Tag: video

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Videos Lie

There’s little to match the potential incrimination of video footage. A camera sensor cannot lie; it offers a view so much more objective than the darts of our biased theorizing eyes as they read scenes and situations by projecting out a lifetime of fears and expectations.

The camera is a grid of light-sensitive pixels that has no opinion either way. Imagine a court case where one word against another is the order of the day, until late in the day a snippet of CCTV footage comes to light that exposes one of the parties in raw honest frames.

Social platforms have embraced the video format. Facebook crams your newsfeed with the cute, the curious, and the crazy, recorded on whatever is to hand.

No matter the scene, no matter the location, if there are people present, there’s probably a recording. When we hear of an incident now we immediately want to see the footage. Many ‘news’ sites package up the footage, bookend it with stock intros, and stuff the rest of the page with advertising. Jaded web users will tend to do two things: block all ads, and get to the source. There’s just too much noise in the signal.

The bandwagons mobilize so fast, keyboard warriors, torches fuelled, scanning the video with that highly adapted mind. When it comes to videos of people, every gesture and expression are read almost instantly, intentions measured in a millisecond somewhere behind our eyes, filtering through into a proposition (of guilt or innocence) and a cool wind or warm blast of anger.

But, how much faith should we put in a video? Is it enough to hang-draw-quarter, or vilify freely in the comments box?

An example from sport

The 2015 All Ireland Semi-final between Dublin and Mayo was a tense, tight, physical game. Tackles were hard and scuffles broke out repeatedly. At one point it appeared that the Dublin defender Philly McMahon gave Mayo’s Aidan O’ Shea a headbutt. Here’s the footage:


Exhibit A: No buts about it, McMahon headbutts Aidan O’Shea

The video was a big hit in the post-match chatter.It clearly shows intentional head thrusting, even if it is light and doesn’t seem to do any damage.

Aidan O’Shea himself confirmed that he was indeed headbutted: http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/aidan-o-shea-yeah-i-was-headbutted-alright-1.2334160

Calls were made for the head of McMahon, or at least a ban for the replay.

A day later, another angle appeared.


Exhibit B: BUT, McMahon’s head simply falls against Aidan O’Shea’s face

From this new angle, a very different interpretation is allowed: McMahon was slightly off balance and was carried into O’Shea by accident. There seems to be no intentional movement forwards, only a falling movement.

Now, it is still possible to argue intent, or, even without the second video, argue none. Either way, the confidence of our quick judgements made on the basis of a single video, or even two, needs to be qualified.

Of course, Aidan O’Shea would hardly have been in a position to see the event clearly, and both videos are consistent with his view that a headbutt happened, but without the intent seemingly shown in the Exhibit A video, it simply doesn’t matter.

Our brains are designed to make really fast calls about the intentions of others. This rapid judge-respond action may be rational and useful in many circumstances, but is it a good approach when there are so many spaces to vent and comment and bicker and chant?

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The Mountain Man Band: Live Music Video (Canon 70D, Sigma 18-35 f1.8)

Kennedy’s Bar, Galway, July 2015, during the Galway Arts Festival.

But this isn’t the official Arts Festival. This is the low budget tagalong sibling, raised on handmedowns and shorn of ‘big’ names: the Galway Fringe Festival. Smaller venues, smaller fuss, more variety: trade your big top tent and big-rig logistics for a dark backbar stage where the hit-and-miss of the up-and-coming brew their storms?

The Mountain Man band kick up a big swell for a two-piece outfit. Born and raised in the wild west of Ireland with Gaelic as language no. uno, they nonetheless rock up a bluesyriff thick sound that seems to have done a few laps of the US and come back for a holiday… or a vacation, depending on your ken.

Baby Please Don’t Go

I stuck my Zoom H2n on a stool near the stage, where it decided to nosily listen in on ambient bar chatter, but obliged to also notice the stage output fair square (I had to push out the audio’s intro to avoid a man loudly saying “Red wine is the worst” just as the guitar starts to get into its groove). I started to record, then after a minute the Canon runs into that beloved error: MEMORY CARD FULL
Unsure of whether or not I had definitely definitely uploaded everything lately to the laptop from the jammed 16Gb card, I began to delete old photos, cursing myself for not being thorough. Come next song, I hit record again.

Baby, Please Don’t Go, is a standard so standard that its origins are as smoky as an Irish bar at 2am before the smoking ban. You might know it from Lightnin’ Hopkins, or Van Morrison and Them, or Big Joe Williams, or John Lee Hooker. The Mountain Man Band hit it from the pre-Them slower tempo, but via a moody-muddy electric direction. It’s laid back and jagged.

Now don’t you call my name, you got me way down here, on a ball and chain

Guitarist and vocalist, Declan Keane, has spent a long time working on getting good tones. For this track, he used a De Armond M75T guitar (humbucker pickups), paired with a Laney VC30 210 amp, played through the clean channel (tones low, mid/bass raised a few notches) via a Boss BD-2 pedal providing some overdrive crunch.

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I had the Canon 70D stuck at ISO 1600, and the Sigma at 1.8 in Av, and used a focusing ‘trick’* to get a focused shot or two, and did but a quick edit in Windows Movie Maker for the video. Movie Maker didn’t quite play ball, though, and after exporting had managed to unsync the audio and video tracks slightly. A few tweaks and exports later and… same thing.

I ran the photos through Lightroom, and levels that I had been trying out of late. The temperatures of lights in a gig need some kind of ‘interpretation’; I never really take to how the camera handles them first.

Listen to more of The Mountain Man Band here: http://themountainmanband.com/music.html

To do them justice I should have captured their original songs; maybe ‘Move to the City’ or the lean and mean ‘I Swore’.

I swore that I’d never leave you; you swore that you’d never break my heart

Them’s the blues indeed…


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random tip #106
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* (How to get shots at f1.8 and slow shutter speeds in low low light with Sigma 18-35 when the autofocus is meh)

  • Turn on Live View
  • Tap screen to focus and shoot (this must be enabled): this gives better accuracy than standard AF at f1.8! (on my gear anyway, based on mine own tests)
  • Switch to Manual focus withough lowering the camera (or changing the subject/camera distance)
  • Switch off Live View
  • Shoot a bunch of photos in continuous mode, being as still as possible (no IS on this lens)
  • Delete the crap, keep the good uns (the ones you like, not necessarily the sharpest!)