This post is sort of a prelude to a review that i’ll be writing in the next couple of weeks. Recently the folks at IKAN sent me one of there v5600 to test out while I have been shooting some video with my 7d and 5d. When I started to take down some notes I realized that there are a few things to be said about using external monitors with these cameras and some of them are characteristics of the cameras and therefore independent of the type of monitor you are using. I found myself trying to figure out what was caused by the camera and what was the monitor so In order to not confuse the review at all, here are some things worth knowing……
When I decided I needed to get this video stuff dialed, I needed something to shoot. There’s no point trying to figure this all out unless you have a purpose and some footage to play with. Leigh Powis, a local skier from Whistler, told about his crazy plan to put a trampoline on top of a cliff to help him practice a few new tricks before the winter. This was the perfect chance to try filming some action AND some lifestyle.
So below is my very first ever video with the 5dMKII. We shot it on 3 different days for about 2 hours on each day. Please click through to the actual Vimeo page if you want to watch the video in HD. But come back to find out more about the video!!
The lenses I used to shoot it were the 85mm1.8 , 17-40 f4, 24-105 f4, 70-200 f4,45mm 2.8 Tilt Shift, 15mm fisheye and the 50mm 1.8.
There are many people out there shooting videos with the 5dMKII right now. The new intro for Saturday Night Live was even shot with one last week! A lot of these video pros are attaching all sorts of accessories to the camera to make it easier to shoot video. External monitors, follow focus systems, matte boxes, shotgun mics and all manner of crazy rigs to hold them all together. This video though was shot with a 5dMKII on a tripod. Nothing else.
The tripod had a manfrotto 701HDV video head on it but that’s about the only difference to what I would usually carry for shooting photos. That’s not to say that all those potential accessories don’t make a difference, they undoubtedly do, but they are not a necessity if you want to travel light.
The whole video was shot in full manual mode so that I had total control over the aperture. In order to shoot at very wide apertures and keep the shutter speed down to something normal, I used a 2-stop neutral density filter on some of the lenses. Occasionally I also put a polarizing filter stacked on to the ND filter which has the effect of cutting down the light even more. This did produce some vignetting which you can see in a couple of the shots, but it actually looks like a nice effect! A 2 Stop ND is going to be the absolute minimum you need to get a nice looking DOF on a bright day though.
For a couple of shots I attached the camera to the end of a Manfrotto studio lighting boom arm. Not what it was intended for at all!! But it produced a dramatic angle. The panning shot right before the action starts at 2min08sec was shot like this. The camera fixed to the studio boom with a manfrotto magic arm and then panning on the mount on top of my regular Benro tripod. Again, a nice video boom would have been great, but I wanted to make this with just the gear I had access to. If you have read much about DSLR video before ,you will probably be aware of what “rolling shutter” is. You really have to be careful with your panning to avoid this. Slow and smooth is absolute necessity or you will get the jello effect. I also found that the visibility of this effect was somewhat dependent on what shutter speed I was shooting at. With a higher shutter speed it seemed to show up a lot easier.
Speaking of shutter speed, I experimented with that a bit too. My preference was for the footage that was shot between 1/120 and 1/250 for the action stuff. Anything faster than that and it gives it a sort of weird digital jerky effect. For the lifestyle shots and interview shots I think I used it down at around 1/60 though. I basically set the shutter speed I wanted, then used the filters to get to the aperture I wanted and then dialed in the ISO speed to get the correct exposure. Incidentally, that is something that I found frustrating. Its VERY easy to miss your exposure by a 1/3 of a stop because the “blinking highlights” feature is only available in playback. Most times I would shoot a quick 2 second clip to check exposure before shooting the shot. It would be great if there were some zebra lines to show overexposure. They are available int he Magic Lantern firmware hack but I haven’t ventured that far yet….
One thing that I was pleasantly surprised about was how easily I managed to nail the focus in the shots even though it is fully manual. The screen on the 5dMKII really is great and considering I wasn’t using any type of screen shade or eye-piece, I found it quite easy to get the focus right first time. Pulling focus between 2 subjects takes a bit of practice to do smoothly, but its possible.
