giulio sciorio at glazer's camera

It's been a long three weeks here in Dupont and JBLM. Tonight, on the day of my work's conclusion, I drove north to Glazer's Camera in downtown Seattle to participate in Giulio Sciorio's presentation on Hybrid Motion Street Photography.

Among the many hats that Giulio wears, one of them is the founder and chief driver of SmallCameraBigPicture.com. His primary interest is what he refers to as the hybrid aspect of contemporary digital photography, the blending of still and motion into the final visual product. His jam-packed two-hour talk tonight was an attempt to convey some of the techniques and tools he has discovered and developed, along with many examples.

The group was small and intimate, allowing Giulio to interact directly with every member of the audience. I'm not about to go over every detail of his talk,  partly because I don't understand it completely to accurately convey what he said, and partly because you should go to one of his presentations to fully appreciate what he has to say.

I did try out one of the techniques he mentioned right there in the audience, grabbing about 60 seconds or less of hand-held video and then editing it in Lightroom 5 at a later time to go along with a still of the subject. Quite frankly the video is horrible and doesn't do the subject justice due to my extremely rough execution. In particular I left the M.Zuiko 45mm on autofocus; you can see the E-M5 hunting when Giulio moved around in the frame. There's a lot of challenging learning I need to accomplish, such as: either I need to learn to put the lens on manual focus at a moment's notice (the inexpensive solution), or else spend more money on gear and get a manual focus lens. The problem with manual focus is setting it up at the right point so that the moving subject is in reasonable focus most of the time as they move around.

If nothing else the video serves as a video snapshot of how Giulio is in front of an audience, which is to say very good.

Giulio spoke to and demonstrated the tools available to the photographer to achieve hybrid motion street photography, and hybrid motion photography in general. You're no longer limited to just the PC and tools like Photoshop and Lightroom; the tools are now available on tablets and smartphones as well. And with the way that many cameras can interoperate directly with WiFi enabled tablets and smartphones, you can do your hybrid motion post processing on the spot, or just ship the photos directly to a service in the cloud and have the motion aspect handled automatically, such as with Google+'s Auto Awesome feature. Which just goes to show you can do more than shoot lame Instagram photos with your cellphone.

When you go to a presentation you can come away with two things; facts and far more importantly, motivation to use the facts you learned. I came away with a lot of both tonight. Thanks Giulio.

I'd like to thank Paula Thomas for alerting me to this presentation.

yes, it does rain in seattle

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This is posting 1,500.