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 ‘Camera choice, thoughts from an over crowded camera bag.’

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!

Since the beginning of November Whistler has received 493cm of snow, and it’s still falling. This has smashed the previous record for November with 10 days still to go. Originally the mountains were due to open next weekend on the 27th but with the heavy snowfall early in the month, Whistler Blackcomb pulled out all the stops to get some lifts turning for everyone a few weeks early. Thanks for all the hard work guys!

Mike Henitiuk heading into heaven...

Leboe

A couple of days ago I headed up the mountain with Jeff Thomas from Poorboyz, Mike Henitiuk, TJ Schiller and Riley Leboe as they begun filming for the new movie.  Overnight there had been 2ft of snow to add to the already impressive coverage and it continued to fall all day.  This is the 7th winter that I have skied at Whistler Blackcomb but I can honestly say that was as good as it gets. Bottomless powder.  In fact it was almost too much, the alpine is yet to open so we were left skiing mid mountain lines in the Garbanzo zone.  With that amount if snow you need some steep pitches to maintain speed and it was a struggle to keep moving as the snow piles up above your waist.  We hunted around the same zone all day and eventually found some nice pillow lines for the guys though.

Me - Stoked to be back to work!

The long range forecast for this place is equally impressive, looking like we will smash well through the 500cm mark in the near future which would account for half of Whistler’s average annual snowfall in just one month. It’s a pleasant surprise to be back into winter work so early and if this is a sign of things to come this year it’s going to be one to remember.

Riley Leboe all smiles

Big thanks to the Whistler Blackcomb PR guys and girls for hooking our crew of riders up so we could get out there and start to document this crazy weather!

TJ Schiller. Skullcandys workin the pow too!

UPDATE: Here is a sneak peak from Poorboyz with intro from yours truly.

I hadn’t taken the time yet to try shooting 60fps with my Canon 7d.  But it started to snow heavily in Whistler village this morning and as I watched out of the window it looked like the perfect chance to try it out.  I put the Canon 85mm 1.8 lens on the 7d and opened my front door to get a few shots.

I had mistakenly thought that creating nice slow motion shots with the footage would just be as simple as dropping the 60fps clips into a 30fps timeline in Final Cut Pro.  Actually that’s not the case though.  Doing that just drops every other frame and you end up with regular looking footage and simply setting the clip speed to 50% does not take advantage of all those 60 frames you just shot.  I did a quick search on the net and found a good tutorial by Philip Bloom.  I can only speak for Mac users here I’m afraid but the solution is pretty easy so long as you have Final Cut Studio.

If you have FC Studio you will also have a program called Cinema Tools.  Fire it up and hit command+O to open a clip.  The clip will open in a video viewer and on the right hand side will be a button that says “Conform”.  Clicking on this will bring up a drop down box with various frame rates in it.  Select the one you want (29.97 for example) and then hit “Conform”.  The transformation is instant and requires no rendering, all that is being modified is an internal part of the file that denotes how the video is played.

WARNING:  This process is not reversible.  Once you hit the “Conform” button there is no going back so I highly recommend that you do this process to a copy of the original file.  I created a sub folder called SlowMo inside the folder containing my original files.  Then whenever I found a file that I needed to conform, I copied the original to that folder, Conformed it and then imported it into Final Cut Pro.  Don’t forget that you will also need to transcode the 7d files from H.264 before you do anything.  Make sure you transcode the files before you conform them in Cinema Tools!

I shot about 10 quick shots from my door to have some footage to test this with and the result is below. Winter is nearly back!!  Click though to the vimeo page to watch it in HD.

Winter’s Coming – Whistler, November 7th 09 – 60fps 7d from Dan Carr on Vimeo.

As I blogged about the other day, there’s been a lot of speculation about this camera for a few years and today is finally the day that Canon have announced the elusive 7D.

It fits into an entirely new position in their SLR lineup, right between the current 50d and the 5dMKII and comes in at the VERY attractive price point of $1699 US or $2099 CDN for the body only.

Specification run down:

18 megapixel APS-C 1.6x Crop
8fps
Dual Digic IV, new 14-bit ADC circuitry
New 19-point AF circuitry
100% viewfinder with LCD overlay, allowing a level and gridlines to be projected on the screen
New 63-zone metering system
Exposure compensation is now +/- 5 stops
FULLY weathersealed, Not half-weathersealed like the 5D Mark II
3″ Rear screen, upgraded version of the one in the 50D and 5D Mark II
Video is 1080p at 24, 25 or 30 fps, or 720p at 60/50/30/25/24 fps, has manual controls, gridlines and the virtual level available
ISO 100-6400, extend to 12800
Internal ETTL flash control (this is a big addition!)
Uses the same battery as the 5dMKII lp-E6
New battery grip

Canon has made some extraordinary advances with this camera and I think it’s going to be a huge bit with action sports and adventure photographers such as myself.  Having a camera that shoots with the speed of a 1-series camera but in a smaller, lighter package is something I have dreamed of for a long time.  There are a few subtle differences in there too which are quite exciting.  The 19-point focus system has all 19 points as more accurate cross-type sensors with lenses of 5.6 and up.  Great news for people using f4 lenses, the old system only had cross-type function for lenses of 2.8 and up.  This should mean greatly improved autofocus speed and tracking even if you are using a teleconverter on an f4 lens. The LCD overlay on in the viewfinder sounds like a great way to display info too.  Canon have also finally added ETTL control of external flashes meaning no more ST-E2 transmitter to remotely control and trigger external Canon flashes.  I might finally get some use out of my old 580EX now!

As you can see from the photos there are several ergonomic changes too.  A dedicated button for liveview and video recording is a welcome addition and also a programmable button next to the shutter release which can be assigned to any function such as mirror lockup.

Cramming 18 megapixles into a 1.6 crop sensor has a few people worried though, this has by far the biggest pixel density of any camera out there right now but has apparently been done with some new technology and should not effect the noise levels.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see on that one….

For me this is an exciting introduction.  It improves on my current 1dMKIIN in nearly every way and does so in a package that is half the size.  Alongside my 5dMKII this will make a formidable combination and I have already added myself to the waiting list to receive one of these cameras as soon as they come into Canada in about a months time.

For the video guys out there the 7d finally adds multiple frame rates with 24p, 25p and 30p in HD and 60p in 720p resolution.