When I first got the 5dMKII last winter, the camera world was buzzing about the incredible HD video that it can shoot as well as the beautiful 21MP images. This will be great I thought, I can shoot some videos in between shooting photos. When it actually came down to it though, nice idea as it is, I didn’t have the time mid-winter to learn about shooting video and editing HD video or learn about all the weird idiosyncrasies that the 5d’s video has. I made a couple of short videos that never turned out how I expected and then pretty much gave up on it until I had some time to sit down and figure it all out.
Every year in the Autumn downtime before winter I sit down and try and teach myself a new skill. Up this year was naturally DSLR video shooting and editing with Final Cut Pro. There’s a few things you need to be aware of, and a couple of problems to solve when shooting with the 5d so i’d better write it all down so you guys can give it s shot too.
The 5dMKII generates 1080p video files at 30fps in h.264 codec. Only one out of these three things is actually a good thing. Video people will look at 30fps and assume that I mean the NTSC standard of 29.97fps because it’s often shortened to 30fps when talked about. Wrong. For some reason Canon decided to use an actual 30fps so that is something you need to bear in mind if you are shooting with any other cameras that shoot at 29.97 and intend to mix footage and audio together. For me though, right now that wasn’t a huge problem and 30fps is just fine for web content which was my initial goal.
What was a problem though was the h.264 format of the files. H.264 is typically used as a finishing format, it’s a codec used to compress movie files when you export them from an editing program like Final Cut or Avid (if you are on a PC). The codec is NOT designed to be edited with and Final Cut will not handle it very well if you try. Importing native h.264 files into FCP will have it breathing like its having a heart attack in no time. Nothing renders in real time and a few seconds of footage requires a 5 minute render every time you make the smallest of changes. This is what put me off the most when i first experimented with the video back in the winter.
First what you need to do is become familiar with some sort of transcoding program that will convert all of your h.264 video into a format that will Final Cut can handle at speed. If you have Final Cut then you should also have Apple Compressor and this is certainly one program that can handle the task. Another option though is a fantastic piece of freeware called MPEG Streamclip. You can download it from their website HERE.
For batch processing a large number of files, I actually preferred using MPEG Streamclip for the job and it’s not at all as daunting as it may sound. Which format you convert to will depend on your intended output for your project. Are you aiming to make production quality TV shows, DVDs or just simply some web content at a scaled down size? If you want to make the highest quality available to you, it is generally considered that converting to Apple ProRes 422 is the best option. You will need Final Cut 6 or later though to have access to this codec. Converting all the h.264 files is more or less a case of just dragging and dropping the files into Compressor or Streamclip and selecting the relevant setting from the menus. I wont go into detail about that as its fairly self explanatory once you have the program in front of you. Converting to ProRes format will roughly quadruple the size of your video files though, so if you go down that route, make sure you have some serious disc space available and a powerhouse of a computer to edit with…
If you are looking for a smaller file size then converting to AIC (Apple intermediate codec) is a great option. File size is roughly half that of ProRes, it is very very hard to tell the difference between the two and AIC files are handled very quickly in Final Cut. This is the option that I chose to work with for my project.
At this point i’m going to leave it here for now as this is getting quite long. I have just finished editing a quick 5 minute short that I shot while I was going through this learning process and I will upload that to the web shortly, along with some more information on things I discovered whilst learning to shoot video with the 5d.
This morning I was woken up at 4am by someone hammering on my front door. I was ecstatic. Why?
Because the guy who was banging 7 shades out of my door, was also carrying my pelican case full of flash equipment that I had last seen at Queenstown airport in New Zealand 4 days ago. If you own and travel with an Elinchrom Ranger (or similar batery powered flash) then you would be advised to read on.
Let’s face it, if you put a Ranger through an x-ray scanner at an airport , it’s going to trigger some alarms. And so it should, a metal box full of wires wrapped around something resembling a car battery. I’d be worried if airport security didnt want to have a closer look at it. When flying though most countries, baggage security agents will open up your case, have a quick look at it, swab it for bomb making substances and then send it on its way. In case you are unfortunate enough to have an agent who has not seen a flash battery system before, its always advisable to include a copy of the manual for the Ranger clearly visible in the case.
