Welcome to Hunting Photons, a blog dedicated to hobbyist filmmaking. Plenty of web destinations exist that cater to indie filmmakers or professional videographers, but none seem to really target regular people with a passion for cinema.
Sure, like many will recite ad nauseum, film is primarily about the story and gear is secondary. In general, that is true. Gear will not magically create a great film and plenty of good short films have been made with lackluster equipment, but for the filmmaking enthusiast, the gear makes up a large part of the experience and for me, a gadget addict, adds to the excitement of making a short film. Better equipment leads to higher video and audio quality, which in turn allows viewers to take the work more seriously and throw away expectations that what they are watching is just a glorified home video.
Like I said, you could use an iPhone to make your movie, but I prefer to tackle new and exciting equipment, attempting to emulate techniques used in mega-budget Hollywood blockbusters with relatively affordable gear and a minimalistic crew.
In the early days of this blog, I'll explore some of the basic gear needed to get started, first looking at cameras and video gear and then moving to the often neglected, but equally or even more important, audio gear. While it's impossible for me to test every camera, audio recorder, and microphone under the sun, I will discuss the gear I have and gear recommended by people in the film industry (if it's good enough for them, it's probably good enough for me, right?).
So the short of it is that this is a blog focusing on the gear and technical aspects of high-end amateur filmmaking, from shooting to editing to final product and all the cameras, mics, computers, and Blu-ray burners in between.
