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I used to shoot a lot of wakeboarding. It was a passionate love affair that eventually got left in the wake (no pun intended) of corporate production and an actual income.

I shot everything on the Panasonic HVX, loved it and had an absolute ball. . .but now the HVX has been gone for quite a while, I got to thinking about what might happen if I turned a Canon lens on the action.

Enter James Boggia, a mate of mine who is fresh from being crowned World Champion in Turkey and happens to be pretty good at the standing sideways on a water board thing.

We decided we would start getting some footage, and this is just a quick and dirty camera test cut of what we have after two very short sets. It’s a major work in progress, but instead of collating footage for an eternity and releasing one 5 minute clip, I thought we’d leak stuff along the way so you can watch things come together. This is here strictly as a point of reference to look back on and probably for Boggia to sling around facebook.

The edit is rough as guts, continuity was tossed roughly aside, it’s ungraded footage straight out of the camera, has no filters applied – this folks, is as dirty as it gets. . .The angles are limited, but it’s a start. . .from here the only way is up and that’s where we intend to take it. . .

All real time footage was shot on the Canon 5DMKII and the slow motion was shot on the Canon 7D.

Stay tuned for more info as things develop and a full run down on the shooting techniques when we’re done and dusted!

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Everybody loves a 50! It was a kit lens focal length for a long time, back when SLR’s first started appearing and ever since then it’s been the darling of every photographer out there. With the advent of video in the DSLR world, things aren’t much different. From the budget Canon 50mm 1.8 II right through to the deluxe Canon 50mm f1.2L & extraordinarily expensive Leica 50mm .95 Noctilux, there’s a 50mm to suit every budget and taste. But what about the inbetweeners? Couldn’t there be some right pearlers in there? Well yes there are, and the Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG HSM is one of them, a midde of the range lens that gives a surprising performance.

Now given that I am a self-confessed gear whore and quite partial to an L series lens, I’m sure you’re wondering why I opted for the Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG HSM over the Canon 50mm f1.2L, especially considering the wider aperture of the Canon? The answer is quite simple. . .The Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG HSM is a really great lens and at 1/4 of the cost, it’s very hard to justify that extra expenditure for a red ring around the barrel and a little more street cred.

Don’t get me wrong, the Canon 50mm f1.2L is a beautiful lens – fantastical build quality, amazing optics and super fast, there is no doubting that it’s a better lens than the Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG HSM. But for me, it’s not THAT much better. It’s not a whole 300% better as the price would have you believe and for the most part, I think a lot of people would have trouble telling them apart if they were looking at video shot at the same aperture on the same camera in a blind test.

Photography however, that’s another story entirely, of course when shooting wide open at the 21MP, pixel peeping at 100%, the 1.2L is going to eat the Sigma for breakfast (A nice hearty, solid breakfast though, given the build quality of the Sigma). Ok, maybe eating it for breakfast is a bit extreme since the Sigma is quite sharp in the centre at f1.4 but the Canon 50mm f1.2L will still outperform it, it’s got to be said. For me it does the job, it falls off a bit towards the edge of the frame, but not so much that a client is going to spit chips. On a full frame camera, there is also a slight vignette when shooting wide open, which I absolutely love. Why people find this an undesirable characteristic I don’t know, I think it looks great. If you don’t like it though, stopping down to around f2 will make it disappear.

Despite still being quite sharp when wide open the Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG HSM does exhibit some chromatic aberration at f1.4. When fine-tuning focus in live view mode, it is clearly visible. Stopping the lens down to f1.8 does show a marked improvement, increasing sharpness and dramatically reducing CA.

In my experience, I get the sharpest photo’s out of the Sigma at around f8-f10, but that’s when being an overly picky pixel peeper. I have no real hesitation shooting this lens at any aperture when shooting video, the differences are really so small you would be splitting hairs to quibble over it.

But wide open is where I find myself most, lounging around in the Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG HSM‘s creamy bokeh, which is really quite lovely. Thanks to it’s 9 aperture blades, the Sigma’s out of focus highlights are nice, round and considerable in size when focused on a close subject. With this lens, you will not have any trouble getting your background to dissolve into a dreamy haze of focusless (I just made that word up! Patent pending.) vapor. I just re-read that and man, I’ve got problems. Yeah, I’ll admit it, my name is Christian and I’m a bokeh addict – The Sigma does give me a good fix though. Don’t take my word for it though, check out the video!

Now the AF in this lens, I don’t know, I seem to get inconsistent results when shooting portraits and I’ve read of focus issues with this lens on the net, but if you search any lens at all, you’ll undoubtedly find somebody who has focus issues. So that doesn’t necessarily mean they all do. I use the lens in manual focus mode 99.9% of the time anyway, so it’s not really an issue for me. It’s got a HyperSonicMotor (Which is where the HSM comes into the inordinately long model name) so it does focus quite quickly and quietly which is cool. But the focus ring on this lens, like it’s little brother the Sigma 30mm f.4, is a dream to use. Well damped and very nice for manual focusing. You won’t find it hard to hit a mark or execute a nice focus pull with this lens.

