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Overhead Camera Rigs


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As we have a lot of keyboard players on the MPN forums, this seems like the perfect place to ask this. Do you have an overhead camera rig for shooting how-to-play or synth tutorial videos? If so I'd love to hear a description of what you did and see a picture.

 

One issue when shooting straight down is, you can't use too wide-angle a lens or else you get bow distortion. This is partly because keyboard instruments are a lot wider than they are deep, so parallel lines that show up not parallel are pretty disruptive to the image. So you have to get far away enough to use something like a 50mm prime lens. If shooting straight down that's, like, the ceiling. (I've also used the trick of placing a keyboard at a near-vertical angle on one of my Jaspers stands and using a tripod, but when we get into heavy 88s, this makes me nervous.)

 

Bruddas like Ed Diaz have this impressively nailed, with trusses mounted across their ceiling to hang lights and cameras, and I think I might knuckle down and go this route. But I"ve got a lot more in common with Bob Moog than Bob Vila, so curious to see what DIY solutions people have cooked up.

Stephen Fortner

Principal, Fortner Media

Former Editor in Chief, Keyboard Magazine

Digital Piano Consultant, Piano Buyer Magazine

 

Industry affiliations: Antares, Arturia, Giles Communications, MS Media, Polyverse

 

 

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This is not my area of expertise, as I frequently try and distort my wide angle views.

 

However, if you looked for a wide angle lens that was rectilinear, that would help quite a bit. For instance, you would probably look for rectilinear lens such as the ones used by real estate photographers, who obviously need to keep straight lines in their photography. I do use a rectilinear lens, an Irix 15mm f/2.4, but I don't have the same considerations you do and cannot evaluate it properly in that context.

 

The other way to go would be to find a tilt-shift lens, which is commonly used in real estate and architectural photography.

 

These are links I found online that might help, or at least help point you in the right direction along with what I've mentioned. I noticed that while none of them appear to mention the Irix lens, they do mention the Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8, which is a fantastic lens that I use all the time. If you are not using it at 15mm and are instead using it with a longer focal length, I do know that it has very little distortion, and what little there is can be easily corrected.

 

https://filtergrade.com/full-frame-lenses-real-estate-photography/

https://medium.com/slr-lounge/the-best-lens-for-real-estate-photography-48a11858c76f

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Great topic.

 

Ed Diaz's rig is great but he has literally built truss / cage system in his house for this rig. Amazing but not practical for me. I've just ordered a heavy C-stand with a boom arm, counterweight and ball head. I'll keep you posted with my progress.

 

In webinars, I've been using an iPhone 6 for overheads and honestly it has been pretty good as far as distortion and field of view.

-Mike Martin

 

Casio

Mike Martin Photography Instagram Facebook

The Big Picture Photography Forum on Music Player Network

 

The opinions I post here are my own and do not represent the company I work for.

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I've done some videos with an iPhone SE 2020, which has a pretty good camera, and it looks astonishingly good. I've been using this for Photofocus videos, mounting it on a microphone stand.
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  • 4 weeks later...

Here is a picture of what I used recently.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CIYE7xIhcmo/

 

I bought a Neewer C-stand (about $150), some stand bags as a precaution to keep it from tipping. My camera mounted on its ball head on the end of the boom arm. As shown in that picture I wasn't getting all 88 keys but I had room to go higher and it would have been fine.

-Mike Martin

 

Casio

Mike Martin Photography Instagram Facebook

The Big Picture Photography Forum on Music Player Network

 

The opinions I post here are my own and do not represent the company I work for.

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A C-Stand is presumably similar to an Atlas-style stand? And you are just using a regular ball head? That's pretty great.
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Rectilinear wide angle lenses are available.

They are usually not inexpensive.

 

If one had several videos ready to shoot in a single day, one could rent the lens when needed and hope the videos pay for the lens rental.

 

You'd have to shoot an awful lot of reasonably successful videos to pay for the lens outright.

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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A C-Stand is presumably similar to an Atlas-style stand? And you are just using a regular ball head? That's pretty great.

 

Yes a regular ball head. C stand - apparently originally called a "Century Stand". Extremely common for lighting rigs.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-stand

 

They're quite HEAVY compared to other stands and there are a variety of ways to attach cameras..etc to them.

-Mike Martin

 

Casio

Mike Martin Photography Instagram Facebook

The Big Picture Photography Forum on Music Player Network

 

The opinions I post here are my own and do not represent the company I work for.

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