Some non-personal Scarlet-X holiday snaps.

[Les Hillis]

Visited some relatives interstate a couple of months back. It was winter-time, so the weather was very cold and windy and overcast for the most part. Went for a couple of drives along the coast and recorded some shaky hand-held Scarlet-X footage here and there, with the intention of maybe extracting some stills.

Camera was set up with just the 5" LCD, Hoodman and side-handle.

Used a Leica 135mm Tele-Elmar-M and a 50mm Summicron-M (not the newer APO one), along with a screw-on circular polarizer.

Kept the camera at 4096x2160, 24fps 1/48sec. Didn't want to shoot at 12fps by going 5K, and didn't care if there was a lot of motion blur. Adjusted the exposure with the lens aperture alone, not worried about maintaining any particular f-stop or depth of field.

Got back home and ran the footage through REDcine-X to do a basic white-balance and see what was there. Then loaded up the RG3/RC3 R3D's in a Premiere Pro CS6 timeline and started playing.

Just scrolled through and looked for whatever frames caught my eye. Re-scaling, cropping and re-composing as I saw fit. Didn't care how 'bad' or incorrect it looked, as long as there was something there that maintained my interest.

Adjusted the colours in a similar way, pushing things around, willing to go off on tangents if something caught my attention.

Ended up with a random variety of images. Thought I'd share some some of the less personal ones here.

 

[Les Hillis]

Some wallabies.



Looks a bit softer here than when seen in isolation in a photo-viewer.







This one was looking over at the one in the previous picture.


But didn't really seem fussed, more interested in grazing on the grass.

 

[Les Hillis]

I like the way elements can be abstracted with extreme zooms. There's something about the way the image starts to degrade that I really like too.





Same bird, same shot, but looking different.








Same bird, same shot again, but showing a translucent beak that looks kind of like wood in the previous shots.

 

[Les Hillis]

A girl looking for shells on the beach. These were all shot with the 135mm lens from quite a distance, could barely see the girl at the time. Was surprised when she turned up in the edit. That's Phillip Island in the background at left btw, famous for its Fairy Penguins and its motor racing.













Again, was really pushing the image degradation here, but it didn't seem to matter.

 

[Les Hillis]

Two more shots from the same beach.

 

[Les Hillis]

A different beach. Beautiful, exotic, downtown Frankston lol.

Some variations on the same frame. More examples of a look I like, that the MX sensor seems to generate when pushed past it's 'proper' limit.

Seem to have lost the pretensious black borders on some of these, hadn't noticed before.

 

[Les Hillis]

Tsunami.

 

[Les Hillis]

Water.



And rust.

 

[Les Hillis]

Pier textures, in black and white.









Is the water flowing past the pier?


Or is the pier walking through the water?


Silly question I know, but...

 

[Les Hillis]

Mostly the same thing, but in colour.

Bleeding rust.

 

[Les Hillis]

More extreme zooming, almost into another medium altogether.

In black and white.

 

[Les Hillis]

And in colour.

 

[Les Hillis]

Same pier. Melbourne city hidden in the distance behind the rain.








The city barely visible on the horizon. If you imagine the sign in the water is a railway sign, these shots look like the place has been flooded.

 

[Les Hillis]

This shot was all about the clouds.



This one was about the water.



This one was about both.






Probably too subtle a variation for the web. The epic sense of scale being diminished too.

 

[Les Hillis]

Caught some mantis-like light-pole creatures on the march too.

 

[Les Hillis]

Mornington wharf.





The colour here seems kind of old-fashioned somehow. And again some of the subtle variations lost on the smaller versions of these pictures.






These could be the most Leica-esque of the pictures I took on this trip.

 

[Les Hillis]

A strange underpass/tunnel just before Safety Beach.

In black and white.









And colour. It's painted in unusual colours and has mirrors(?) installed on one of the walls.



I like the way the cropping and forced perspective in this shot make it look like the road might be going vertical or in a loop.

 

[Les Hillis]

Some cargo ships drag-racing around Port Phillip Bay. Hard to capture the excitement of it, so I didn't even try. Going instead for a more atmospheric effect.







Hazy.






Lemony.



Too far-y.












Way too far-y.









Are you out of your freaking mind-y.


Like I said, was just rolling with it. I happen to like those colours, that was the only excuse I needed. And honestly, the blotchiness you can see in these web versions isn't there in the originals, there's a lot lost in translation here.

 

[Les Hillis]

 

[Les Hillis]

Not sure if these variations are just an example of chronic indecision or if it's a genuine attempt to show how many grading options there are using even the simplest of tools. At the end of the day it doesn't matter anyway. What matters is, once I realized the range of hills on the horizon looks like a giant tidal wave, I was never able to look at this picture the same way again. Scary.































And again, under better viewing conditions, there's a really nice photographic-looking sensor-noise/grain effect happening that's just being crushed here. Nevermind.