Overall, The Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG HSM is a nicely constructed, well performing lens than will suit most peoples purposes. I am a stickler for quality and at the time could have purchased either the Canon 50mm f1.2L or the Sigma. I couldn’t justify the extra expenditure for a fraction of a stop, the “L series” badge and a less than impressive increase in image quality. It’s really as simple as this. Sigma made a great lens, they made it affordable, and what it comes down to is the pictures – in this case they look fantastic.

Please do your own tests and share your thoughts with us here in the comments section.

Go on! Go full screen and watch it in HD. You won’t!

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Shooting with the Canon 100mm f2.8L Macro IS USM is like delving into another world. A world of tiny things made large, hair thin focal planes and immensely sensitive focus rings. It’s as close to ‘Honey I shrunk the kids!’ as I’ve ever been and funnily enough, every time I focused upon a leaf, blade of grass, flower or a grain of salt, that’s exactly what I thought of. . .but without Rick Moranis. . .he always scared me.

Ok, first up, let it be known that macro shooting is seriously awesome! I’d seen shots from the Canon 100mm f2.8L Macro IS USM before, wanted that look and knew what I was getting. What I didn’t know, was how much joyous, childlike fun I would have shooting with this lens, peering at things very close up through the live view and then gazing transfixed at them on the iMac. Initially I thought this lens may be very limited in application, but now having seen the results I’m inclined to think otherwise.

But obviously you’ve seen how close in you can get with this thing, as no doubt you’ve watched the video before reading this literary masterpiece. So enough, let’s get to the bigger picture.

What I love about the Canon 100mm f2.8L Macro IS USM, aside from it’s amazing image quality and ability to focus so close, is it’s focus ring. Being a lover of manual focusing, the nicely damped focus ring is a dream. It feels really great in the hand and the stops, although they are not hard, are sufficient for my style of shooting. I can see how purist “my lens will have hard stops or die” types may frown at it’s easy going ways, but for me, it’s not a huge problem. As well as feeling good, it’s nice and wide since we’re not sharing the barrel with a zoom ring, which means you can get a comfortable grip on it any which way when you’re shooting handheld. Speaking of shooting handheld, as you may or may not know, I’m a pretty big fan of shooting handheld with the IS on. This lens is no exception, I did have quite decent results shooting handheld video and photo’s with the IS on, but it does not feel like as good an implementation as it does on the Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS USM. The IS on that lens seems to perform a lot better, especially when shooting video. It just seems to have more room for movement.

The AF is super fast and super quiet and despite having switches to limit the focal range (and hunting) I didn’t make use of them this weekend. I’ll let you know how they go a little way down the track.

I like that it comes with a soft case to keep the outer plastic shell from scratching too badly and that it also comes with a lens hood. Speaking of the plastic shell though, that’s one thing I don’t like. Although it probably is, The Canon 100mm f2.8L Macro IS USM, does not feel like a tough and sturdy lens. Sure it’s nice and weighty in the hand, but the plastic construction of the outer shell does not inspire a lot of confidence. I’m not rough with my gear, but I do like it to have a solid feel to it’s construction, and given the L Series classification, I was surprised to find this. It doesn’t feel like it’s about to fall apart or anything, but it is missing that tank like build quality of the other L series lenses. We’ll see how it holds up over time.

On the camera (I have used it on the Canon 5DMKII and Canon 7D) it feels nice, not too heavy and if I’m to be a complete wanker, looks quite cool with the lens hood on. Of course how it looks doesn’t affect the images, but hey, some people like cars. . .I like camera’s. . .don’t we all? That’s why you’re here! But I digress. What’s it like to shoot with I hear you clamouring, get to the bloody point!

It’s good! Real good! And when shooting video or photo’s, very closely, wide open at f2.8, insanely difficult to manual focus. Now I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but this is seriously a whole new ball game. I pride myself on being able to rack a pretty decent focus when I need to, but this is unbelievable. The focal plane is literally hair thin. At the minimum focus distance, wide open, a grain of salt is deeper than the focal plane. That’s some pretty shallow depth of field. Moving the focus ring a little actually does quite a lot at this stage and even the usually imperceptible swaying of your body can mean the difference between a keeper and a dud. The bokeh it produces is just gorgeous and the out of focus highlights are beautiful perfect circles at f2.8 thanks to the 9 blade aperture diaphragm. For the best result when shooting super close you’re going to have to use a tripod. I found my Glidetrack to be a great help, moving the camera instead of the focus ring. You’ll see examples of that in the video with the shot of the eyes. That’s not a racked shot, that’s a Glidetrack push.

The difference the 1.6x multiplier of the Canon 7D‘s cropped sensor makes to the perceived focal length is quite astounding. Effectively turning the Canon 100mm f2.8L Macro IS USM into a 160mm Macro Lens. I didn’t do a full test of this, just putting it on there briefly to see what it looked like in the live view. But at minimum focus distance the difference I saw was significant. The shot of the eye at the beginning of the video. On the Canon 7D, that shot would have been mostly iris, in other words, really bloody close! I’ll do a full test of this in the coming weeks and share the results. I’m looking to seeing what it can do that’s for sure.

