I traveled a lot this year, much more than previous years.  This is a quick list of what I would consider to be essential items for a photographer on the road.

1. Power Strips

If you’ve ever spent prolonged periods bouncing from one hotel to the next then you’ll know that the one thing they all have in common is a lack of power sockets.  By the time you take into account a couple of camera battery chargers, a laptop, flash battery chargers, phone charger, iPod, point and shoot camera, audio recorder and video camera you can imagine how many things you might need to plug in a one time.  A power strip is an absolute necessity!  Make sure that you get one that is rated for both 110v and 240v or even up to 250v to take into account fluctuation voltages in some less developed areas.  One of the best solutions I have found so far is the 3 Port + USB Outlets to Go model from Monster cable.  It offers 3 power sockets and a USB charger all in one package, complete with a built in cable management system.  The best part about the design is that the 3 sockets are spaced well apart, with one on the back and two on the front.  This means that even with the biggest power brick, you can still get something into the socket next to it.  It can be had from Amazon for less than $15 and at that price you just can’t complain!  Make sure of course that the device you are plugging into the power strip can also handle 240 volts!

2. Plug adapters

You are going to need to adapt the plug on the end of your power strip to fit the local socket type so decent plug adapter is also a necessity.  The Warrior Go!Con adapter is a crazy looking device but I have seen it recommended in a few places if you can get hold of it.  They come from Japan and whilst you can order them from their website, they are not so cheap.  You can also order them from this other Japanese website and pay in US$ this looks like it would be the easiest.  It looks complex to arrange, but it does seem to have the biggest variety of plug adaptions that I have ever seen and the whole thing folds flat and fits in your pocket!  Quite amazing if you can find one.  If you want to find something a little closer to home then take a look at this universal adapter from the online travel store Magellans.

3. External Hard Drives

No matter where you go you should always be backing up your photos.  When I’m on the road I use the LaCie Rugged line of drives which I have written about before. So far no problems with them at all and no failures.  Prices have come down a bit now and the top of the line triple interface 500gb drive can be had for under $140.  Keep an eye out for USB 3.0 drives in the near future though.  Right now not many laptops support USB 3.0 but that will all change within the year so expect companies like LaCie to follow that up with new drives.  There are drives that are physically smaller but the rubber bumper and internal rubber suspension gives me a little piece of mind.  I tend to travel with 2 of these, one of which I format before each trip to use for photos, and the other one contains my music and movie collection.  If you keep one set of photos on your laptop and one on your external drive, make sure you don’t have them in the same bag when you are traveling.  That way you can’t lose all your shots if the bag gets lost or stolen.

4. Camera Insurance

If you are traveling with professional gear than more than likely the maximum value of gear you have will well exceed any travel insurance policy that you have.  A lot of regular policies also won’t cover gear being used for business so you should think about getting everything insured by a specialist.  Some people find that adding gear to an existing home insurance policy is an option but finding a company that specializes in camera insurance has a lot of advantages.  There is a couple of ways you can insure things with most people, either a worldwide policy that insures your gear wherever you travel for a single rate, or have a policy that cover things when you are home and then add a rider to your policy for each trip that you take.  Depending on how much you travel, one of these will work better for you.  If you travel a lot then go for the full package and you have one less thing to organize before your trip.

Two important things to look for in the policy; does it cover your gear when it is locked in a car?  And does it cover the rental cost of gear if your gear gets lost or stolen?  The latter is extremely important.  Make sure that if any of your gear gets lost by the airline, you are covered to rent gear to get the job done.  Again, specialist companies will have this kind of thing in place already and they will have procedures for solving these problems.  Also check with the company to make sure you can easily add more gear to your list as you buy more.  Living in Canada I can’t really speak for insurers in other countries but my gear is insured by CG&B Group.  Whilst its hard to track down on their site, they do have a specific policy for pro photographers and so far they have been great to deal with.

