Leaving the house, we drove straight towards the Hinterland. Threatening rainclouds hung low over the hills, ready to disgorge the contents of their swollen bellies. It wasn’t looking good, but come hell or high water (or summer rain storms) I was going to shoot Kondalilla falls. . .After a rocky start with a sun shower hitting us just as I was about to film the views from halfway up the mountain, everything went smooth as silk. . .

This outing, whilst obviously focusing on getting shots of Kondalilla falls was really just to get more acquainted with the new 7D. Of course it’s a camera like any other, but I have to shoot my first job with it tomorrow and I don’t want to look like a kook. There is no better way to learn, than to do. Well, as someone who’s been completely self-taught, I have to believe that don’t I?

With my lovely lady, Katie, in tow, off we set, looking forward to seeing Kondalilla as we’d never been there before.

Katie was my wonderful walking model for the shoot when I needed just a little bit of movement. We only noticed when we got back to look at the footage that her tag was hanging out. Needless to say, she was mortified. I’m sure we’ll be able to deal with it in time, but for now the pain is too near I did assure her none of you would mind the tag, probably preferring to study what the actual picture looks like, how much noise there is in the shadows or the depth of any particular lens.

I used 4 lenses for this shoot – the Tokina 11-16 f2.8, Sigma 30mm f1.4, 50mm f1.8 and the 75-300 f4-5.6. I wished I could have got closer to the falls, but I definitely wasn’t going to swim over there and that was the only way it could happen.

First off, Low Light. I am impressed. The Kookaburra shot at the start was shot at full telephoto on that sloooow 75-300 at 1000 ISO. Sure there’s grain in it, but I definitely couldn’t have done that before. The 500D would have been pushing an automatic 1600 ISO and been completely unusable. Very pleased with that. I found that even in the dimmest filtered light I didn’t have to go much above 400 ISO, which was a very pleasant surprise.

The actual image it puts out is lovely. Is it as sharp as the Sony EX1? No definitely not. Is it still acceptable for a 1080P image, of course. I didn’t see too much aliasing at all on this shoot. I would say this is because it’s largely very dense confusing foliage and there isn’t many straight lines for it to work it’s ugliness on.

The ability to manually set a kelvin temperature as a white balance is an invaluable tool when shooting video. It’s something I have missed immensely and yesterday it was wonderful to have that at my disposal. It has been agonising using presets with the 500D and the whole “set a white balance off a still image” tool is positively useless for what I need. I don’t want a correct white balance, I want one that looks good. So this Kelvin setting is just great! If you haven’t tried it, give it a go!

You may wonder why I didn’t pull a really great shot of the water cascading down through the air at 60P. That would have looked great in slow motion, wouldn’t it? Well I didn’t do that for one really good reason. I forgot that I could! Ha! I totally spaced it and forgot I could shoot 60P. Kind of funny really, considering I did it the day before. I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again. One thing I do wish though, is that you didn’t have to change the video mode to NTSC to select the 30P and 60P frame rates. That is a little annoying and I hope they get it fixed for the 7D MKII.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I had better go and spend some time with the gorgeous one out there in the lounge room, she is already concerned that the 7D is the new flavour of the month and has knocked her off the perch. Can’t have that now, can we?

I’ll get around to doing a bit more of an in-depth review when I am better acquainted with the camera. . .

More soon

TESTING, TESTING!!! 1,2,3!

Disclaimer: This is straight out of the camera! It includes unaltered wind generated lens shake, automatic highlight tone priority visibly changing the exposure (lesson learnt!), messy pans and all. It is not meant to be a showcase of my best work, it is only to show the results of my first afternoon shooting this camera. There are some shots in there that I would never include in a final edit for upload, but have here because a camera test should be just that, a warts and all look at what it looks like. There is a time and a place for icky-sticky sugar coated depth of field wack off material, but this isn’t it.