The Canon 100mm f2.8L Macro IS USM is super sharp wide open, and obviously it gets a bit better as you stop it down, but I didn’t notice too much of a difference. Even wide open it’s still really impressive to me and I used it like this mostly.

All up, this is a lovely lens. Not only is it a cracking 100mm lens, it’s also got that macro ability which is really something else. Having not shot Macro stuff before, it’s been really interesting, and really refreshing being able to get that up close and personal with any subject and see it like you’ve never seen it before. To be able to pick a subject, no matter how close and not worry about your minimum focus distance, is really refreshing. What I love about shooting is freedom, and despite the limitation of it being a fixed focal length lens, the macro ability more than makes up for it. So get out and give it a go if you have the chance, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Anyway, I reckon that’s about enough out of me for now I’ve only used the lens for about 3 hours or so and will get a bit more up here once I’ve had a couple of weeks of time behind it. Some things you only notice after extended use and I’m interested to see how I can incorporate this lens into my daily shooting and just how many applications I’ll have for that extreme close up. Only time will tell.

Now if you haven’t already, get you butt back up the top of the post and go and watch the test footage as it’s supposed to be watched. . .in 1080P. Nothing else does it justice.

Until then. . .

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Man, this was fun! Fun to shoot and fun to edit! After a month or so of chopping away at commercial gigs, this was just some good ‘ol fashion candy coloured, idealistic fun!

It’s nice to take a step back from everything sometimes and just shoot some stuff that feels good. It’s a good time of year for it too. Around the end of April the temperatures are starting to drop a little, the skies are starting to clear up and with the diminishing rainfall, there is little silt washing down the rivers into the ocean, leaving it crystal clear. It’s this fortuitous combination of meteorological phenomena that makes this time of year such a lovely time to shoot.

All of this footage has been shot over the last 2 or so weeks. A mixture of the Canon 5DMKII and the Canon 7D. Canon 5DMKII for the lower light sunset stuff so I can keep shooting a little later and Canon 7D for the blue sky daytime stuff, basically because I have polarising options on the Canon 7D that I don’t have on the Canon 5DMKII. . .yet.

Did I mention it was fun shooting this?. . .Yes. . .Where were we?

I shot this with a mixture of the usual suspects. . .that being, the increasingly insufficient bag of lenses that I lug around, detailed greatly elsewhere on this blog. Man, I’m hanging to get some new glass for the Canon 5DMKII.

The new Canon TS-E 17mm F/4L didn’t get too much of a run here, with this kind of footage, I really missed the ability to be able to whack a polariser on the front. Likewise being without ND grads really limit this lens as a landscape type of lens for me. If I could filter it, I would be absolutely stoked! I had been using the Tokina 11-16 f2.8 ATX on the Canon 5DMKII. By itself, it works passably from 15-16mm, but with the polariser on you get a bit of hard, unflattering vignetting at the edges. So whenever I needed a wide polarised shot, I turned to the Canon 7D. I could have fixed this with a dedicated Wide Angle lens for the Canon 5DMKII, but this solution will work well for now. I don’t mind running two camera’s and would rather keep doing this so I can invest into other glass first, instead of buying another wide angle.

There are a couple of Canon 5DMKII shots in there with the Sigma 30mm f1.4. I just scaled them up a little to remove the darkest of the vignette, I’m sure you’ll spot it/them in there, it’s quite noticeable. Funny that in that OOF background, there is a ring of slightly more in focus detail inherent in the fringe of the vignette. It’s weird and kind of takes away from the perception of depth. I’m not sure if you can see it here, but it’s there. . .trust me (I mean that in a totally un-facebook, not creepy way, honest!)

The Canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6L was great for the yachts on the water at Mooloolaba, but I have since taken to leaving it at home more recently. The camera bag was growing in weight and considering I wasn’t using it every time I shot, decided to see how I would go without it, relying only on the Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS USM. I can say, my back really appreciated not having it in there, but I did miss it a couple of times for sure. Especially when shooting from up high on the cliff in Coolum, it would have come in great handy there. The Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS USM’s bokeh at f2.8 was pleasant though, and it was nice to be limited on focal length for a while. It makes me walk more and in the process, see shots I might not have come across.

The music in this clip, Revtone – Love Movement (Ulrich Schnauss Remix) is off a compilation, Global Underground 030 – Paris – Mixed by Nick Warren, one of my favourite DJ’s. Ulrich Schnauss has a very typical sound, very atmospheric and it was playing in the car while I was cruising around shooting some of this footage up at Coolum. When I heard it, I immediately knew that this would be the soundtrack to this footage. Cruisy, beautiful and not in a hurry to get anywhere. It would allow the shots to just hang there for a couple of seconds extra, allowing the eye to really roam around the image.