5. Rechargeable Batteries (NiMH)

It’s pretty fair to say that you will have something in you kit that needs AA batteries, most likely a flash.  I much prefer using rechargeable batteries to save the hassle of having to find some in a hurry in an area that you do not know.  Sanyo Eneloop batteries are particularly good for one main reason, they maintain their charge.  Most rechargeable batteries loose their charge over time.  If you have a lot of batteries then maybe there are some that dont get used so often.  With my old Energizer NiMH batteries I would often find batteries in my bag that had lost their charge and that can be a bit frustrating if you have forgotten to top them all up.  With the Eneloops though you can leave them for a whole year and they will still have maintained 85% of their charge.  They also make a pretty neat little dual battery charger that will top up a pair of Eneloops via the USB port on your laptop or by using one of the above mentioned power strips that has a USB port.  This is very handy if you are running low on power sockets in a hotel room.

6.  Have your equipment registered by customs

This information will vary from country to country but I will cover Canad and the USA.  I would assume that similar systems are in place in most countries so you might have to do a little research.  Note that this is not eh same as the ATA Carnet program.  For enormous amounts of equipment the Carnet would still be the way to go but for anything that one person can carry I have not found it necessary.  Instead in Canada there is a simple procedure you can do at the airport to register your equipment with customs officials.  Called the Y38 form (”Identification of Articles for Temporary Exportation”), all you have to do is show your equipment serial numbers to the customs agent in the departure terminal and they will record it on the form.  It is then signed and stamped as proof that you did indeed have that equipment in Canada.  One one piece of your equipment is listed the Y38 form is valid for life so you do not need to keep re-registering your gear.  Just keep the forms in your travel bag for next time.  Upon re-entering Canada if you are questioned about whether you purchased any of your gear while you are away, you can show them the forms to prove that you had it when you left.  Note that you can still be asked for proof of purchase in Canada if they want, but I have never been asked.  Generally they are just pleased that you were organized enough to get the forms filled out before you left!

In the USA there is a very similar system but the form is called the US Customs form 4457.  The procedure is identical, simply find the customs office in the departure terminal and get the to record your serial numbers of your lenses and cameras.  The forms are good for life so get them done and keep them safe.

7. Card Reader

You can plug a USB cable directly into a camera to retrieve you images but you will experience download speeds of anything up to 3 times slower than you will get if you use a dedicated card reader and a regular card.  If you are using UDMA high speed memory cards then the difference will be even more pronounced.  Even though I typically try to take as little gear as possible with me, a card reader is one of those things where I value the speed and time saving it gives me over the relatively small bulk+weight added to my bag.  There are hundreds and hundreds of different readers out there but I like to keep it simple with a Compact Flash card reader only.  None of this 78-in-1 reader business.  All my main cameras shoot CF cards and whilst my Canon s90 point and shoot is SD card I shoot relatively few shots with that camera so it’s not a big deal.  I use a Sandisk Cards and a Sandisk Extreme CF card reader.  I know that a lot of micro four thirds and Canon Rebel series cameras do shoot SD card though so if you have one of those, or a combination of CF and SD cards then take a look at the Lexard Dual slot reader that is UDMA compatible, or the Hoodman USB 2.0 UDMA reader.

8. Laptop Computer

Lets face it, if you shoot digital then you need a laptop computer.  There are far too many possibilities out there for me to run through them all.  The type of laptop that is suitable will depend on what you need to do to your images while you are on the road.  Some people just need something to download their memory cards and maybe upload shots to a server.  In this case you could get away with a small cheaper netbook.  Some people need to be able to edit their photos in Lightroom and Photoshop while they are away so something a little more powerful is necessary.  By far the most popular choice for creative professionals is the Apple Macbook Pro though. I’m not sure what overall worldwide percentages is but in my industry I would say 90% of people travel with an Apple laptop.  For myself I actually do very little editing while I am away but I do like to catalog in Lightroom and I also appreciate the 15″ screen on my macbook for watching movies and TV shows while I am on the plane or at the hotel.

