The diminutive little H1 audio recorder that I blogged about a while back is finally shipping at B&H photo for just $99!  This would work great in conjunction with one of the Redrock Micro Nano rigs I posted about yesterday!

No official announcement yet but these photos have show up on a Japanese forum and they look real to me.  Seems the 60D will have the same sensor as the 7d and an articulating screen that will make it pretty great for video. It also has a dedicated movie recording button and I would expect to see some form of auto focus during video recording… time will tell.

I have started a Flickr account which you can find at this link.  I haven’t used Flickr before, mainly because it was just another thing to add to the workflow, re-sizing and uploading photos.  But Lightroom 3 has a very neat new feature that allows you to very quickly publish and manage photos on Flickr.  Its as easy as dragging and dropping a thumbnail from the gallery view and then it watermarks, re-sizes and adds to whichever set I tell it to.

When I shoot all of my winter work, the majority of the best shots have to be saved from public consumption until they have appeared in the adverts and magazines.  But there are also hundreds of nearly awesome shots that didn’t quite make the grade and until now these ones mostly stay on my hard drive.  But now I have decided this is a good way to share more photos so keep an eye on it and I will update the photos a few times a week with shots from various trips over the last few years.

Catchy title huh?  This is a short post but one that I hope might help a few people out.  Firstly, if you are a PC user then i’m afraid I can’t help you with all the details, but at least read the first few paragraphs to find out why you might want to do this.  In the past 18 months I have had three hard drive failures, 2 in laptops and one in an external USB drive on my desk.  It happens and I hope by now we all know that.  I’m not going to preach on backing up your files, that’s for another time…..

A few times in the last few months I have found myself working in a location that is fairly remote.  No Apple store or computer parts store within a thousand miles, and not somewhere that gets any kind of speedy mail-order servicing either. So what would happen if one of my laptop hard drives had failed in one of those locations?  This is mostly relevant to photographers who travel a lot, and especially those who visit remote locations, but the solution is actually fairly simple and remarkably cheap.  A bootable external drive that can run Mac OSX is the answer.  It doesn’t even need to be a 2.5″ hard drive, you can actually boot to Snow Leopard directly off a USB keyring as long as its big enough!

Continue reading »

If you are a regular visitor to my site you will have noticed that it has been unavailable for the past 5 days or so.  The company that hosts my site had total server failure and as such, everything hosted on it was down while they copied the vast amounts of data over onto new servers.  If you have tried to send me an e-mail over this period, I will not have received it so please try again later today and things should be back to normal.  Thanks for your patience!

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I noticed in my website statistics that a large number of people unsubscribed from the RSS feed during the outage period, most likely because their reader was displaying an annoying error message when it could not retrieve my feed.  Please re-subscribe again so that the content can be delivered !

I’ve been on the road for the majority of the last month so posts have been a little sparse.  Over the last few weeks though there have been quite a few announcements in the photography world with the PMA tradeshow taking place in the US.  In case you missed any of them, here is a quick run down of new developments.

• Apple has announced Aperture 3. The third iteration of the popular image cataloging program features some big advances that look likely to bring it more in line with Adobe Lightroom.  It even features full support for video including options to edit the videos in Aperture.   Available to purchase here.  You can download a free trial from the Apple website and give it a try for a month.  At the moment I am using Lightroom 2.0 but I have been unimpressed with the speed of it.  I’m definitely going to give Aperture 3 more than a passing glance, especially with its video support.  I’ll report my findings but feel free to chime in with comments below of you have already given it a trial.
• Nikon announced 2 new lenses , the 24mm 1.4 and the 16-35 f4 VR.  With the 24mm lens Nikon is just playing catch up to Canon’s stunning 24mm 1.4 that I have recently purchased myself.  I’m sure Nikon users will welcome the addition to their prime lineup.  With the 16-35mm f4 VR though , Nikon looks to have produced a fantastic and currently unique lens, the only wide angle stabilized zoom available on the market.  Previously Nikon had no compact f4 zooms where Canon now has a nice selection.  Something that has been a frustration for Nikon shooters who would benefit from lighter weight lenses.  With this lens though, Nikon has jumped right into that market AND added VR (for the canon shooters that is simply Nikon’s version of IS).  If I were a Nikon shooter I would jump on this lens!!
• Canon has announced a new Camera, the Rebel T2I or the 550d depending on which part of the world you live in.  The camera features the same 18MP 1.6 crop sensor from the 7d and impressively retains all the same video functions as its more pricey brother.  This is a very nicely specced camera for those looking to get into photography without breaking the bank.  The 7d’s sensor is very capable of producing great images the the video functions of the T2I are much better than the other Rebels in the lineup.  Obviously the T2I lags behind the 7d in terms of weather sealing and build quality as well as autofocus system but nonetheless its packing some impressive numbers for a camera retailing for much less than $1000!
• Sigma introduces a slew of new lenses at PMA but the one that caught my eye was the new 8-16mm f4.5-5.6.  This is a rectilinear lens designed for crop body sensors and produces the widest available non-distorted view yet for these types of cameras.  All you guys out there shooting the 7d should definitely keep an eye out for a review.  Looks like an interesting product.  They also announced an 85mm 1.4 lens.  Given the prohibitive price of the Canon version of this lens, this could be a winner too if the IQ is in the right ball park.  We’ll have to wait for some reviews.
• Samsung has now joined the field of high quality pocket friendly digi-cams with the new EX-1.  Featuring an f1.8 24mm lens it sets itself up firmly against the likes of the Panasonic lx3 and the Canon G11 or S90.  The f1.8 lens is the fastest in it’s field and it also features a flip out screen like the G11.  Again, this has just been announced so we will have to wait for some reviews but it’s one to keep an eye on if you are interested in a high quality point and shoot that lets you capture RAW images.

