THE AMAZING iSIGHT CAMERA

I can't stop fooling around with the built-in iSight camera on my computer. Maybe it has to do with the quality of the lenses or the electronics.  Maybe it's the program. Anyway, you can do some serious photography with this thing.

The moody picture above was lit with a flashlight. Think about it, a flashlight!  I look like a guy who's at the end of his rope, out of work and wondering how he's going to feed his family. In reality it's just me, wondering if there's any potato chips in the house, and the camera benignly transforms that expression into high tragedy.  Of course, it also makes me look a hundred years old! 

 
Here's my favorite (above)!  I look like a demon from a Hell that burns black flame. I shot it for the Potemkin post but wasn't able to fit it in.  Once again, the lighting was done with a flashlight. 

 

 Here's (above) a bit of gritty, 50s realism.  Theater in that era was thick and serious. The words poured like molasses.  One play that comes to mind is "Krapp's last Tape." It's terrible and just about unwatchable in my opinion, but it has a following, and it has the virtue that you could film the whole thing in YouTube type close-ups. Imagine that! A serious play shot just for YouTube! 

I think I'll try a couple of really heavy, dramatic readings here. They'll suck but, what the heck, it's a blog and blogs are for fun, not for perfection.  Like Clampett used to say, "What's the worst that can happen? Is the sky going to fall down?"

 ISight does a good job on color, too. Sometimes the color looks purple and washed-out, and other times it feels like Technicolor.  In the picture above the lighting makes me look like someone in "The Conformist."