Originally Posted by
ericantonio
One of the reasons why I buy less than ideal stuff, is that I've mentioned before, I worked with A LOT of 8x10s back in the 80's. These were studio settings. Imagine working at a garage and using house tools. Not so great shape, and you got to do what you got to do. I've learned a lot of these guys makeshift, DIY (before DIY was a real term I guess) on how to get stuff working.
What I've learned:
1. Tape anything that can and will fall off (you may be working with a camera that you are not familiar with)
2. A-clamp that flatbed so you don't get "creep" focus especially with working with tabletop setups
3. Make you own gobos
3. Make your own lightstands with old paint can, a 1X piece of wood, and an quickcrete
4. Tape the legs to the studio floor, someone will eventually trip on it
5. Tape all the extension cords to the floor
6. Tape the tops of 8x10 film holders, most of the time, the locking thing is broken off and nothing worse than handing a holder to someone only for the slide to come loose. Oops.
7. when in doubt, ductape the connections on tripods too. These are old, not yours, belongs to the studio and has seen some sh**, so tape it
Most of these guys are working on 2 or 3 tabletop or room sets and going back and forth so they absolutely positively can't have anything move, fall, tripped on (me!, that eric assistant is always tripping on stuff!) while going back and forth different set ups. Usually my job is to set up, make everything rigid and not move, and he'll move from set to set. If he thinks is good, I'll take a bunch of light readings, take the shot while he is working on next set. It then gets processed inhouse lab (yah, we had a E6 lab in house) and then look and determine the wratten filter to be used. And the filters, hahahah, I kid you not, we taped them on right in front of the lens.
All these I learned cause they need to get the shot, get paid, and buy booze. Priorities man. Not like the studio is gonna buy new holders or a new tripod head. It'll be "ummm work with what you got, it still works".
And it works, and I've seen our work in magazine, boxes, billboards, galleries. And I can remember heck! The shutter on that lens wasn't even working and we had to do 30 pops on the speedotron.
I guess my rule of thumb is "make it work dumdum"
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