AV News 183 - February 2011
Audible Photography
Howard Gregory
You may well have spent many years in photographic societies learning all the
photographic tricks of the trade. You have learned from books, by attending
lectures and competitions, by chats over a cup of coffee, taking your own
pictures, or just generally moving in photographic circles, what makes a good
picture and how to take one. You can recognise faults, instinctively know what
to do to correct them and probably have a fair idea how to manipulate digital
images on your computer. In short, you have served your photographic
apprentiship.
Then along came AV with a whole new set of skills to learn, particularly on the
audio side. Just as you once had to learn how to view the world through a
photographer's eyes, you now have to learn how to listen to the world through a
sound recordist's ears. Audio may seem like a black art. Don't worry - every
photographic process has an equivalent in audio. Every photographic trick
you've ever learned has an equivalent trick in audio - and this CD is full of them.
The CD greatly speeds up the audio apprentiship process by showing how
remarkably similar audio and photographic processes are and how the affinity
you have developed for all aspects of photography can be transferred to audio.
The early sections go through the various photographic processes involved in
AV production and compare them to the similar audio processes. Later sections
reinforce the similarities by going a bit deeper, comparing problems and
comparing and demonstrating solutions, together with pictorial and audio
examples.
Whilst primarily intended to demonstrate the audio processes involved in
making high quality soundtracks, the way this is done also makes the CD a
valuable resumé of all the photographic steps and tricks useful in maximising AV
picture quality.
Topics discussed and illustrated are:
• Introduction.
• Comparison of photography and recording.
• Digital darkroom and digital studio processes.
• Setting up a digital darkroom and digital studio.
• Levels in histograms and in audio.
• Blurred pictures, muffled sound, sharpening and enhancing.
• Noise in pictures and recordings and what to do about it.
• Data loss in JPEG and mp3 and how to minimise it.
• Directing the audience's eyes and ears.
• Conclusion and what to do next.
In addition to soundbites, the dialogue is illustrated by pictures, graphics and
screen-grabs to show exactly what is going on. You can pause or go back to
listen to a bit again at any time.
Total running time of the 10 sections is 86 minutes. If your system will play
exe file AV sequences, this CD will run.
The cost is £6, plus 80p p&p and can be obtained from Howard Gregory
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