You can download a copy of the manual from this link : HERE
On the font of the manual I write a quick note saying that the IATA specifications are located on page 4 of the manual. These specifications state that the Ranger battery meets all the necessary standards to be deemed a non-dangerous goods item by IATA providing that the 30amp fuse is removed from the battery and the battery stored separately from the Ranger.
Sometimes security agents get especially freaked out by the words “lead acid battery” written on the side of the battery case. It is in fact a Sealed Lead Acid Battery that does meet all the necessary requirements for air travel but I have had the batteries confiscated in the past at Auckland airport because the security personnel were not willing to listen to me. In that situation I returned home with everything apart from the battery and then contacted Elinchrom for a suggestion. They pointed me to a separate letter from a Panasonic engineer that specifically stated the specs for the actual battery inside the battery box.
I provided the agents at Auckland airport with this letter and they returned my battery. Keep a copy of this letter along with the Ranger manual inside your case.
So far I have flown to many different places with my Ranger and these 2 printed items have done the trick. But a few days ago I experienced more trouble traveling through Auckland airport. My bag was checked through to Vancouver via Auckland when I left Queenstown. My flight to Auckland was delayed and there was only a matter of minutes between landing there, and taking off again on my way to Vancouver. I was already on the plane which was about to pull away from the gate when an Air New Zealand representative came running down the aisle looking for me. I was dragged off the plane (in front of 300 pairs of glaring eyes) and was told that my bag had caused a level 4 security alert. No problem I told them, i know why and you can find the IATA specification for the offending item inside the case.
Now hear lies the problem because as it turns out, the passenger HAS to be present in New Zealand for the case to be opened. They could not read the info I had provided because they were not allowed to open the case unless I was there. At this point the plane was late and costing them a fortune in ground fees. My case was somewhere on the other side of the airport in a secure room. If they left it there, it could not be opened if I left, but if i went to open it the full 747 of people would be even later. And it was already 10 minutes late having waited for me to arrive on my connection from Queenstown.
Now in the end I talked them through exactly what it was in the case and sent the keys to the lock off with an Air NZ rep who went and opened it herself after many phone calls and frantic radio conversations. How could this have been avoided? Apparently if I had also carried a copy of the specifications with me in my hand-luggage and ALSO given a copy to the check-in agent ( who would have attached a note to the outside of the case) then this could have been avoided. They ended up sending me on the flight without my case, which finally arrived, as i mentioned last night.
I had always assumed that my case would opened by security and that the specs in the case would solve all problems. I dont know how many countries have similar regulations to New Zealand but in the future I will be travelling with a huge stack of these letters linked above and I suggest you do the same. Sitting on the other side of the world wandering if your precious cargo will ever safely make it back to you is not a nice feeling…..
Ever find yourself skiing,snowboarding or biking with a 40lb pack? Chances are your bag is full of speedlights, cameras and lenses with 4 lightstands hanging off the side just waiting to crack you in the side of the head at every turn.
This winter when I started to slimline my gear a bit in an effort to save my back, I decided that i needed to find some super lightweight lightstand solutions. I tried out some $10 tripods from ebay, you know the ones, shiny and silver , made from 1/2 mm think aluminum. Lightweight they are, but they are still too bulky if you have a few of them.
In the end, the solution was pretty simple. Why take a stand at all if I already have skis and ski poles (or bike handlebars and tree branches depending on the season). All I needed was find a way of attaching the flash to my ski tip or ski pole and then I can just stick that wherever I want.
Enter the Manfrotto 386B Nano Clamp. Most photographers are familiar with the ubiqutous Manfrotto Superclamp. This thing is bombproof and very sturdy but also far too big and heavy to be considered portable. Last year Manfrotto came out with it’s little brother, the 386B. It only weighs 110g but is rated to hold 4kg and it fits in the palm of your hand. On one side of the clamp is two threaded holes, 3/8 and 1/4. Then all you need to buy is a camera stud or spigot like this one. Having both 3/8 and 1/4 threads on it gives you some flexibility in what you attach.