Usually I burn shots, 1-2 seconds and out, and I did start doing that at the end because it was too monotonous, but this time I wanted to more reflect the feeling I had when I was shooting it. Which was a whimsical kind of relaxed concentration. . .Very Sunshine Coast!

My own criticisms. . .This clip is about two minutes too long. At 2:30 it would have been a corker. In, out and left me wanting to see more. Trouble is, this one is a bit of a dual purpose clip. I intend to utilise this for other applications and wanted it to be a bit longer than what I usually cut. There are some shots in there that hang a little too long and it loses momentum somewhere in the middle. A little editing of the song might not have gone astray here, but there is only so long I can spend on these things. At the end of the day, this is not a show reel (Which I am working on at the moment) or anything, just a collection of footage shot over the past two or so weeks.

Things to look out for. . .

• Some very nasty aliasing on the sunset shot across the bay from the Canon 5DMKII. One was so bad I couldn’t include it. perhaps I need to wind the sharpness down as detailed in various places around the net.
• Sigma 30mm f1.4 EX DC HSM Vignetting. What’s your thoughts on that? Fan or hater?
• Glidetrack love. . .and love it is. . .I really do love it. (In an entirely not creepy way. . .)
• The video’s stupid title. . .watch that. . .it was late and I was strapped for ideas. . .I think in German it means “Flying burger sausage”. Perhaps not.
• The second last shot, a little noisy (ok, alot!). . .That was Canon 5DMKII with the Tilt Shift on at 6400 ISO. With some noise removal it might have come good. For me, it’s better having a noisy shot than no shot at all. I’m not going to a 35mm print for theatrical distribution so it’s not going to cause me much trouble.
• The last shot. This was my first attempt at a proper night timelapse of the stars. It’s not an amazingly interesting shot, it was after all my first crack, taken from my front yard and a test more than anything. I just really wanted to use it here, since it was something different. I’ve become quite inspired, as I’m sure many other have, by Tom’s work, over at Timescapes. That guy is seriously one of the most talented out there, more so than any of the other DSLR ‘pioneers’ out there. Check him out, you’ll be glad you did.

Anyway, that’s enough crap from me, it’s late and I’ve proven myself unworthy of continuing to type at this keyboard.

I hope you enjoy the flick, if there’s anything I missed, just flick me a comment!

More soon. . .

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What better way to break in the new Canon 5DMKII than to take it on a plane/road trip to visit the family down in Tamworth. Two little sisters, one of which who loves watching the footage of herself almost as much as the rest of us do, a bunch of greenery and lots of fun.

The new Canon 5DMKII only arrived on the Friday afternoon and flying out Saturday morning didn’t leave a lot of time for really investigating the new beasty. I’d used one a fair bit on shoots a while back, but since getting a Canon 7D had been using nothing but. I must say, she’s quite the different animal and on first impression, nowhere near as user friendly as my beloved Canon 7D.

Firstly, (and I know I’ve already rabbited on ad nauseam about this on Facebook, but I’m super excited!) I was stoked to see that the Sigma 30mm f1.4 actually worked on the Canon 5DMKII. Not only did it work, but it brought with it a dirty vignette that I’d never seen on the Canon 7D before (Due to the smaller sensor). It was love at first sight. Now I might not be reaching for this lens next time I have a corporate shoot, but in a more relaxed setting (a glorified home movie), this combo kicks some serious goals in my book! To me it’s a nice effect, with a bit of character, that still looks absolutely fantastic in the centre of the frame. All the benefits of a Toy Camera lens without the drawbacks. So yes, very happy there.

The 30mm focal length on the Canon 5DMKII is really nice too. So much so that I am seriously considering saving the pennies for a Canon 35mm f1.4L. I think in the interim though a Canon EF 35mm f2.0 could find it’s way into the camera bag, according to reviews it’s not so bad a lens and f2.0 is a quick enough for most things. As I said, whilst I love that vignette, it’s not going to work for everything.

My little Canon 50mm f.18 II worked wonderfully on the Canon 5DMKII. Seriously that lens blows me away! I took a photo at f10 on that little beast and it was so tack sharp at 100% it just wasn’t funny. If you haven’t got one of these lenses you are nuts! It’s so good for the price, I can’t see myself justifying the $2K it costs to get the Canon 50mm f1.2L. Even though it’s supposed to be that much of a better lens (well for a start, it’s not all plastic!) I’m not sure it could be that much better. The depth of field is lovely, and when it’s wide open at f1.8 you get some nice vignetting and a little decrease in sharpness towards the edge of the frame. It adds a bit of charm (like a fake chimney).

Now, what was seriously impressive, having come from the Canon 7D, which. let’s be honest, is a rather noisy experience at the best of times, was the low light capabilities of this camera. Now I’m not going to crap on at length about this like every other blog has since the camera was released over a year ago, but I will say this – The Canon 5DMKII looks the way you want your footage to look in low light conditions. It’s still going to be noisy if you push it too far, but it seems it can nicely capture what you can easily see with the naked eye in dim light. Now it might be awesome to have the near night-vision capabilities of the Canon 1DMKIV, but it’s not like you’ll be disappointed if you can’t take a shot of something you can’t see in the first place! For the first time I’m pleased with the quality of the video I shoot when the sun goes down, I can’t say I ever felt that with the Canon 7D.

