Last night I did some consulting for a friend and then came home for a frosty beer. Looking at the half-full, unused Hefeweizen keg, I figured I might as well try fixing it, as I’ve known it’s been leaking for two weeks. I pulled the bad valve post and tried replacing the whole thing with one from my spare shorty keg, but of course it’s a different thread size. Then I remembered I had spare poppet valve stems, swapped the old with a fresh one, reinstalled it, and pressure tested it. It’s holding pressure finally! there’s a lot to be said for stocking spare parts.

I’m in love with the Canon f/1.4 lens we have at work, and I’ve been casually looking at inexpensive alternatives for the Nikon DX gear I’ve got. Most of Nikon’s really sharp AF-S glass is >$300, which is more than I’d like to spend, but it would be great to have a fully automatic lens if that’s what I’m going to pay. I have a 50mm f/1.8 lens which was inexpensive and works great; they make a 50mm f/1.4 for ~$300, but I like the 28-35mm range from a shooting standpoint. Nikon offers a 35mm f/1.8 prime for $200 which would be perfect, and my brother-in-law has one that I’ll have to borrow sometime to try out.

Nikon also made a bunch of razor-sharp manual prime lenses back in the day, an f/1.4 and an f/1.2, which are both compatible with my DX gear. I’m toying with the idea of buying one of the f/1.4s from eBay, if I can get the price down low enough, just to see what it’s like. One of my photographer friends says the local camera shop usually carries a few used copies, so I’ll have to ring them up and see what they’re charging. The f/1.2 is another matter entirely. It routinely sells for ~$300 on eBay, which is a lot of coin for a manual lens but I do see some examples for cheap here and there. I’ll just set up a Craigslist alert and wait it out.

A rough count on our YouTube page shows I’ve shot at least eight finished videos this year. Most of them are simple one-camera setups, which are pretty easy to bang out at this point. Now I’m learning about multi-cam editing in preparation for editing the Forest project videos I shot a while back.

I made a breakthrough on Tuesday after a few weeks of gridlock. I’d shot tons of footage and struggled with exactly how to start piecing it all together. At first I got hung up on the technical challenge of syncing everything together, adding B-roll, and timing it all. Then I realized I didn’t even know what I had, so I stepped way back and started cutting out the junk footage to where all I had was their answers, assembled in rough order. Using this method, I cut rough reels for two subjects and sketched out a workflow.

Then I installed Final Cut Pro on my home machine Tuesday evening so that I can keep working in my spare time, and set up a portable drive to move the project and all its files back and forth. I’m definitely enjoying this.