TheGarage Tech Blog

I’ve been thinking about building a small photography/recording studio here in TheGarage so I can practice up on my portraiture skills and so I can have a set to film lead ins, transitions, and closings to my videos. Actually I’ve been thinking about this in depth for a couple of years now but it involves spending money so it languishes on the back burner. I could probably get a small set built on the cheap, but at a minimum I would need to buy some lighting gear, some additional audio gear, and condition the air.  What I would really like to have is a little spot in a strip center with two studio setups that I could use for my own projects and that I could also rent to others. All the infrastructure to stream to the Internet would be available of course as well as equipment for post-processing and printing.

I have a lot of ideas in this area but I don’t have the extra money laying around. The pundits are saying that for the amount of money in the “stimulus” bill and the resulting jobs, each job would cost about $260,000. Idiots. Give me $200,000 and I would create five jobs by the end of the year just with what I have going now. Notice how during the election both candidates sounded like the savior of small business and now all we hear is government spending and tax refunds to people who pay little or no taxes.

Anyway, I got off track. What I really wanted to mention in relation to the studio is that my Nikon D90 will shoot hi-def video using the new LiveView feature. That means I can shoot hi-def  with any of the lenses I have, which is a nice assortment, including a 10-20mm wide angle, a 70-300mm, and a 105mm macro.   And I suppose I could use the 50mm f1.8 at 3200 ISO in very low light conditions.  I need to record some hi-def at the extreme focal ranges, in low light,  and very close up to get an idea of just what the capabilities of the D90 are. I am not setup to do a lot of hi-def video editing, but I may need to get set up.