9. At least one short prime lens

I would consider a short prime to be something in the 50mm -24mm range and however light I’m packing I always make sure there is at least one prime in my kit. Why ?  Well if it were possible I would only have prime lenses due to their increases contrast and image sharpness.  But a kit of primes is far heavier than a zoom + prime kit and due to the type of photography I do weight is a factor.  Short prime lenses tend to have a much larger aperture though and having at least one lens with an aperture in the f1.8 -f1.4 range is very useful for nigh time photography in whatever city you find yourself in or photography inside buildings such as museums, cathedrals, restaurants.  I often take my best photos when I go for a walk with just one prime lens because it really makes you focus on what you are shooting.  On my 5dMKII I prefer a 35mm or 50mm lens but mostly I carry my 1dMKIV with a 24mm f1.4 II mounted on it.  If it has to be really lightweight then a 50mm 1.8 on the 5dMKII will do just fine.  And photos shot on primes with wider apertures have a very different look to typical shots from most zoom lenses so it really helps to bring some diversity to your shots from a particular trip.

10. Rocket blower sensor cleaner

Even though newer cameras have automatic micro-vibrating sensor cleaning functions, they don’t keep all the dust off. There are several similar products available but the Giottos products do a great job and are available in many different sizes. Due to their grenade-like appearance, expect to get some funny looks from airport security personnel though! Continually changing lenses outdoors means that you will get dust buildup around the mirror mechanism but a few squeezes with the blower and you will prevent that dust from ever getting to the lens. If you have more persistent particles check out the products from Visibledust. I use their wet cleaning fluids every few months and also their statically charged brushes if the blower can’t shift the dirt. Gitottos also do some kits that include blowers cloths and some lens cleaning solution that you can get from B&H

10.5 Local knowledge

I’ll call this 10.5 because this is a small thing and somewhat dependent on what the purpose of your travels are, but if I have been sent half way around the world on a commercial shoot then I always take the time to research local camera stores and equipment rental places.  If my gear goes down and needs replacing in a hurry, or the airline loses my pelican case then I already know exactly who I’m going to call.

Everyone who shoots with DSLRs for video knows the problems with high speed panning, the dreaded “jello vision” or rolling-shutter effect.  This is caused by the way the camera’s sensor records the information, top to bottom.  As you pan, the image that the sensor starts to record at the top, is shifted slightly to one side by the time the sensor has finished recording the data at the bottom so the subjects appear to bend to one side.  But this does not really effect your video if you want to perform a tilt at high speed because relative to the vertical lines on the sensor, the subject is not moving. A couple of days ago I wanted to try out my 300mm f2.8 L IS for filming with my 1dMKIV.  I was attending a snowboarding competition and I knew that with such a long lens I was going to need to follow the action pretty fast.  Instead of setting up for a standard panning movement, I climbed high above the action and shot a high speed tilt instead, thereby making full use of the cameras abilities and not allowing it’s main weakness to effect my ability to get a cool shot.  There is some panning motion in there too but it is a much smaller amount than it would have been if I was side on to the action.  Also bear in mind that I have conformed this from 60p to 30p in cinema tools, so the actual speed of tilt was twice as fast as it appears, and the footage held up nicely.

Tomorrow the Apple iPad will finally launch internationally,including in my home country of Canada. I have written previously about what an iPad can do for photographers and now everyone outside of the US can find out for themselves.  To mark the occasion I have decided to offer up a FREE wallpaper for your brand new iPad.  Wallpapers for the iPad need to be 1024px X 1024px.  This is somewhat unusual, and only a portion of this picture will be able to be seen at one time, depending on whether you have the iPad in vertical or horizontal mode.