If you carry 3 or4 lightstands, I wouldn’t necessarily replace all of them with these. But you could almost certainly replace 2 of them. The 386B clamp is extremely solid and well made (hence the slightly high price) but it will easily hold a couple of flashes. For more flexibility you could also add a very small ballhead onto the stud to help with aiming the flashes.
Ever looked at something and wished you could shoot 2 different angles? Any working photog these days is going to own more than one camera. If one of your cameras fails, you need to be able to finnish the job you are being paid for. But other than having the camera just as a backup, you can put that camera to good use too. Remote cameras are nothing new in sports photography. Take a look around any major sporting event and you will often see hundreds of remote cameras. Photographers for some large agencies will capture anything up to 10 different anlges with the push of one button. This type of setup is not something you see in action sports photography very often but it does happen and it can be very useful.
In a lot of circumstances it is just not practical for me to shoot with more than one camera, the weight of the extra equipment simply outweighs the benefits. But if I am shooting a park shoot or a snowmobile accessed backcountry jump then I will put my extra camera to use.
The remote camera is fired using the same pocketwizards that I use for my lighting gear, in fact the only extra piece of equipment you need is a motor cable to attach the pocketwizard to the 10-pin socket on the side of the camera. These cables have an in-line switch which you can flick to put the camera in a permanently “awake” mode. Mimicking the action of depressing the shutter button half way, it helps to make sure the camera fires the instant it receives a signal from the transmitting pocketwizard.
It all sounds remarkably simple but there are a few things I have learnt. Firstly, differing frames per second can cause a problem. My backup body is a 5dMKII which shoots considerably less frames per second than my 1DMKIIN (8 vs about 3 i think). I found that when holding the shutter button on the 1DMKII to fire a burst, the remote camera would not fire consistently at its fastest rate, it would stutter a bit. I solved this by using a pocketwizzard Multimax as the receiver on the 5d. ON the multimax you can adjust what is called “contact time” If you set the contact time for 2 seconds, one press on the transmitter and the receiver acts as if the test button is being held down for 2 seconds. By setting it up like this, the receiver was only really hearing the first initial signal from my transmitter as I begin a burst on the 1dMKIIN but it keeps the 5d firing continuously for 2 seconds at its maximum FPS.
The other problem with all of this is something a bit harder to solve. Pocketwizards are not quite all they are made out to be in many situations. I think the official maximum distance for their operation is something like 1500 feet, but that is under optimal conditions. As far as I can tell, these optimal conditions only exist in the lab of the company that makes these things, and certainly not at 8000ft in the coastal mountains of BC…… The operation of these things is something of a mystery but they do appear to be effected by temperature, weather, altitude….you name it really. There are things you can do to help, keeping line of site with the receiver is one of them and keeping the receiver as high above the ground as you can. But when it comes down to it, sometime they just wont work when you need them to. Never rely on a remote camera , but when the planets align and they do work you might just get yourself a great shot that you weren’t expecting. It’s a very satisfying feeling to scroll through the shots from you remote at the end of a shoot and see a shot that makes all the frustrations worthwhile.
This is an example of a setup i did on a backcountry jump earlier in the year. As you can see if you click on the photos, you can get two very very different looking angles with the push of one button.
A couple of days ago we took some time off sledding here in Whistler with the PBP crew to shoot a jib setup that I had found before the season started. The setup was a double bomb drop, one drop followed immediately by another one into some trees. I thought i’d take a bit of time to go over my thought processes when i’m shooting something like this. Unfortunately I can’t show you the final shot from the shoot but you’ll see it soon enough….
One of the first things you want to remember with this stuff is to try and make the setup look good. Take the time to make things look nice for the cameras. In this case it was being filmed too so it needed to look neat and tidy but even if i’m just shooting stills , its a good idea to keep it clean and tidy. Put square edges on your jumps and landings and try not to put unnecessary footprints in the background. These things wont always end up in your shot but if you do the work beforehand, once you have started shooting you won’t have to stop halfway and fix something up just because you have changed angles.