Now it’s really tempting to start comparing the Canon 5DMKII and the Canon 7D to each other on a minute scale, but I just don’t feel comfortable doing that as yet. I’ve only been using it for a week and I really need to give a red hot crack before I go talking smack about it. I don’t want to give the wrong impression because I haven’t dug deep enough in the custom fuctions or just haven’t shot with it enough yet to make a proper judgement. What I can say, is that I feel the design of the Canon 7D’s body and button layout is far superior to the Canon 5DMKII. More on that in a future blog post. . .

Funnily enough I think I only pulled the Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS USM out of the bag twice on this trip and neither of those shots made it into this edit. The 100-400 didn’t even get a look in.

The song in this clip is by one of my favourite acts of all time, Way Out West. The song is called ‘Just like a man’. Off the album called ‘Don’t Look Now’, this track is just superb. I suggest you check out the entire album if you dig the style. It’s an all time classic electronic release.

It was a lot of fun shooting this footage, my little sister Kendra is a ball to hang out with and it’s always fun capturing funny little moments that go one when we’re hanging out. I know this is not the best footage I’ve ever shot, but this was more about getting a feel for the camera and also just making a nice home movie for the archives. I actually tossed up on whether to put it here on the site, but figured I’d been talking it up so I better actually post it! If you enjoy it even 1/20th as much as I did shooting and editing it (You should have seen the stupid grin whilst cutting in the timeline. I’m a sucker for my little sister) then I’ll be stoked.

More soon. . .

The gorgeous little Kendra.

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What would a trip be without a bit of a video to go with it, eh? How will I hold onto the memories once my old and decrepit brain slows and the once vivid colours and easily recalled sounds start to dim and fade? Well, the plan is that I’ll take out my 128 Core Intel Blink6a Chipset driven Mac-3D Hologram interface running OS XVIII Aardvark from the comfort of my nursing home bed and hoping that it still knows what to do with the H.264 codec, watch all these videos, remembering a time when I could choose when to go to the loo and walk where I wanted unaided. . .ahhh, can’t wait!

All that aside, this video was really just a bit of fun to shoot and a walk on the wild side for me, since I never travel anywhere without a tripod. Even though I missed, it, it was an interesting excercise.

There are some really pretty area’s where the lovely Katie’s parents live. The Dandenong Ranges are about an hour east of Melbourne in Victoria and make for some very nice scenery, I could seriously have spent days and days just walking around shooting, it seems everywhere you turn there’s something to lock the lens on. But, since it was a family trip, I had to make some concessions on allocating one on one time with the 7D. . .

I’ve got to say the decision to not take the tripod was interesting. . .and stupid. . .I hated it. . .So many times I wished I had it with me, my shaky hands and wobbling footage driving me up the wall. See if I had steady hands, I don’t think I’d have cared so much, trouble is, I tremble like an 8 day high crack fiend as soon as I pick up the camera. This is where a heavier camera has always been my friend. If you too have trouble getting that steady shot when running around shooting hand held, the best bet I found is to try and keep it moving, that way the shake is disguised a bit more. Or lean on something that doesn’t shake! I think for the home movie stuff it works ok, the landscape stuff. . .eeewww! Man, some of that stuff looks rough! Lesson learnt. . .

Both the Sigma 30mm and the 50mm 1.8 II got a really good run in this video, the tight quarters shooting meant for the kind of shots I wanted these focal lengths worked well. I love shooting portaits with the 50mm on the 7D, I guess it equates to about 86mm on a full frame. Now that I have a 5DMKII to play with, I will have to get the Canon 85mm f1.2 lens as I have really fallen in love with that focal length.

After watching a colleague work with split screens I got inspired to play with some of my own. I did specifically shoot a sequence of shots for the effect, instead of just seeing what would work afterwards, I think that helped. I don’t mind it, but I’m not sold on it. What do you think, win or fail? The implementation could do with some tweaking, the hard borders a a bit harsh, I definitely think that having three handheld shots all wiggling different ways at the same time is a bit much too, a locked off shot would improve things greatly.

Now, one thing I do know it that there is absolutely no consistency to the grade, some black and white, some super saturated, some really warm, some really cold. . .That’s exactly how I was feeling at the time, all colours were created in camera. I didn’t do any post colour correction on this at all. In hindsight, I would have liked to see more Black and White, but hey, I made my bed, and even though I don’t have to lie in it, I will. I’ll know better next time. It’s my goal to be able to grade in camera with as little post as possible, give your settings a bash around and see what you come up with, it can be rather rewarding!

The music is by a very lovely group by the name of ‘The Album Leaf’ and the song is called ‘We Need Help!’. It’s not symbolic in anyway, we didn’t need help, (Well I did, after a bit of celebratory overextension syndrome after my birthday on Good Friday, but that’s a story for a completely different blog! ) it’s just a nice cruisy song, that I thought fitted the feel of the trip.

