Macro made by Kiron. Never used it as a macro, but as a tele...maybe is the sharpest old lens that I have, tied with the Contax-Zeiss 135mm f/2.8. In fact, is so sharp that it looks like a modern lens. Got it for around US$90, with original box, just returned from CLA - it is pristine, without a single dust spec, to this day. Good times. This was the video - GH2 with Sanity hack, no Ibis or manual focus aids. Vimeo dropped the resolution to 720p, the original file is much sharper. Another remembering - the GH2 mics were superb, the audio is from the on board mics, only with a little EQ. And all my thoughts to Ben - after this gig he spent hours talking with the fans, taking photos, always with a smile in his face. Hope that that smile returns soon.

Yeah, if it was because of phase detect you'd think it would impact every picture profile. I can't imagine it won't be fixed in a firmware so that the standard profiles at least get the same performance as V-Log. If it isn't something they can fix then shame on Panasonic.

I don't think the issue is Phase Detect because V-Log on the S5II (while sharper than before) has not the insane sharpening and chroma noise reduction that the standard profiles have. Moreover, nor my A7III and IV smooth details like this at low ISO and yet they use Phase detect. There are just bad processing going on internaly on the standard profiles with the S5II.

Just out of interest, why do you need to shoot 8K on a phone?

Very disappointing, the smoothing and sharpening are part of what we're trying to avoid by shooting on a "real" camera! I hope they've addressed this in firmware by the time my S5IIX comes in.

The 6K Pro is a vastly better pick-up-and-go camera than the 4K – decent internal battery life, EVF, tilting screen, NDs, better in the hand. So in that way, it's more fun. I gotta say though, I went the opposite way. Blackmagic pocket cams to Sony mirrorless. I'm having way more fun now lol.

The way 2.7K is derived from 5.5K sensor produces severe aliasing, and no AI superscaling can hide that.

The GoPro Hero 11 already has the highest resolution 240 fps, at 2.7K of any camera. Almost all other cameras of any price limit 240 fps to 1080. 2.7K has twice the resolution of 1080. DaVinci Resolve Studio has a feature that enables super scaling resolutions to higher values using AI. Going from 2.7K to 4K requires a doubling of resolution. So, how does 2X superscaled 4K 240P look to get 8X slow motion? Here's a 4K test:

Looks very organic to me 🙂