DTC; Arri Locaster; Cardellini; Rag Place

DTC Grip and Lighting, the biggest rental house in the Bay Area, had a small gear expo recently. It was a dual-networking opportuniyt for me, both for Airbox Lights and also for my other DP/lighting/producer identity as Conviction Films. Most of the gear was grip and electric stuff, not much in the way of camera etc.

For me it was a pretty successful event.  I don't know many folks around here since I transplanted from New York, so any connections are good connections at this point.

Highlights:

•the Airbox Macro fits on the Arri Locaster LED light!  It's Arri.  It's top end.  Top end jobs use them. And probably lots of them, the way big union shoots tend to order gear. This could be good for us! My flexible strap design pays off again. Thanks to Mitch Gross for the original nudge to come up with a one-size-fits-all design.

•I met Steve Cardellini, the inventor of the ubiquitous and ever-useful cardellini clamp.  Nice guy.  He quit Key Gripping four years ago to just sell Cardellini products. I'd always wondered if there was a saturation point at which the market wouldn't require any more cardellinis, since the'yre pretty durable and don't really wear out.  He said he had always thought so too, but that he was still selling more and more of them every year!  It's good to be Steve Cardellini it seems.

•the Rag Place:  Some really great products. Spendy perhaps, but they're better than the average grip fabrics.
Things I liked: a single-ply double net.  It works on-camera without any moire!  And it's quite sturdy. Here's some video showing what it looks like when you shoot through it.



No-moire single-ply double net! from Thomas Guiney on Vimeo.

They also make this neat snap-open eggcrate.

We all love eggcrates, except they're a little inconvenient and fragile.  This is something I would buy.  Imagine- you can get a 4x4 source, but not necessarily have to set two more 4x4 siders on it just to keep it from going everywhere.  For the small-production owner-operator, the speed and convenience of this could be great, even if it's a bit pricey for that scale of production.