This was a fun little video to shoot and to cut and would recommend everybody to give something similar a shot. Use your lovely Canon glass and DSLR depth of field to really do a number on the old home video! I’d love to see your results!

Well, that’s it for now, I’m off to Tamworth for the weekend to see my family. It’s another road trip video and no doubt my gorgeous little sister Kendra will break in the new Canon 5DMKII that arrived today very nicely. I can’t wait!

Until then. . .enjoy the vid!

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So at last I got around to chopping up the footage from last weekend’s semi-large storm swell and here it is! I must say it turned out better than I thought, mostly due to the surfing and acting talents of my good friend, Greg Weatherall.

Turns out he is a bit of gun surfer! In his brothers’ words “He’s a big unit! I’ve seen him smack the lip and just destroy waves! I mean look at him, he’s huge!” I’d have to agree, he is a big unit and yes he does tend to leave quite a wake in his passage. Despite not finding the 12 foot waves he was hoping for he still had a lovely time and turned it on for the camera!

Going into this shoot, I kind of had an idea what I wanted to capture. The usual spectator love that goes with these kinds of swells (Since every man and his dog wants a slice of the action), some good surfing and hopefully some nice footage for an intro, with Greg getting ready and all that kind of stuff.

I must admit the intro stuff wasn’t just off the cuff, I did wear my Directors hat for that, but hey, you got to set the scene right? Lucky for me, Greg is a good sport and was willing to indulge my shot-wankery, instead of just charging off into the surf with a devil may care attitude like every other pro surfer!

I started with the getting ready footage. The Sigma 30mm f1.4 and Canon 50mm f1.8 II really worked well here. I love these lenses, the bokeh is nice to play with and the quick glimpses gives you just enough to see what’s going on. We started off out at the furthest point break using Greg’s Canon 400mm f2.8. I must say, I was so excited to use this lens and my lord it is a lovely piece of kit, but man it is just so unwieldy it really didn’t lend itself to the way I like to shoot. Encumbered by my camera bag, my tripod, the glidetrack and the 400mm (in it’s own backpack, it’s that bloody big!) it was just such a pain in the butt moving around that I probably missed a tonne of great shots because I couldn’t spare the time to be moving around the rocks with all the gear. An assistant would have been invaluable, but as if that’s going to happen for this kind of shoot. So whilst the image is outstanding, and the extra stops really helped as the light fell, I don’t think I’ll be saving my pennies for this one.

I finished off the evening by pulling out the trusty Tokina 11-16 f2.8 and my Hyongnuo Intervalometer (Which has a dinky screen! Beware!) and grabbed 150 shots to whack together into a time lapse. 150 seems good to me and works out to be a 6 second shot. I’m not usually one for hanging on shots, but the music in this track really lent itself well to that.

At 6am the next morning. . .well you know the story from the previous post. . .very disappointing. . .nowhere near the predicted swell. . .sad faces all round.

I had learnt my lesson the day before though and left the Canon 400mm 2.8 in the car, waved goodbye to the Glidetrack and travelled light and swift with my camera bag with all my lenses in it and the tripod. Ahhhh! Much better! I did however borrow Greg’s 1.4X extender and found it worked quite well on my Canon 100-400 f4-5.6L. The 1.4X coupled with the 1.6X Crop factor was really quite nice. Sadly shooting wide open (at f8) was not really an option, as it was just too soft. I found to get anywhere near a sharp image I had to be shooting at around f11-f13, f13 seemed to be the sharpest.

You’ll notice that the footage looks radically different in places, there was bright sunshine, overcast skies, dim dusk shooting, sunset shooting, man I got it all. I was really hoping it was just going to be grey and overcast and look a little menacing, sadly that wasn’t the case. The colours in this clip are pretty much straight out of the camera. Just a couple of shots had to be corrected for contrast as the 400mm and the extender had left them a little washy at times. I think one day I might do a graded version of this clip just as a test, but today is definitely not that day!

What do I think makes this clip? Seriously, it’s got to be the song! It’s just great! I’ve been listening to it all week and funnily enough, it’s another track of that Gui Boratto Mix Collection on Renaissance. That compilation has been getting a hiding on lately! It’s just too good! The song itself is by Bomb the Bass and it’s called ‘The Infinites (Featuring Paul Conboy and Gui Boratto)”. Great album, you should definitely check it out!

So that was the weekend that was. . .Not what we’d hoped for, but now having cut it all up, not a total disaster either. Could it be better, of course! Will it be better next time? You bet! Let’s just hope we don’t have to wish too big of a tropical cyclone upon the Pacific islands to get the shots we want!

That’s it for now! It’s way past clock off time! Managed to get down to the Mooloolaba stop of the Triathlon World Cup today, hopefully will get some time to cut that this week.

Until then. . .stay classy!