Canon was not present at the PMA show but they will have a strong presence at the upcoming WPPI show next month.  Expect at least a couple of new lenses from them, including the oft-rumored 24-70 2.8 IS (via CR).  We should also be seeing the firmware update for the 5dMKII early next month that will enable 24p mode.  Recent rumors have also indicated that there will be some new audio features enabled too , audio meters and maybe a live on-screen histogram.  There were a lot of other things announced at PMA but the majority were consumer p&S cameras that I have no interest in.  These are just the things that caught my eye though.

I’m in the lucky position right now to have all three of Canons latest cameras sitting here in front of me. I have been using the 5dMKII since January last year , I purchased a 7d in August and just over two weeks ago I picked up the new Canon 1dMKIV.  Whilst I’m not going to do exhaustive comparative testing between all the cameras (I simply don’t have the time to do this and plenty of websites out there will do this anyway) I thought I should collect together some of the thoughts I have had whilst using these cameras.  These 3 cameras cover a broad spectrum in pricing so they are likely to appeal to both professional and amateur photographers.  Which camera would I chose for a particular task?  Read on to find out. Continue reading »

If you are looking to become a ski or snowboard photographer then get ready for a long shopping list of gear you are going to need.  Every time I pack my gear for a trip I’m amazed at the amount of gear I have amassed over the last few years.  Some of it is fairly specialized and only necessary for people that shoot full time for a living, and some of it I would recommend for everyone looking to get into the business.  In no particular order here is my top ten list of things you will need to get started! Continue reading »

The blog went quiet for a couple of weeks there as I have been away in Alberta shooting alongside the Poorboyz Productions crew as they work on their new Ski film called……ohhh I can’t tell you that just yet   But I can tell you I just got a sneak peek at the trailer and it WILL blow your mind.  We headed to the city of Edmonton on new years eve to shoot urban skiing for 10 days with Matt Walker, Leigh Powis, Mike Henitiuk and LJ Strenio.  Poorboyz filmers Pete Alport and Cody Carter met us up there and we all piled into a basement apartment kindly provided by Mike’s grandparents.  You can read a little bit about our exploits on the Poorboyz blog HERE. I wont go into too many details, the features we hit have to remain a secret for a while but you can see some snap from my Canon s90 on the Poorboyz blog and also on my Facebook page.  While I am on the road I don’t have a lot of time for blogging but Facebook is a quick and easy way to keep people up to date with some behind the scenes photos so please become a fan if you’d like to follow that stuff!  You can also find regular updates on my Twitter page.  By the way, i’m still loving the s90.  To know you have something that powerful in your pocket is very useful!

From an equipment point of view I pretty much took everything with me on this trip as I was driving there.  90% of my photos were shot with the 5dMKII though I did also have my 7D with me too.  If I can use the 5d I always will, the image quality is leagues ahead of the 7d.  The 7d gives me a fast FPS but the majority of urban images I use a multitude of flashes and that gives me the opportunity to use the 5d instead because i’m only taking one shot per trick.  Occasionally I used the 7d for flash work too because of its slightly faster sync speed.  The 7d is rated at 1/250 x-sync where the 5d is only 1/200.  I was slightly disappointed to see that it was not possible to push the 7d past 1/250 without serious banding.  With my old 1dMKIIN I could easily use 1/320 with no problems.

Portable office!

The temperature when we arrived in Edmonton was -20 Celsius and during the trip it regularly dipped below -25 and even to -30 on one day.  I was initially very worried about what effect this would have on my gear.  Nothing is really designed to be used in those conditions and temperatures that low was new territory, at least for such prolonged periods of time.  I’m happy to report though that I had very few troubles and I was amazed at the resilience of my gear.  Both filmers from poorboyz would eat through batteries on their video cameras even with hand warmers taped to them but I could easily shoot all day with one battery in my 5dMKII!  I did experience slightly higher than average battery usage from my pocketwizards but nothing too shocking and all of my flash batteries lasted very well.  In particular, the battery pack in my Elinchrom Ranger.  It seemed to be totally unaffected by the cold and I got just as many full power pops out of it as I would expect in a normal situation!  Incredible in such low temps where sometimes the battery would be exposed for up to 3 or 4 hours at a time.  With the pocketwizard multimaxes, I did notice that the LCD display would go totally blank in the cold after a few minutes, but it would always come back to life at the end of the shoot once it warmed up.  I did get one of my Multimaxes stolen during a shoot when i turned my back, so if anyone hears of one for sale in Edmonton perhaps you could contact me…..

I did receive a nice piece of news though while I was away, a call from Aden Camera in Toronto to say that a Canon 1dMKIV had arrived at their store with a note to say that it was for me!  Only a week earlier I had inquired as to the availability of the camera in Canada and was told that it could be many months before I could get hold of one because a large number of them were being set aside for the Olympics.  I have a couple of big trips coming up, including a trip with Salomon to Japan and I really wanted to get the camera for that trip so a big thanks to Canon Canada for getting me one so quickly!  I will be posting info on it soon!

Next week i’m off to Retallack Cat Skiing lodge with Poorboyz, Dane Tudor, Mike Henitiuk and Charley Ager.  It will give me a good chance to put my mew 1DMKIV through its paces!