Sony has announced an interchangeable lens video camera today based around the sensor from their new NEX camera series.  This has surprised a few people, myself included!  We all figure Canon is working on something like this, we know Panasonic is because they have officially released prototype drawings of it, called the AG-AF100 but Sony always seemed a little bit behind in the race because their Alpha line of SLR cameras is really the only major SLR lineup that currently does not feature video recording.  It seems then that Sony just decided to skip the intermediary stage of creating an SLR that can shoot video and go straight to the video friendly form factor that everyone has been clamoring for since the release of the Canon 5dMKII.  Interestingly the press release says it features an autofocus lens but details on this are slim right now.  It is not clear whether all lenses attached will be able to shoot with autofocus or whether the system is built into the 18-200 lens that comes with it.

So lets break it down, what are they giving us ?

UPDATE:  It seems that this camera will only shoot 1080/60i , no progressive mode.  No 24p , 30p etc.  I have no idea why sony would cripple it in this way.  Seems weird because the rest of the concept seems pretty solid.

• Shoots to SDHC / SDXC
• Exmor™ APS HD CMOS sensor
• Comes equipped with an 18-200 stabilized zoom lens featuring an autofocus system!
• Uses the new Sony E-Mount (and Alpha via an adapter)
• Shoots 14.2 Megapixel still images
• 3″ Swivel LCD Screen
• Quad capsule stereo array microphone
• Dropping in September for approx. $2000

Full press release :

CAMCORDER REDEFINED: SONY DEBUTS WORLD’S FIRST CONSUMER INTERCHANGEABLE LENS HD CAMCORDER

SAN DIEGO, June 13, 2010 – Following the 25th anniversary of its industry-leading Handycam® product line, Sony today announced the innovative NEX-VG10 Interchangeable Lens HD Camcorder.
The new NEX-VG10 is the world’s first consumer camcorder with interchangeable lenses and the first Handycam camcorder to feature an extra-large Exmor™ APS HD CMOS sensor.

“The NEX-VG10 takes Sony’s Handycam line to the next level by allowing unprecedented artistic expression that isn’t possible with conventional consumer video cameras,” said Andy Bubala, director of Sony’s camcorder business. “With this camcorder, video enthusiasts and photographers can now capture cinematic full HD movies and premium stereo sound.”

Sony’s NEX-VG10 Interchangeable Lens HD Handycam® Camcorder is equipped with the same Exmor™ APS HD CMOS sensor used in the “NEX-5″ and “NEX-3″ digital cameras and compatible with the high grade “E-mount” series of smaller, lighter lenses optimized for video shooting with silent operation and AF. It is also compatible with a wealth of “A-mount” interchangeable lenses used by Sony’s existing α DSLR camera lineup via a mount adapter (sold separately), including award winning Sony G Lenses and Carl Zeiss® branded lenses.

Coupled with Sony’s powerful BIONZ® processor, the camcorder’s Exmor™ APS HD CMOS sensor realizes high resolution video and 14 megapixel still images. Approximately 19.5 times bigger than the standard sensor found in conventional camcorders, the APS HD CMOS sensor enables an extremely shallow depth of field. This allows videographers to achieve cinematic results with stunning background defocus (bokeh). Users can also enjoy DSLR-quality photo capture with features like Auto HDR, Handheld Twilight, and Anti Motion Blur, as well as catch fast action sequences with a continuous burst rate of up to seven fps.

The NEX-VG10 can capture full 1920×1080 high definition video at up to 24Mbps for amazing clarity and detail, ideal for recording on to Blu-ray Disc™ media. It also comes with an E-mount 18-200mm lens optimized for video shooting that offers a powerful 11x optical zoom in addition to a silent auto-focus system and Optical Steadyshot™ image stabilization with Active Mode for superior versatility.

Satisfying the needs of serious videographers, sound quality matches the stellar imaging performance of the NEX-VG10. Its Quad Capsule Spatial Array Stereo Microphone uses advanced processing algorithms to combine signals from four individual microphone capsules. The result is exceptionally clear stereo audio with high directional response, allowing videographers to capture more sound from their subject and less background noise. The camcorder also features dedicated inputs for optional external microphones and headphones to monitor sound levels.

The camcorder’s TruBlack™ technology brings remarkably higher contrast and brightness to its 3.0″ Xtra Fine LCD™ swivel display, delivering more natural, realistic colors and easier viewing in bright conditions. The LCD is supplemented by a high-resolution adjustable electronic viewfinder that helps framing, monitoring and capturing clear images.

Compact and easy to handle, the NEX-VG10 gives videographers the flexibility of a removable lens with the ergonomics and operability of a Handycam camcorder. An intuitive jog dial and hotkeys make it easy to navigate menus and adjust shooting parameters, including full manual control of Iris, Shutter Speed, Gain and White Balance for professional results.