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It’s getting ridiculous. This no shooting thing is getting to me so much, I’m getting all melancholic and down. I decided I needed to cut something last night and so I obsessively hunted through the footage banks from the last couple of months, (in which not a hell of a lot of fun, non work-related, shooting has gone on! :/) and pulled what shots I could into a sequence.

There was a criteria – Blue skies, good weather, fun times. . .that was it. . .This, friends, was an exercise in positivity. In trying to see past the drab and dreary world outside to the vibrant, colourful world it can be in the right light.

It is by no stretch of the imagination a masterpiece, nor is it cohesively structured in any way. It’s just some shots that I’m fond of cut to a track that I fell in love with while I was trawling the drives for footage. Unfortunately I couldn’t find enough footage to really go crazy with the cut. It’s great going into something with too much footage, that way you can be really brutal with the edit. There’s a certain excitement I get when I’m giving shots that I could realistically hold on for 7-10 seconds about 2-3 seconds screen time. It’s not appropriate all the time, but it can leave people wanting to see it over.

It’s a bit of hodge podge of locations this one, there’s some container ships down at Moffat Beach, a little bit of the Glasshouse Mountains, some Kayaks in Cotton Tree on the Maroochy River, some aerial snippets from over Mooloolaba and Maroochydore, Osprey soaring over the Headland in Moffat Beach & a random Surf Boat crew in Mooloolaba.

All of it was shot on the 7D and some of it was that long ago, that I cannot for the life of me break down how and what I shot everything with. I know the Opsrey’s were shot on the Canon 100-400 L, that I remember. It was so hard to get and keep the suckers in focus. I have a very healthy respect for die hard bird photographers who use constant manual focus. Big ups to you!

The aerials were definitely shot on the Tokina 11-16 and were Smoothcam’d in Apple Motion. I did it in Apple Motion because I am one of the users suffering from the annoying and unfixed Final Cut Pro Smoothcam bug, where it looks great rendered in the timeline, but when you export it, it looks as though it hasn’t been applied. It’s very annoying and I wish Apple would fix it! Come on guys! It’s not like you don’t know about it, it’s all over your discussion boards and all over the web! What’s the hold up?

There’s definitely a couple of shots on the Canon 70-200 in there too. The Kayaks are one I’m sure of. . .the others. . .hmmm. . .I don’t know. Sorry.

I do love shooting this kind of stuff, but I’m finding more and more I wish I had people to work with, to put in these situations so the viewer can identify with them and become more involved in what’s going on. Pretty pictures are all well and good, but at the end of the day, they don’t really create an emotional connection with the viewer, they’re just nice to look at. I’m thinking I need to get some of my friends in on the action and get them doing some fun stuff. We’ll see how that goes. . .when the sun comes out next. . .

What niggles me about this clip is the Aerial shot at the beginning, even though I love it, it’s had to be zoomed a little too much and it’s not so sharp anymore. It looks darn average! That was before I got the Glidetrack Shooter and started using it as a stabiliser up there. At least it won’t happen again!

The music, if you’re interested is off a new mix CD from Renaissance. It’s called The Mix Collection and it’s mixed by Gui Boratto, a Brazilian Techno producer who happens to make very good music and consequently have very good taste in music. The track is called ‘Daten-Übertragungs-Küsschen’ and it’s by Dominik Eulberg. Ha! How’s that for a mouthful! Awesome track though and rather indicative of my head space right now.

Anyway guys, that’s me done for now. . .hope you enjoy this little morsel. . .I give my word there will be more substantial fare soon!

For you Vimeo Lovers!

A sense of lurking malice hid in the atmosphere, unseen forces swept through the air and the ocean, elements whipping each other into a frenzy. The usually idyllic Sunshine Coast had turned feral and it surely was a sight to behold!

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With the weather putting all my shoots on an indefinite hiatus until it clears, I had the perfect opportunity to get out with the camera and shoot a little bit of what’s going on at the moment. We are getting pummeled by heavy rainfall, strong winds and king tides – It’s not the best, but it sure is interesting! The surf is big and supposed to be increasing right up until Wednesday and it should make for some great footage if this onshore wind will let up.

This was a bit of an experiment today, with different settings, white balances, filters, time lapse, slow motion. . .and of course some playing with the Glidetrack Shooter for the first time in a shoot of this kind. Got to admit, I had a ball! It’s been ages since I got to go out and just shoot for fun and I really enjoyed it, even though it felt like shooting in a Coriolis storm!

As usual, I shot it all on the 7D with the usual crop of glass. Nothing too different there – Sigma 30mm f1.4, Tokina 11-16 f2.8, Canon 100-400 IS 4.5-5.6 and 70-200 f2.8 IS USM.

I didn’t have too long to shoot, knew that I wanted to attempt a very harsh color profile in camera and had some ideas of what I wanted to capture. The wild sea, some time lapses of the clouds as the wind was howling and they were moving super fast, and hopefully some people watching. I got lucky on all counts, with the bonus being some Kiteboarders who were the only ones to brave the conditions. Funnily enough, the kiteboarder in the red is the same Kiteboarder from the 7D test video I uploaded ages ago! I found out his name is Mick and he is the Stickerman here on the Sunshine Coast. So good on ya Mick! Thanks again for the footage!

