[There were a couple of issues with our screen capturing, so we have to apologize for some parts of the clip being a bit weird at times.]

David Dvir

When I buy a necessary items of equipment, like a camera, I like to think of it not as a piece of technology, but something that helps make my business run. I have a studio which I pay a constant rent for. I also renovated the location which cost me a decent amount, but when I think of my rent, I don’t include the cost of the renovation, just the monthly fee. Cameras should be seen in the same light. Yes I paid around $5K for my D3s two years ago. But I won’t be holding on to it if I buy a D4. Why would I? I’m going to sell it. I’ll probably receive around $4K for it and I’ll have to cover another $2K and change myself. This hike in price is also unusual as most replacement bodies come in at around the same price as their predecessor was when it was new. Normally, you’d need to cover about 20-25% of the cost of the camera if you sold your old one.

This, folks, is how we justify these purchases. It’s not that we’re simply dropping $6K happy-go-lucky styles. We’re continuing our “rent”. This difference in price is the rent we pay for our cameras. Yes we did put down a lot at some point, but forget about that. That investment is gone and you won’t be needing to recreate again. From now on, you need to put aside about $50, maybe $75 each month and you’ll be able to replace a D3s, or a D4 relatively easily. This camera rent will keep me and my company up to date with technologies for the foreseeable future. I even enjoy thinking that new technologies will be available and I’ll only have to drop 20% of the asking price in order to play with it myself.

For anyone on the fence about buying new gear, or any gear for that matter, I think it’s important to keep this notion in mind. You’ll have to make an initial investment. But when it comes time to upgrade you won’t be looking at reinvesting that same amount. The world of up-to-date gear may not be as scary as you once thought. And also keep in mind that the launch of the D4 means plenty of D3s’ and D3′s on the used market. Which likely means an increase in D700′s and D300s’, too. The circle of life goes on… enjoy my horrific drawing.

Thanks for reading,

Dave Dvir

Dave Dvir

Dave

Congrats to the winners, if you’re one of them be sure to contact us at contests@2dhouse.com

See you next time!

Dave

So we decided to work on an underwater photoshoot.  We also thought we’d make a behind the scenes video for the shoot but with a less common addition.  We wanted to add every step of the shoot into the video.  It makes for a longer clip although very informative.  Most questions should be answered within the video but I’ll try to explain some additional information below.

Some addition info that we’d like to share:

You don’t really need high end gear to make these shots work.  Yes we had an underwater kit and yes we did use pro bodies/lenses.  However the shots themselves could be recreated with most body/lens combos.  Your shoot may not even be underwater, it may be in a desert, and that’s the main focus we’d like you to draw from this BTS.  Another thing we wanted to mention is that electricity and water don’t typically mix.  We were very cautious with our setup near the pool and made sure there was no chance of anything falling into the water.

Once more I’d like to thank Isaac Levy, Leanna Lee, Amanda Taylor and Paul Bongiovanni for their efforts in this shoot.  If anyone has any questions or comments please feel free to ask and we’ll be sure to get back to you.  Also, as we err speak… ?  type..? yeah type, as I type, Kevin is working on a more in-depth tutorial for editing one of the images.  We should be releasing it sometime very soon.  In case people were more curious as to how we ended up with our final images.  The tutorial will be on the image directly below.

Dave Dvir

Cheers,

Dave Dvir

Some days I’m even so ambitious that it all acts against me in a way.  I’m so eager to work on so many different projects that I am thinking about them all at once and at the end of the day nothing gets done.  It’s kind of like when Mr. Burns had every illness known to man and they all countered each other so somehow he was invincible, only with me it’s sort of the opposite of invincible.

Anyway, the point is sometimes you have to kick yourself in the brain to get out of it.  We found this video and I really liked it.  I actually connected with almost every point and my favourite one is probably the last.  Enjoy.

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

David Dvir

Business cards make it "legal"

As many of our fans and followers know by now, we don’t just do photography anymore.  Seems of late we’re shooting videos, stills, and building Rube Goldberg Machines.  Given all these areas of interested regarding what we actually charge clients for, the decision has been made that “2D Photography Inc.” is an evolved relic of a name.  Hence let me introduce: 2D House!

2D Photography Inc is just too specific a name.  Any person who hears it for the first time will expect that we pump out still photos but that’s about all we’d do.  Since that’s no longer the case we figured having a name that specific is a bad thing unless we can really define what we do with it.  Well, defining exactly what our services are is harder than it seems.  So the alternative is to have a name that’s generic enough that hearing it alone won’t help anyone figure out what we do.  Kind of like Pepsi or Kleenex.  Sure we know these companies now, but at some point these names were no more than a random sound.

“House” seems like a nice umbrella option for the generic kind of name.  We’ve opted to stick with “2D” and just add “House”.  So to recap, new name, same game.

Just remember, 2D House

David Dvir

So firstly, thank you all for your patience.  We’ve been talking about this second Rube Goldberg project for a little while now but I’m happy to report it’s finally launched!  Our client was Target (the popular retailer).  And they hired us for an interactive-fresh food related-Rube Goldberg (video below).

This project was pretty nice to work on, on our end. There was an extremely tight deadline and I am honestly quite proud of everyone at 2D for getting it done, and really exceeding expectations, too. The entire process, design, build, filming was done in about four weeks. THat’s a significant improvement from the photography Rube.

As for how this project got made, here’s a list of what peeps did what: 

Olson – they brought everyone together for a great project
2D House – we designed, built and filmed the machine
Drive Thru - edited the final footage
Monster Media - made the video interactive

Hope you guys like it!

David Dvir