So desperate I'm taking shots with my iPhone. Come on SUN!!!!

I am hanging. . .

Like, flat out hanging for a hit maaaan! It’s been that bloody long since I was out in the sunshine having a great time shooting, I almost forget what it’s like. It’s a sad feeling.

I know I could go out and shoot some really morose, rainy, boring footage and peddle it off as ‘arty’ but there’s enough bloggers doing that kind of crap around the place. It’s depressing!

It’s a waiting game though and it seems we’ll be waiting a while. There have been rather decent storms complete rain and floods, gale force winds (with rain in them) and a hell of a lot of clouds. It’s uninspiring weather at the best of times and even though the surf has been big it’s so windy and rainy, there’s not much going on out there to shoot.

But what’s been going on? Well, the Glidetrack is going well. It’s alot of fun but I do get over having it on the tripod all the time. It adds weight and makes the whole thing pretty unwieldy. I am getting much more used to it and it’s already paid for itself. I love the shoulder mount function and use it quite a bit, takes out that horrible minute shake that seems to introduce some terrible jello. It’s also been great for using for Aerials, I straight up would not have been able to get some of the shots I got last time I went up without it.

I sold the 500D! It went to a chap in New South Wales. I hope he has as much fun with it as I did. He got a bargain! I would have been stoked with that deal! So the money is sitting in the bank and was supposed to go straight towards a 550D, but i am just not sure if that’s what I want to do. I’m seriously considering kicking the HVX and getting a 5D MKII when the new firmware comes out. Being able to record audio properly on that sucker is going to be killer! So considering that’s the only thing I keep the HVX around for these days, it’s possible she might be going to a new home. It’s done it’s time and really, somebody somewhere will give it a hell of a better life than it has now, sitting in the corner in it’s Pelican case. Probably going to sell it all as a kit.

Well, that’s about it for now. I’ll be doing a bit more around here in the coming weeks. It’s time to get back into the swing of things. Next up I’ll be bringing you some information on a group of unlikely lads who have got their hands on Firmware dumps of the 500D and 550D and will be doing their best to bend the 500D to their will, cracking it wide open and making it do all those cool things we want it to. We’ll be following their progress closely because if and when they succeed, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of happy campers out there!

More soon. . .

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!

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