There were quite a few people watching and despite a few curious glances at the strange looking guy with the Glidetrack, on the ground behind the spectators, everything went pretty smoothly.

Got to say I do love this Glidetrack Shooter so far, but I am still a bit of a novice with it and still yet to learn how and when to employ it to the greatest benefit. It is a lot of fun though and quite smooth along the slide. I ended up getting a little Manfrotto 701HDV head for it. That was a good move, it uses the same base plate as my 503HDV and means I can quickly pull the Glidetrack on and off my main tripod legs without any hassle and also switch the camera in between both of them without having to change base plates. It’s very useful and I’d say almost essential for shooting on the move. It has taken a bit of getting used to in terms of setting up and balancing and what not since it’s a tripod mounted on a tripod, and as you can see in the wide shot with the people watching I noticed it develops a gradual lean when moving from one side to the other. It’s not very noticeable when viewed in real time and you can really only see it because of the speed ramp applied to the shot, but it’s something I need to investigate so I can stop it from happening. Something about the drawing board and a trip back to it. . .who knows?!

There is some funny business going on with some frame blending artifacts on the sped up clip of the tree and the clouds. I have found a slight hiccup with MPEG Streamclip and the fact that the transcoding process actually creates interlaced footage. Yes I’m aware it’s Progressive interlaced footage, where both fields contain information from the exact same moment in time and hence when displayed together create one entire progressive frame. But I don’t want that, I’ve found that speed changes with frame blending enabled and also Smoothcam can make this footage show it’s true ugly interlaced colours in the form interlaced banding. Something I was glad to see the back of when I got my HVX! And now it’s BACK!!! Ugghhh. . .So MPEG Streamclip only allows you to select the options “Upper field first” or “Lower field first”. It doesn’t let you choose ‘none’, or ‘progressive’, like After Effects or Final Cut. If anybody knows a way, please share, this is annoying me and so far I’ve only been able to achieve true progressive output in ProRes LT with Compressor. But as you may or may not know, Compressor takes much longer than MPEG Streamclip to do the same thing, so it’s not really a path I want to embrace at this stage. I’m putting it out there! Any ideas?

So for the last time lapse I used my little chinese intervalometer, which, by the way, has a bung screen but is still usable. It was just a 1.6 second exposure fired off every 2 seconds. Finally I got some decent wave motion. I decided to play it back at a slower frame rate just so the motion wasn’t so fast you couldn’t appreciate what was going on. I think that works well with waves, so you can actually see whats happening.

The music in this video is by The Last Atlant and the song is called ‘Everything is Illuminated’. A great track off an even greater album, ‘Cloudburst of Colours’. Get on it, no doubt you’ll enjoy the whole album if you liked this track!

Anyway, it’s definitely not a masterpiece, but I had heaps of fun shooting it which is all that matters at the end of the day. . .and I didn’t get rained on too much, which is a huge bonus.

Hopefully the swell picks up even more over the next few days and we get some real carnage going on! Fingers crossed!

More soon!

And for you Vimeo Lovers!

Now let’s be realistic, this was a totally self-indulgent w#nk! Hahaha! In fact that’s what this video should be called!

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I was bored, ok? This was shot when I was stuck in the hotel room in Sao Paulo after we had been delayed and missed our flight out of Brazil to Texas, all those months ago during the Brazil and Mexico Shoot. I cut and uploaded the second travel video this day and after that, pretty much had nothing to do except shoot myself doing what I had been doing for ages, sitting in the window watching the rain fall down from the sky and cascade down the glass. Riveting stuff, why not shoot it?

Funnily enough, it did prove to be quite a challenge, and there was much trial and error, particularly with the shallow focus and having to get the shot right, before running over and getting in place. To be honest, my acting wasn’t as good as I thought it would be either, way too contrived. . .lucky I didn’t have a speaking part.

I used the Sigma 30mm f1.4, the Canon 50mm f1.8 II, Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS USM and the Tokina 11-16 f2.8. The 70-200 was probably my favourite of the four, positioned right up against the far wall of the hotel room, wide open and loving the dim light at a low ISO. I can’t help but start wondering what a 5D MKIII might have looked like and how soon it will be tempting me.

The music here is by a group called Way Out West. They are absolutely phenomenal artists, just two lads in fact, Jody Wisternoff and Nick Warren. The song is called “The doors are where the windows should be” and it just sounded exactly like I felt at that time; Mellow with a dash of skitter.

It’s short and rightly so, the subject matter didn’t really lend itself to lengthy epic, rain, me and a window. . .even 30 seconds is too much. Sadly that’s all the Sunshine Coast has been offering up the last week also! Just rain, rain and more rain! There hasn’t been much shooting going on that’s for sure. When there has, I’ll be back on the case and pumping out content on here like there’s no tomorrow.

More to come soon! Oh and Happy New Year guys and gals!