Today Poorboyz productions released the official trailer for their new movie Everyday Is A Saturday.  With the most comprehensive list of athletes ever featured in one ski movie this is a guaranteed hit.  For the last few months I have spent a lot of time with the crew up here in British Columbia shooting rails, backcountry jumps and lines.  Let me tell you right now, this movie will be ridiculous!  Check out a few behind the scenes photos below, click for larger versions

UPDATE:  Read my review of the TT1 transmitter HERE.

Today the makers of Pocketwizards announced two new models to add to their lineup.  I’m not going to go into details about what the current PWs do, if you don’t know then this isn’t going to be of interest to you at all….

First the good news, the new TT1 and TT5 are backwards compatible with the old models so there is no need to go out and replace the whole lot!  The big new feature is that with a TT1 or TT5 on your camera and a TT5 on your canon speedlight – you can do wireless remote ETTL.  Great for some people but whilst I do own a Canon speedlight , it hasn’t been out of its bag in 2 years so this feature would not make me buy the new models.  So what is there in here that might be useful to a action sports photographer like me?  I always use all of my remote strobes in manual mode so the ETTL capabilities are useless.  But hidden away in all of the technical jargon and PR speak in the press releases is something VERY interesting and it’s called Hypersync……

It sounds like wizardry to me but the long and the short of it is that the TT1 (or TT5) on the camera can be programmed to fire your flash a few microseconds BEFORE your old pocketwizards could.  They do this because they know when you are about to fire the flash and you can program it to jump the gun slightly.  The exact amount of time can be programmed by hooking it up to your computer so that you can experiment with finding the best timing for your strobes.  What this does for you is allow you to typically find a setting that will allow you to shoot with a higher sync speed than you normally would be able to.

Shooting action with strobes is a constant battle with ambient light (unless it’s dark).  You have to under power the ambient enough that you wont have any ghosting in your action image but this can be a struggle in full sunlight, especially if you are shooting with fairly low powered strobes.  Using the new Hypersync technology will enable you to shoot in brighter light with your strobes! For owners of the 5dMKII like myself, this could be a huge benefit , with its lowly 1/200 sync speed its mostly useless in bright light unless you can get your strobes right next to your subject.  On the other hand, this will also enable me to sync at 1/500 with my MKIIN which would be a huge improvement!  Becauause all of this wizardry is done in the transmitting unit, you only need to buy one of either the TT1 or TT5 to take advantage of Hypersync with your old PW system.  There are also 2 custom programmable settings in the transmitter so that you can store two Hypersync offset values for say 2 different cameras or 2 different strobe setups.  It sounds to me like this Hypersync offset is something that will take some experimentation to get right, every camera and strobe will need a different timing offset but once perfected, this will make a huge difference to the versatility of strobe work.  Initially they are only available for Canon cameras (fine by me) but Nikons are soon to follow and I will be doing an in-depth test of how the Hypersync works as soon as they hit the shelves so stay tuned!

I have a love hate relationship with Pocketwizards.  When they work there is nothing better for triggering your remote strobes.  But take them up in the mountains, put them in negative temperatures and things can quickly go awry. Triggering distace can drop to mere metres and misfires occur frequently.  From the pocketwizard site today is a teaser for new triggers to be revealed on Monday.  Most likely these will simply be a challenge to the radio poppers , allowing wireless ETTL.  But you never know….. maybe they will have something cool up their sleeves.

About 3 years ago when I decided to start taking my shooting seriously, I also decided that I was going to need a fisheye lens.  What action sports photographer doesnt have a fisheye right?  Being a Canon shooter gave me two options, the Canon 15mm Fisheye or the Sigma 15mm Fisheye.  At the time I remember reading something posted on the website Wheels And Wax.com saying that the two were nearly identical in image quality.  I had just bought a 70-200 2.8L IS so I though i’d save the money and buy my one and only non-canon lens with the intention of upgrading it somewhere along the line.  3 years on and i’m still using the Sigma and i’m continually impressed by the quality of the images I can make with it.  Even when shooting with my 5DMKII, the full frame 22 megapixel sensor doesn’t faze it.

Last week I was away on an assignment in Revelstoke, BC.  Half way through one of the days I used the Sigma but stupidly put it in my pocket as I switched to my other wide angle.  I forgot that I had done this and after getting the shot I skied down to the skier I was shooting.  At this point I was skiing with 3 backpacks through a foot of fresh snow and the weight of it all got the better of me and I fell over.  The Sigma fell from my pocket……… and worse still, i didnt realise until I got back to the hotel at the end of the day.  Needless to say I was pretty bummed, I figured I’d never see the little guy again and If I did, the negative temperatures and snow would probably have ended him.  But the next morning I went up for a look around anyway, I figured I knew where it would have fallen out of my pocket and by a stroke of luck it was right there, just beneath a layer of snow but still visible as a dark patch in the white surroundings. I quickly brushed it of, resisting the temptation to warm it up straight away for fear of causing huge amounts of condensation on the inside.   I immediately put it on my camera though and fired it up, though the focus motor was slow to get up to speed , incredibly it was as good as new!

Below are some examples, the first was shot last week in Revelstoke.  Shot with the Canon 5DMKII ISO400, 1/1000, f9.0.  Obviously there is going to be some vignetting when the lens is used at wider apertures but I think it is very well controlled and almost unnoticeable on a full frame at f4.5.  Because the scene was so white in this example I used the 5DMKIIs incredible higher ISO quality to give me a smaller aperture just to be perfectly sure that the sky and snow would not be darkened in the shot at all. 100% crops are also provided.

The second shot is an example of the field of view when the lens is on a 1.3 crop camera, in this case the 1DMKIIN, F5.6 ISO 160, 1/250th.  On a 1.3 crop vignetting is only really noticeable wide open but overall sharpness does benefit from being stopped down to f4.0.

Interestingly, over the last few years the gap in price between the Sigma and the Canon fisheyes has narrowed.  I did a little research and typically the Canon is only $100 more than the Sigma version now.  When I bought mine, the difference was more than a couple of hundred dollars.  Now I dont have a Canon fisheye to compare to, from what i’ve read they are very similar in quality but this isn’t designed to compare the two.  When i thought that I had lost this lens last week I found myself feeling more disspointed than I imagined I would.  It was only really then that I realized how much I love this lens and how many great shots it has given me over the years.