The wallpaper I’m offering here is a photo of the Peak 2 Peak gondola at the ski resort of Whistler Blackcombb in my home town of Whistler, BC in Canada.  I’m offering it here for personal use only as a wallpaper for your iPad.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

If you are interested in creating your own iPad wallpapers I have also created a photoshop template that will help you visualize exactly which parts of your photo will be visible when the iPad is in a particular orientation.  You can DOWNLOAD THE IPAD WALLPAPER TEMPLATE by clicking the link.  It is a .psd file which you can open and overlay as a separate layer on top of you image in photoshop.  Make sure you lower the opacity a little bit on the template layer to reveal your photo underneath.  Then you can move your image around until you have it in just the right spot so it will look good in both orientations !  The areas covered by the red squares will never be seen, in either orientation.  The center square will always be seen, and the yellow strips will be seen depending on whether you have it horizontal or vertical.

Adobe release Photoshop CS5 a couple of days ago and one of the most talked about features is the content aware fill tool.  I recorded a quick demo of it this morning with a couple of potential uses.  I don’t think its quite the “black magic” that it seemed to be when Adobe demonstrated it but it could be a time saver in some situations.  Just using the tool on its own though rarely does the job, it still needs considerable touching up with the healing tool and brushes but at least it can get you in the ball park pretty quickly.  If you want to try it out yourself head on over to the Adobe website and download a free 30 day trial.  I didnt have a chance to play with many other features but there seemed to be a slight speed increase and I also really like the mini Bridge module.

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So you’ve mastered you wide-angle lenses and medium telephoto zooms like the ubiquitous 70-200.  The next step is inevitably looking at longer lenses in the 300mm and up range.  Firstly, be prepared for your wallet to take a bit of a hit.  For the most part, once you start heading north of 200mm the price of lenses can take a bit of a jump for the higher quality ones.  I can’t cover every lens option but here’s a few thoughts on some of your options from the main two manufacturers.  During my years shooting skiing I have rarely needed a lens that goes much longer than 300mm.  Sometimes 400mm is good and a couple of times even longer.  But I would not say that for skiing and snowboarding photos you need a lens that is natively longer than 400mm.  If you need longer once a year, its best to use a teleconverter that time, than carry around unneeded range with you all the time.  Here are your main choices in order of ascending price…….

Nikon AF-S VR 70-300 f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED

Renowned wildlife photographer Moose Peterson called this lens “Nikons best kept secret” and if you are a Nikon shooter on a budget this is a great option as it comes in at less than $600.  It weights next to nothing compared to the other long lenses on this list but it still produces a very sharp image while working with all the full frame Nikon cameras.  Remarkably sharp for the price.  It would be nice if Canon had a lens in this range that people of the caliber of Moose or Joe McNally could rave about, but sadly they don’t so i’ll be skipping the Canon 70-300s.  They just don’t cut it.

Canon 300mm f4 L IS

This is a great lens , and one that seems to get overlooked by a lot of people.  Its design is fairly old and as such it doesn’t have as good weather sealing as modern L lenses but it is very very sharp.  Especially when stopped down to f5.6 and smaller.  This was my first long lens and I loved every shot I took with it.  The auto focus is not as fast at the 70-200, especially with fast moving objects that are close to the camera, but for shooting skiing and snowboarding at a distance ( big mountain lines) it does an admirable job and is great value.  It handles the 1.4x teleconverters decently too, as long as you have enough light to stop it down to f8 or even f10.  Another benefit is its light weigh, coming in at just 1.19kg

Canon 400mm f5.6 L

I know of at least 2 professional snowboard photographers that use this lens on a regular basis.  Personally I prefer the 300mm f4 because I have found 300mm to be of use on many occasions but the 400mm does produce a much sharper image than the 300mm f4 + 1.4x teleconverter combination.  Due to it’s age it lacks IS and weather sealing but it manages to pack 400mm into a respectably small package and it only weighs 2.75 lbs which is very appealing if you like to hike or go ski touring with you gear!  There are of course 2 other 400mm lenses in the Canon lineup but the 400mm f2.8 is far too big and heavy for skiing and the 400mm DO…. well image quality can be questionable and the price is fairly prohibitive.

Canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6 L IS

This is an odd lens firstly because of its age, its 12 years old and in most people’s eyes long overdue an update.  It utilizes a “push-pull” style zoom which personally I can’t stand and reportedly sucks dust into the lens over time.  It seems as though this lens also suffers from hugely varying build quality because there are many conflicting reviews out there.  Having said that it does go all the way to 400mm and with such a long zoom range it has versatility on its side.  If you already have a 70-200 though, you have some focal length overlap going on though and it performs very badly with teleconverters.

Canon 300mm f2.8 L IS

Amongst the pro Canon shooters in the industry this is the most popular of the longer lenses.  It is unspeakably sharp at all apertures and also works very well with the 1.4 teleconverter giving you a 420mm f4 L IS that still locks on super fast with the autofocus and if stopped down to f7 and smaller, is still amazingly sharp.  It even works well with the Canon 2x TC if you have enough light to get it stopped down to f10 or thereabouts.  This is something that I was very surprised with when I tested my own personal 300mm 2.8 in Alaska recently with the 2x TC.  I made some great images with this 60mm f5.6 (you lose 2 stops with the 2x tc).  Seriously, they didn’t even need sharpening in post production! The versatility of this lens is one of its major strong points.  A definite negative is its size and weight compared to the 300mm f4 IS and the 100-400 though.  It weighs in at 5.6lbs which is a noticeably heavy chunk of glass in your pack if you are skiing or snowboarding all day with it.  You certainly have to think hard about what other gear you want in your pack on a day when you take this lens out with you, but the images you get from it will always put a smile on your face.  In terms of sharpness and contrast this is probably Canons best ever lens.

Nikon 300mm f2.8 ED VRII

This MKII version was released by Nikon at the tail end of last year and reports are favorable.  It improves marginally on the sharpness of the first version and adds a stronger implementation of the image stabilization.  It’s worth noting though that currently (april 2010) there are still large stocks of the old MKI version of this lens which was also very very sharp, and now selling for more that $1000 less than the MKII version!  Size and weight are comparable to the Canon version mentioned above and it also works well with Nikons teleconverters.  In fact it was specifically designed to pair with the new Nikon TC-20E III

Nikon 200-400 f4 IS

This is a monster of a lens weighing in at 7.2 lbs.  Its size and weight means that its not that practical for ski and snowboard photography but I had to include it because it is simply the most impressive long zoom lens ever produced, and it covers the focal lengths we are discussing.  A constant f4 aperture makes this a physically large lens, but it maintains its sharpness throughout its range. On top of this, Nikon JUST announced version II of this lens.  Which adds better image stabilization and Nikon’s nano crystal lens coating for improved sharpness and less lens flare.

Please check out the rest of the Ski and Snowboard Photography 101 series HERE !

This sort of follows on from the review I did a few days ago of the Gisteq PhotoTrackr.  I was not overly enamored with the software that came in the box with the PhotoTrackr but it did allow you to export the GPS track to a .gpx file and that meant you can upload it to other software.  With the introduction of Aperture 3.0, Apple added compatibility with geotagging to the popular photographic organizational tool.  The new “places” tool in Aperture 3 lets you sort and view your photos by location, and also lets you geotag your photos either by uploading a .gpx file from a third party tracking device or by syncing with information in your iPhone photos.  Once Aperture has cataloged a photo that contains GPS coordinates it then uses what apple terms “reverse geocoding” to translate a GPS location into familiar place names or names of a place of interest.  For example, the photos that I tested the PhotoTrackr with were all shot at Whistler Blackcomb ski resort in British Columbia.  When the shots were imported into Aperture 3 their location was listed as exactly that “Whistler Blackcomb ski resort, Britihs Columbia”.  Using this information, Aperture allows you to sort your photos in the Places interface, using drop down boxes for things like country, state and city. Finding every photo that you ever took while on holiday in Egypt for example, would be a breeze.  As would narrowing things down to find all the photos you took of the Pyramids while in Egypt, so long as everything was geotagged.  In fact even if it is not, you can assign a location by simply dragging a photo or collection of photos to a location on the map, and whilst this is not quite as accurate it is useful for updating a back catalog of photos that likely spans a period when you did not have a geotagging device.