Just quickly, as I’ll cover this in more detail once I’ve really got to know the camera better, my first impressions are these. It’s lovely to shoot with, coming from the 500D there is no comparison as to how much easier it is to get the shot you want with the settings you need. Image quality is as expected, great! Aliasing, hell yeah. It’s very noticeable in some scenes and not very nice at all. Is it going to pose a huge problem for me? No, it’s not, but it’s just not nice, ya know?! Low Light? Seems to handle it very well, I could have pushed it harder, but didn’t. . .I will today.

The way that 75-300 of mine shakes in the wind, you can see the image goes a bit jello-ish. It’s not nice, I suppose a more solid lens could fix that. Well, I hope so. I imagine a Matte box in that kind of wind would be out of the question. We’ll have to see when I get a matte box.

In the hand it feels great, on screen it looks great, I couldn’t get achieve maximum flash sync speed of 1/250 with my ebay CTR-301p radio triggers, most I could get was 1/200, disappointing but it’s not going to kill me.

Slow motion is nice, unfortunately the aliasing is more noticeable at 720P. That sucks! Despite what some other bloggers have said, you can watch back video shot at 50P/60P in slow motion in camera. You just have to select the slow motion playback icon. Simple really!

Anyway, take a look, let me know what you think. I’m heading out to do a serious test now and hope to have something actually worth watching up soon.

Looking to escape the southern winter cold, a seething, roiling mass of people all funnel into the Sunshine Coast at this time every year. It’s school holidays, and for us locals that means for the most part we don’t venture out, preferring to avoid the madness and leave the clogged streets and long lines to the blow in’s.

For these kids though, who are lucky enough to live right on the beach at Marcoola, their secluded little stretch of sand doesn’t attract too many tourists and provides hours of fun when school isn’t on the program.

Now this clip was more of a quick test. I shoot the 500D locked off on a tripod most of the time and after the Fiji trip and watching Brett go absolutely psychotic with the 5D MKII handheld and seeing the results, I decided I would give it a go.

Brett has this full on approach to ‘getting the shot’ when shooting people. He gets right up their faces, into the action, where I would normally hang back and be a little more reserved, preferring to give them some space. I realised that because I wasn’t really getting in there, I was missing classic moments and my shots were at times lacking in excitement because of it. So enter this test at Marcoola Beach.

I went down there with the tripod to grab some general wides, as it was a lovely day and I’d been down there for about 5 minutes when a girl came down with her little brother and 2 sisters. So after a brief chat with the eldest sister, in which I assured her I wasn’t some dodgy lecherous old man and offered to show her my Blue Card (A card provided by the government that says you are allowed to work with Children), she agreed to let me film the little tackers going nuts and having a great old time.

I discovered the joy of shooting children (that sounds a lot worse than it is hey? ) when my father had a little girl about 2 years ago. She was pretty much the cutest most amazing little thing to ever walk the earth (I’m sure there are other Brothers/Dad’s out there that feel their little princess deserves that title. . .I’ll fight you for it! ). She loved the camera and I found her to be great subject matter for all manner of fun little clips. I loved shooting them but I think I mostly shot them for her, as she would watch them over and over, mesmerised by the fact that she was on TV. I got a real kick out of that. But I digress. . .

I started off pretty far away, on my long lens, the old Canon EF 75-300 f4-5.6. After getting a couple of shots with that, I whacked the Canon 50mm f.18 II on there and not being in close enough, decided to get some handheld stuff of the waves. I was just about to pack it up, when they started playing in the sand, digging and drawing things. So up I trot and after asking nicely if I could get right in there, did exactly that. Hand held and just trying to get in and get amongst it. . .There was sand and crap flying everywhere, but it was great fun and I was pleased with the shots. They definitely are a lot more lively than they would have been if I had of stayed locked off on the long lens from 20 metres away.

So did I learn a valuable lesson? Absolutely! I’ll definitely be doing more of this again soon.