Dual accessory shoes (Alpha Hot Shoe/Universal Cold Shoe) allow for many still photography and video accessories, such as the ECM-CG50 shotgun microphone and external flash lighting. There’s also a choice of rechargeable battery options, including the NP-FV100 that provides up to 315 minutes of continuous HD shooting (may vary), and a specially designed soft carrying case.
Included with purchase as a download voucher ($99 value), Sony Vegas® Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 video editing software includes powerful tools for video compositing, color correction and sound mixing to produce cinema-quality HD movies with ease. You can also share your creations via DVD, Blu-ray Disc™ media, or upload to the web – all from one simple program.

The NEX-VG10 accepts both Memory Stick PRO Duo™ (including Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo™) and SD (including both SDHC and SDXC formats) media. Users can record up to four hours of high definition footage (1920×1080, FH mode) when using the 32GB memory card.

Sony’s Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX offers an industry leading 30MB per second transfer rate, which means Handycam users can upload video clips in a fraction of actual playback time.

Price and Availability
The NEX-VG10 will be available in September for about $2,000 and presales on www.sonystyle.com will begin July 14. They will also be available at Sony Style® retail stores and at authorized dealers nationwide.

Before the 2010 Olympics kicked off in my home town of Whistler, BC, I was commissioned by the local arts council to produce a slideshow of some of my skiing images. The slideshow was played on TVs and giant screens around the Olympics during the breaks between events.  Check it out below and click through to Vimeo if you want to watch it in HD.

Whistler Core Shots Olympic slideshow from Dan Carr on Vimeo.

Sometimes you stumble across something  you wander how you ever did without; something that has so many uses that it instantly deserves a tiny piece of the valuable real-estate in your rapidly filling camera bag.  These two accessories from LCD manufacturer Ikan are two such items but before all you stills photographers switch off, thinking this is just for video applications, think again…. and read on.

The articulating arm and Cheese Stick JR are 2 separate products which on their own are quite useful, but it’s when the 2 are combined together that you really get sometime cool.  The arm is available in 2 sizes, 6″ and 10″.  I have the 10″ version and the extra length adds a few more possibilities to the list.  The Cheese Stick is covered in all the photographic and production industry standard thread sizes (1/4-20, 3/8-16, and M4-.7) and easily allows you to connect together 2 things with different thread sizes.  Some of the solutions you will come up with are not necessarily the best looking, but in a pinch you can solve a lot of problems with this tiny device.

The articulating arm feels well made but not overly heavy and can be set up in several different ways.  The metal hot shoe mount can be detached from the end of the arm and then screwed into the Cheese Stick.  The threaded end of the arm then screws into any of the available holes on the stick.  The arm also comes with adapters to convert the threaded ends into threaded holes meaning that you have plenty of options to mount it even if you do not have the Cheese Stick JR.

So what can you use this for then ?  Well the obvious ones are for people shooting video.  You can easily attach a small LCD monitor such as the IKAN V5600 to a DSLR or other video camera by using the hot shoe mount as shown in the photo below where I have it attached to a Canon 7d.  By mounting the arm on the side as I did, it leaves plenty of room on the top to attach more accessories such as a microphone or wireless lavalier receiver.  In the next photo down you can see that i used a small ballhead to attach the monitor to the top, leaving the arm free to put mount a microphone or recording device like the Zoom H4N.  You could even mount a second monitor on the arm , allowing a director and a DP to monitor the video feed though you would need to use an active HDMI splitter to to drive 2 monitors from one output.  So those are some good uses for video shooters but what can stills photogs use this for?  Well with the addition of the Manfrotto 386B Nano Clamp you have yourself a very versatile little setup for positioning a flash wherever you need it.  With the Cheese Stick on one end you can mount both the flash AND your flash remote such as a pocketwizard to it.  This is a great continuation to the setup I wrote about HERE for a portable light stand solution.  For my skiing work, I can easily carry this in my bag and clamp it to a ski or a couple of ski poles to turn them into a lightstand.  I have also used the Cheese Stick a lot for coupling things together where before I used umbrella clamps with various spigots in them.

Almost exactly a year ago I posted some information about the RED Scarlet Camera.  Since that time there have been a number of “announcements” from the company but most of them have said more or less the same thing. “  The cameras are delayed , but here is some more computer generated graphics of something that might possibly look like the camera when it finally arrives”.  I would imagine that Jim Janard and his crew at RED have had to re-think a few elements of their designs in an attempt to combat the surprising success of Canons DSLRs in the video field. A year ago, nobody really saw it coming, but today its no surprise at all to find Canon 5dMKIIs and 7ds on the set of hollywood blockbuster movies attached to Panavision prime lenses.  ( Funny story… Panavision has actually gone and melted all of their Panavision to Canon lens converters because they are sick of seeing so many of their lenses not being mounted on their cameras!)  Canon seems to have swooped in (or stumbled into) to the exact market that RED was targeting with their Scarlet plans so it’s really no surprise that things went back to the drawing board for a while in order to add a few more features.  A few people out there (myself included)  were a bit worried that the Scarlet project was doomed to vaporware status.  Continuous updates to CGI models, but no actual camera to play with.  After all, most companies do not tend to announce cameras until they are nearly complete, shrouding the whole development process in secrecy.  But Scarlet has been on the table for some time, or at least drawing of it anyway……

For some time though Jim Jannard has been throwing around the November 30th date though as a day when we would learn more info about scheduled release and pricing.  Their motto though is “Everything is subject to change , count on it!” so i’d be very surprised if this information stays the same up to the release date.  None the less, they have provided a little more information about the cameras than usual so this time i thought it would be worth posting about it.  I know that there are still some stills photographers out there that don’t see the point in learning about shooting video, and those guys might want to skip this post.  But i’m still firmly in the camp that believes that convergence is inevitable, and if I keep my finger on the pulse then it won’t be such a shock when it comes!