So how do you go about geotagging your shots in Aperture 3 then?  Well as polished as the rest of the program seems now, the places feature is still a little lacking.  It would have been nice if Apple had implemented support for a simultaneous import in the catalog, whilst matching photos with coordinates from a .gpx file.  There are other pieces of software that can do this so i’m not sure why it wasn’t included here.  instead of this though you just go ahead and import your shots as you normally would and then click the places icon at the top of the screen.  This opens the map display but also still allows you to browse your projects in a pane below the map.  At the bottom left of the map is a button marked GPS.  Clicking this reveals the option to import GPS Track.  Using this option you can select the .gpx (or NMEA) file from your tracking device, and the whole track will then be shown on the map.  The next step is important, and something that I got wrong a few times before I figure out what was going on.  You need to select the photos you wish to tag from the browser pane, either as a folder or by selecting individual shots with thumbnails.  You then need to drag those shots onto the map while holding down the mouse button.  Drag the shots to the track that has appeared on the map and you will see the pin “snap” to the track.  Whilst still holding down the mouse button, move the pin along the track line until the tiny box next to the pin reads an offset of 0 hrs and 0 mins.  By doing this you are showing aperture where the first shot was taken and from there it will ask you if you want to assign locations to the other photos based on time.  I’m not sure why Aperture requires you to point to the location of the first photo though, again it seems like an unnecessary step in the process that other similar software does not require you to do.  Nonetheless, it seems to work once you have done this, and pins are marked on the map at the location f your shots.

Tagging using your iPhone

All photos shot with you iPhone automatically include GPS data so when you import those into your Aperture library they will show up on the map.  If you do not have a separate GPS tracker for your regular camera you can use the data in your iPhone photos to place the images from your other camera.  Simply snap a quick photo on your iPhone at the location of your other photos.  Then select Import GPS from iPhone photos on the menu.  This will bring up all your photos currently on the iPhone and allow you to select the ones related to the current project you are tagging.  Once selected, they appear as purple waypoints on the map, and you simply drag the other photos from the same location, onto the waypoint to assign the GPS data.  This works as a good solution if you are taking a lot of photos in one particular location, for example at a scenic viewpoint, or some sort of tourist attraction.  If you want very specific location data though from a hike or a long journey then a separate GPS tracker is far more accurate.

I think Apple has done a good job with offering a feature to people who do not necessarily own a stand-alone GPS tracking device.  The implementation of the iPhone based tagging is nice, as is the speedy location search bar at the top of the map which really makes it easy to find that tiny town somewhere in Europe where you spent a family holiday 8 years ago.  Assigning a location to non-geotagged photos is a breeze then, apart from the necessity to point to the first photo location when matching things to a proper GPS track file.  Unfortunately though it seems that these GPS locations are stored on the Aperture library file and NOT embedded into the metadata of the photo immediately.  Upon export from Aperture, it does write the GPS information to the file but only at this point.  So if you export a JPEG from Aperture after tagging it in Places, then it will display the correct information if imported into another photo organization program such as Lightroom 2 or 3.  BUT if you select to “export Master” from Aperture , it does not contain any GPS data.  It means that if you ever decide to make a switch from using Aperture to organize your files, none of the RAW files you painstakingly tagged with GPS data would have that data with them in another program.  If Apple can fix this it will be onto a real winner.

