Rick Sammon and David Leveen:
Snapshots to Great Shots

by Dustin Driver

When you’re teaching photography, a picture is worth a thousand words. A video is worth even more. Photographer Rick Sammon has taught people how to take better pictures for more than 20 years. Recently, he teamed with Emmy-award-winning editor David Leveen to crank out how-to digital imaging DVDs for rickspixelmagic.com — the company he co-founded with Leveen. Their latest project, “Rick Sammon’s Canon EOS Digital Rebel Personal Training Photo Workshop,” was made with Macs.

“We used Macs exclusively for this DVD,” says Sammon. “We used Aperture to organize the hundreds of photos, Keynote to make the review sections for each lesson and Final Cut Pro to put it together. The project really wouldn’t have been possible without our Macs.”

Photo by Rick Sammon

In his latest role, Sammon covers the basics — camera functions and features — while touring the country in search of the scenarios that many amateur photographers might face. He grabs shots of alligators in Florida, beasts at the Bronx Zoo, stunning scenery at the Valley of Fire in Nevada and more. The adventure, and Sammon’s corresponding photographic advice, was shot with HDV cameras. Leveen pulled the video footage and stills into Final Cut Pro for editing.

“Final Cut and Aperture were just killer,” says Leveen. “The fact that Aperture worked so well with Final Cut Pro, Motion and Keynote, the fact that it worked so well with all the pro apps, was just amazing.”

In the Field

Sammon and Leveen didn’t set off on their adventure without a plan. The two formulated an outline for the video before they hit the road. Each location was chosen to illustrate particular photographic techniques, from white balance to exposure compensation. “We created a main project in Aperture and then albums in that project to store the pictures for each one of our lessons,” says Leveen. “That was tremendous. Aperture really helped us catalog and maintain a workflow based on our original outline.”

Aperture allowed the team to sort and search through the images quickly and efficiently. “Stacking is very useful,” says Sammon. “For example: We’re shooting at an alligator farm in Florida. Every alligator looks the same, right? But in some shots I’ve used a minus exposure compensation and others I’ve used a plus compensation. Stacking helped us sort those photos for our production phase.”

“Rick’s RAW images were the central reference points for the project,” says Leveen. “And Aperture made it very easy to do what we needed to do.”

Those photos corresponded to video sequences of Sammon explaining the photographic techniques. At the end of every day, it was up to Sammon and Leveen to organize the digital photos and the HDV footage. Both packed MacBook Pros and FireWire hard drives to capture the media. “I wanted to digitize on the road because I didn’t want to re-digitize when I got back to my edit room,” says Leveen. “I put a 7200 RPM 120 Gig drive into a WiebeTech FireWire 800 case. I digitized to that drive through my MacBook Pro. When I got back to my edit room I could just transfer those files into my Mac Pro for editing. It saved me so much time.”

Each day on the road ended with a review session. “We would sit down with the other two people who were working on the production — our co-host Vered Koshlano, and our production assistant, Kristin MacDougall — and we would look at what transpired during the day making sure we were happy with what we got,” says Leveen.

In the Studio

Sammon and Leveen ported the photos and footage into their studio editing systems in Croton-on-Hudson, NY. “I would come back to the studio and export the project out of my laptop and into my Mac Pro, which is my main edit station,” says Leveen. Editing involves splicing the footage with the photos using Aperture, Final Cut Pro and Keynote. “I use two monitors. I use 23-inch and 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays. I have Aperture, Final Cut Pro and Keynote running. I keep Aperture and the bins for Final Cut on one monitor and Keynote and Final Cut edit windows on the other. From there it’s just a matter of dragging images from Aperture into Keynote and then dropping the Keynote presentations into Final Cut as high-resolution QuickTime files. The fact that I could just drag and drop back-and-forth between Aperture and Keynote cut down the processing time amazingly.”

Leveen was able to keep the project in high-def by creating high-resolution (1920 X 1080) Keynote presentations. “Everything was being edited in Final Cut in HD,” he says. “That gave us tremendous flexibility because we have the high-resolution master and it can be formatted for virtually any screen.”

The pair also laid down some tracks for the DVD using GarageBand. “David plays drums and I studied arranging and composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston,” says Sammon. “And we play well together, so making the tracks in GarageBand wasn’t difficult.” Sammon and Leveen recorded live guitar and drum parts and filled in their tracks using GarageBand instruments. “There are five different pieces of music in the DVD and they were made in either Soundtrack Pro or Garage Band,” says Leveen. “I would export out of Garage Band into iTunes. Then I can just import the tracks into Final Cut from my iTunes library.”

Final Touches

All the elements — stills, video footage and music — have to come together in a DVD. Again, Leveen makes use of multiple apps to get the job done. “For the chapter menus on the DVD, I pull the stills from the Final Cut edit, import them into Aperture, tag them and put them in the appropriate project folders,” he says. “Then I drag them into Keynote to make the moving menus.”

Those movies are exported as QuickTime files, then imported into DVD Studio Pro. “I put those QuickTime movies into DVD Studio Pro to use as moving backgrounds for the different chapter menus,” says Leveen.

Photo by Rick Sammon

Wiley Publishing will release the completed DVD and a book later this year, says Sammon. In addition, the duo will convert some of the DVD’s lessons to video podcasts for download. “They’re actually going to be complete lessons,” says Leveen. “I’m just exporting them from Final Cut to the iPod format. That’s the beauty of shooting in HDV, you can distribute your content any way you want. We can cut the lessons down in size so that they can be played on the web in H264 or we can turn them into iPod videos or videos that can be sold in the iTunes store or streamed to the Apple TV. With HDV and Final Cut, we have lots of options.”