There are 3 cameras then that we now have more information on.  The Scarlet is to come with 2 sensor variations, 2/3 and full frame.  The 2/3 will ship (hopefully) in may-june 2010 and the FF35 version will be Summer 2010.  The 2/3 version comes in 2 options , either with a fixed 8x zoom lens or as a “brain” with the option of adding components and prime lenses.  Specific details are laid out below in the table.  The FF35 version is only available as the kit which allows you to totally customize the accessories that you attach to it.  The list of accessories and pricing is also laid out below.  My initial thought is that the 8x zoom 2/3 version seems like a good deal and will be very popular for people filming action sports like skiing and snowboarding (a field in which i know many people).

If you are looking to build up a kit with the 2/3 sensor brain then the mini prime lenses are looking great, and very compact.  But the problem I see with that is that if you decide to upgrade to a FF35 brain later…. your lenses won’t work.  If you are looking to build up a rig with the FF35 kit then you’d better be ready to drop some serious cash !  The pricing is not even close to the same league as buying a Canon DSLR and shooting with one of those, so these Scarlets had better be damn good!

A few things jump off the features list at me.  HDR photo mode for one, this could go either way.  Personally i’m not a fan of HDR photos and I hope that this is not a gimmick.  Most camera companies have shied away from adding this so far though i’m sure that they could if they wanted to.  I just hope that its not too over the top and that it is user configurable.  For the most part the camera is really geared for video and not photos.  At the beginning of the development cycle it was touted as a stills camera a lot more but there seems to be less and less mention of this these days.  For one, it looks incredibly un-ergonomic for a stills camera anyway…..  Touch focus tracking is a nice addition though and something that i’m sure we will see on all cameras within 2 years, just like on the iphone, touch the part of the screen you want to focus on.  So simple.  I’ll leave you with a few more photos of the camera and also a rather cool looking ” RED Station” which seems to be a high speed multi-card reader. Cool idea.  I also see that the ” Bomb EVF” has a built in heater for use in extreme cold environments!

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.

PBP bomb drop from Dan Carr on Vimeo.

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.

The lack of updates over the last few weeks might lead you to believe that I have been off adventuring round the world chasing snow storms….not quite.

It’s been a strange winter here in British Columbia.  The snow didn’t really come in November and December leaving the mountains still looking like mountain bike resorts.  A lot of my plans went down the plughole and I was left twiddling my thumbs for a few weeks.  Then on December 26th Vancouver received nearly 60cm of snow (though nearby Whistler got only a couple of inches).  With more snow than Vancouver had ever seen I quickly organized a trip down there to meet up with the Poorboyz crew and we hit some rails for a few days with Mike Henitiuk, Matt Margetts and Leigh Powis.  When a city that normally doesnt get any snow, receives nearly 2 feet, the place comes to a standstill.  Jeff Thomas met me at his house in North Vancouver by coming down his road on his snowmobile…..

As soon as that trip was done I headed back to Whistler for the Deep Winter photo challenge that I wrote about last week.  After the Deep Winter I headed back down to Vancouver for a shoot at Grouse Mountain which saw the beginning of another strage weather pattern.  As we arrived at Grouse it looked like the day was going to be foggy and overcast but a quick trip up the gondola quickly showed that the temperatures were inverted and the top of the mountain was bathed in a beautiful orange glow as the sun rose above the cloud layer.  This inverted weather pattern stayed around for the next 10 days though bringing unseasonally high temperatures to the alpine regions while the valleys hovered around 0.  Up in whistler the temperature in the alpine shot up to a high of 10 degrees and stayed there for the week.  The already thin snowpack was melting away…….

Booter shooting in whistler from Dan Carr on Vimeo.
With no real powder to ski anywhere I spent the week building backcountry jumps with the PBP crew.  We discovered that the snow on some West facing aspects was still soft enough to land on once you punched through a thin crust so we built a collections of step downs, hips and gap jumps with Anthony Boronowski, Charley Ager, Brandon Kelly, Dane Tudor and Riley Leboe as they work on the new Poorboyz movie to be called………. well I cant tell you that yet but wait until the SIA trade show in Las Vegas next week and all will be revealed.  For now though the inversion has dispersed and the slush has turned to Ice but at least that finally gave me some time to do an update!

I get asked this question every week so I have finally got round to making a tutorial video about it.

Photoshop Tutorial :: How to make a sequence from Dan Carr on Vimeo.