Next up, pick an angle or two. Normally I find there is one angle that jumps out at me as “The one”. I’ll fire off a couple of test shots shutter priority set to 1/320 (max sync speed on my canon 1DMKIIN) so I can get an idea for the angle and also what the exposure is going to be. Then I’ll stick the camera in Manual at 1/320 and guestimate f-stop for the ambient exposure i’m going to need to underexpose by a stop or two in order to stop ghosting. The exact amount or underexposure really depends on how much ambient is hitting the feature , in this case the rock was actually pretty well shaded so i hardly needed to underexpose the sky by much at all and the rock was almost totally dark. We were also shooting at the end of the day so the sky had a nice deep color to it.
Now I know what my exposure setting is going to be it’s time to get out some lighting kit. I shot this with 4x Nikon sb80DXs and one Elinchrom Ranger RX. The SB80s were on dual brackets with each pair fired by one pocketwizard. Note though that just because they are on the same bracket doesnt mean they have to be aimed at the same subject… In the final scenario here, all 4 SB80s were aimed at different points by swiveling their heads around. The next two photos show some of the differences that light placement can make. The first setup had the ranger behind me, 2 SB80s on the left firing up at where the rider would be and then 2 more SB80s on the right firing up at the rider. This looked pretty crap though, not enough contrast in that rock and just pretty dull looking. The ranger was pointing far too close to the same direction as the camera was so there were very little shadows cast on the rock and the moss. FAIL.
For the second setup I moved the Ranger over to the right (you can see the flare from it in the second shot below. That created some nice contrast in the snow on the rock now and a great reflection in the wet rock on the bottom right (compare the two!). I then aimed one of the SB80s on the left at the rock as there was no longer any light on that side of the rock. The second SB80 from that bracket was zoomed to 105mm and pointed at the spot in the air where i wanted the rider to be. The second pair of SB80s was positioned behind me. One was zoomed to 70mm and aimed at the skier (not 105mm like the other one as this one was closer to the rider) and the second was left wide at 17mm filling in the front of the rock slightly. The third shot below shows the view from above down to the landing and gives you some idea of the distances involved. The Ranger is much further back as it is way more powerful. For the fastest flash duration on a Ranger you have to have it at full power so it needs to be set back quite a long way in order to get the same exposure as the SB80s
Now we’re getting somewhere. I got one of the riders to stand on top so I can get a feel for the shot and make some fine adjustments to the lighting. Have them throw a snowball so you can see the trajectory and then you are good to go! All of the flashes I was using have a fast flash duration at full power, fast enough that I can confidently leave them at full power for most things as in this case. Then all you have to do to adjust your exposure is alter the distances that the flashes are from the subject or use the zoom function on the flash head if it has one. Doing this quickly is just a matter of practice, I don’t use a light meter for any of it. After a while you’ll be able to get your exposures and distances pretty dead on very quickly.
Time to drop! Video courtesy of Jeff Thomas/Poorboyz Productions.
Once I have the strobes where I want them for the shoot I tend not to move them until I have the shot I want fromt that angle. What you will normally find though is that there are some good lifestyle oppertunities as the riders go about doing there thing. The exposure for my shot was going to be f10, 1/320 at iso 200. That would properly expose the rock and the rider for the action shot but by following the riders round with a longer lens and simply adjusting the aperture as they got further away from the strobes, you can usually grab a couple of lifestyles if you are quick. These 2 shots of Dane Tudor and Charley Ager were shot entirely by using the lighting setup fot the action shot. Nothing was planned, I simply reacted to where they were and quickly adjusted the exposure.
UPDATE: September 20th 2009.
So when i wrote this post, I couldn’t show you any of the action shots from the shoot. I needed to wait and find out if any of them were going to get used for commercial uses or in magazines. As it happens, the best shot from this shoot was picked up by Salomon to use as an international advert for one of their new skis, the Suspect, and you might also see it crop up as a poster for one of their top skiers, Dane Tudor.