Support this website by purchasing Apple Aperture 3 from B and H Photo

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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……

We all know now that the quality of the 5dMKII video is great, but the way it is implemented is severely floored in several ways.  Some things have been fixed with firmware (manual exposure) and some things will be fixed in future firmware (multiple frame rates).  But the fact remains that Canon was caught a bit off guard  with the implementation of the video functions.  It seems they grossly underestimated the popularity of the video features and never expected it to be used for so many professional applications.  Or at least not adopted for this this so quickly and eagerly.

Both the 5dmkII, 7d and 1dmkIV feature a mini HDMI port on the side which can be used to send a signal to either an HDTV or a video monitor.  The necessary cable to do this does not come with the camera but can be easily purchased from most electronics stores for about $20.   With both these cameras you are forced to use manual focus while you are recording.  Nailing accurate focus by viewing the 3″ LCD screen on the back of the camera can be pretty tricky but with a larger external LCD things become considerably easier.  Even just being able to angle the screen to a more suitable angle for viewing makes things easier, especially for low or high angles shots.

The way that the signal is output from these cameras varies because of a number of improvements were made when the 7d was announced.

Canon 5dMKII

Liveview – 1080i signal at 16:9.  During liveview, a portion of the image is masked off at the top and bottom of the screen to achieve the 16:9 recording aspect from the cameras 3:2 photographic sensor.  Cycling through various display options with the “view” button will alter the size of the on screen image depending on how much other information you require on the screen.

Liveview on the 5dMKII

Recording – Pressing the video record button whilst you are in live view causes the external monitor to go black for between 2 and 3 seconds.  While the screen is black, the recording has already started.  This will happen with ANY external monitor plugged into the 5dMKII.  When the picture returns to the screen you will see that it has changed from 1080i 16:9 signal and instead switched to a 480p 4:3 signal.  Hence the screen blackout as the aspect ratio changes.  Quite why Canon decided to implement an aspect ratio change at this point is beyond me.  A change of resolution could almost be excused, but the drop from 16:9 to 4:3 at this point is annoying.  If you are using a 16:9 aspect LCD , the picture that before was filling your screen , is now letterboxed into a 4:3 window in the middle of the screen.  On smaller monitors this does make quite a big difference to the size of the video you now see on the screen, hence making the benefit of an external monitor a little less for accurately focusing during recording.

Playback – Once you have recorded your video clips, video plays back in 1080i 16:9 and will fill the screen on a 16:9 aspect monitor with no overlays and no letterboxing.

Playback on the 5DMKII

Canon7d

Liveview – 1080i 16:9 signal.  This works the same as on the 5dMKII.  Cycling through different views with the view button changes the size of the video as different details are displayed on screen.  In the most cluttered view, the video is moved to a 4:3 sized box in the middle of the screen and the resulting pillarboxes on either sized are used to display information.  Unless you are using a HUGE LCD monitor you really should avoid this particular mode.

Info button display on 7d

Record – Hooray!  Canon fixed the annoying aspect change!  With the 7d things are greatly improved over the 5dMKII.  Pressing the record button whilst in liveview simply starts recording with no unwanted resolution or aspect change.  No screen blackout whatsoever, just a red recording dot in the top corner.  It is still letter boxed slightly on the top to account for the bars masking off the 16:9 image from the 3:2 sensor but I do not find that to be much problem.

Playback on the 7d - 1080 16:9

Playback - Video plays back in 1080i 16:9 and will fill the screen on a 16:9 aspect monitor with no overlays and no letterboxing.

Canon 1dmkIV

At the time of writing this, the Canon 1dmkIV is not yet available but the Canon white paper on the camera is available for download on the Canon website as well as the user manual.  I have downloaded both these documents and it seems that the HDMI output of this camera behave identically to that of the Canon 7d (refer to the text above to see how the 7d works)

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!!

Cliff Trampoline – Whistler from Dan Carr on Vimeo.

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.

You can download this letter: HERE

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…..