I thought I should wirte a quick post on the importance of backing up your files and photos from your computer. I’m writing this from an internet cafe, the hard drive from my computer has terminally failed for the second time in less that 12 months.
Hard disks are mechanical, all mechanical things will eventually fail, theres no question of that. Its just a matter of time. When will they fail? For the most part you can never tell, but they will, trust me.
Now, im not panicking about this, I am very careful about backing up my files so I know that I haven’t lost anything. My primary drive in my computer is backed up automatically every hour by Time Machine which is the program built into OSX 10 (leopard) on the mac. All my digital photos are stored on external drives and they are stored redundantly with identical copies on two seperate 1TB dives. As a further precaussion I also put select files on an internet storage facility to cover myself against something like a house fire that would take out all of my drives.
If you do not backup up your files you will lose them eventually. It might be next week or it might be in 10 years but give it time and it will happen. It`s not all doom and glom though, with the price of hard disk space falling through the floor now though there is no excuse not to backup your files. 1TB drives are available for $100 and 1TB holds a lot of photos. With the invention of storage robots such as the Drobo there is just no excuse. It couldnt be simplar to make your files redundant these days. Raid systems from companies such as LaCie take care of everything for you and the Drobo system is even upgradeable so you can just keep adding more and more storage to it as required. My current external drives are nearly full and I will be testing out the drobo system soon i think.
If you are reading this and thinking ` oooh I have been meaning to backup up my files for a long time` I urge you to stop reading right now and do just that. One day you will kick yourself if you don`t.
I`m taking this opportunity to upgrade my computer system too but when i`m fully back online in a couple of days time expect an update about my trip to Vancouver last week to shoot with Poorboyz productions.
Firstly let’s just quickly cover why you might want to make a twin flash bracket. Using two flashes where you might normally only have one has several advantages. Firstly and most obviously you have double the power, useful if you are trying to overpower the sun outside. Secondly if you use both flashes at half power, you’ll have the same total power as with one flash but with a much faster recycling time. The third advantage is that at half power you will also have a much faster flash duration. The exact factor of duration increase will depend on the type of flash you are using but it can often be half the duration at half power. Very useful if you are shooting fast moving subjects as I often am.
You can buy twin flash brackets that range from $50 up to $100. For me this is excessive for something so simple. I needed 4 and there’s no way i was going to pay hundreds of dollars so I decided to make some at home. Total cost for 4 brackets….$10
Firstly you need to make a quick trip to the hardware store to pick up a box of screws. You’ll need 1/4 – 20 screws and i used ones that were 1 inch in length. You are also going to need some threaded inserts, again with 1/4 – 20 thread.
Next you need to take a trip to your closet and find some hangers from your pants. Hopefully you have some wooden ones similar to the ones in the photo below. With a bit of twisting and pulling you should be able to remove the metal hanger leaving you with two flat wooden bars. Now mark the centre point of the bar and mark points 2 inches in from both ends. With a 1/4 inch drill bit drill holes right through on all these marks. With a 1/4 inch hole in the middle , the threaded insert will be a tight fit so you might need to give the drill a wiggle to widen it very slightly but you still want it to be tight. With a rubber mallet bang the insert through the middle hole, the spikes will help to secure it in the wood.
Next you need to mix up some epoxy glue ( or something similar). Push the screws through the other two holes and add a couple of washers on one side. The washers just make sure that theres a nice flat surface for when you screw on the coldshoes for your flashes. A generous helping of epoxy around the base of the screw should secure it all in place and voila! You have yourself a twin flash bracket for about $2 each.
Now they may not be quite as slick as the $50 ones from Paramount Cords or the $100 ones from Really Right Stuff but they do the job very nicely.
This post is sort of a prelude to a review that i’ll be writing in the next couple of weeks. Recently the folks at IKAN sent me one of there v5600 to test out while I have been shooting some video with my 7d and 5d. When I started to take down some notes I realized that there are a few things to be said about using external monitors with these cameras and some of them are characteristics of the cameras and therefore independent of the type of monitor you are using. I found myself trying to figure out what was caused by the camera and what was the monitor so In order to not confuse the review at all, here are some things worth knowing……
