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.
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……
A nice surprise in my mail box this morning. I knew about this for a couple of weeks but today was the first time I have seen the finished product. This is my 8th cover but my first one in N.America so i’m really pleased with this one.
Max Hill is the man on the cover and the shot was taken last April in Whistler, BC. I had the idea for this shot about 3 years ago but that year at the time we didn’t have the snow for it. Last year there was plenty in the spring time so finally got to make it happen. When I took Max and Leigh Powis to this spot and explained that I wanted them to jump over a railing, hand plant on it AND grab their ski they looked at me as if I was mad. Once they’d given it a couple of attempts though and built a small jump to pop them over the railing it didn’t take any time at all. I think this shot was only about the 4th or 5th time that Max hit it.
Shot with a Canon 1dMKIIN , 15mm Fisheye , 1/250th , f7.1, ISO 250. Lit with 1 Elinchrom Ranger and 4 Nikon speedlights all triggered with pocketwizards.
I have made a quick lighting diagram for those interested in that sort of thing. Click for larger
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.
I was hoping to have a lengthy review of the Canon S90 having recently taken it on vacation to Mexico. Unfortunately the camera was stolen 2/3 through my stay there. I will get a replacement but the review will have to wait a bit. Sadly I had taken a few hundred photos with it before it was taken, which would have been perfect illustration of this cameras abilities. C’est la vie i guess. My experience with the S90 was overwhelmingly positive though. Truly a pocket-sized camera unlike the G10 or G11. I was continually amazed by the quality of the shots I was getting and also the accuracy of the exposure metering in even the most complex of lighting situations. Flash exposure with backlit subjects was particularly impressive.
After the unexpected popularity of the Cliff Trampoline video (thanks to all that posted it on various websites) I have uploaded a full sized 1920×1080 version to my smugmug account. For those with sufficiently fast internet connections, you might want to check it out. Smugmug still has to do a fair amount of compression as their max file size is 600mb but nonetheless it is still pretty impressive. CLICK HERE FOR 1080P VERSION
Some readers might have noticed that I now have a Facebook page for people to follow. If you are a regular Facebook user then this might be a good way for you to keep up to date with what i’m up to. I regularly post photos to that page that I do not post on here as it is simple and quick to do so. You can find the Facebook page HERE
The famous underwater surf housing manufacturer SPL have started selling their new housings for the Canon 7d. HERE Looks great, especially with the Tokina 10-17 lens on board. Should be a decent choice for surf photogs out there. Wish i had an excuse to buy one…..
As I begin to see more of a use for video in my work I have been experimenting a bit with some more equipment. I wanted to construct some sort dolly to see how it looked with the Canon 7d and 5dMKII. With a bit of research on the internet I came across a type of do-it-yourself tripod rail system nicknamed the “ZaZaSlider”. I purchased the raw parts for it and constructed it today. Below if a few test shots to see if i was heading in the right direction. It seems to work pretty well but needs a bit of tweaking. Once I have it fully dialled i’m going to do a full post on how to make one and what parts you are going to need. I wasn’t going to post this as it was really just for me to see how it was working but i thought why not…. no particular editing going on here but you can get an idea for whats going on. Its a very portable solution which can be carried if I am skiing. More info in coming weeks once I have refined things a bit more. This was shot with the 7d by the way, not the 5d
Lots of people asking about the 7d too and I’m working on writing down some thoughts about that within the next couple of weeks. Also stay tuned for reviews of some more video equipment that i’m testing out this week.
I feel like posting a photo too as this is a photography blog after all. This is a shot of Charley Ager that was in last months issue of SBC Skier in Canada. Shot in Whistler BC with the Poorboyz crew.
Canon 1dMKIIN, 200mm on a 70-200 f4L IS 1/1250 , f7.1
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Adobe have released Lightroom 3 BETA as a free download on their website. Users can download it and try it out for free until the release candidate hits the shelves in the first half of 2010. There are some nice updates but the whole thing is very buggy right now. I would recommend trying it but not using it to replace LR2 just yet.
Yesterday I received my new Canon S90 from B&H photo. This little camera has the same sensor as the new Canon G11 and offers full manual control and RAW shooting. I wanted a high quality P&S camera and found it hard to choose between the s90 and the G11 but i’m glad I went with this. It is incredibly small. I would have no problem having this in a pocket all day, you’d never know, which is something that can’t be said for the G11.
I’m heading to Mexico for a week and i’ll be taking some time to test the S90 while i’m away, expect more info when i get back.
I’m also taking my Canon 7d with me. I’m just going to take the one lens as photography is not the reason for my trip but I wanted a simple case to put it in so that i could safely pack it into my F-Stop Satori along with some clothes. I picked up a Neoprene case from LensCoat called the bodybag and i’m impressed with the quality. The stitching seems to be very sturdy and if you need a simple case to protect a body and a lens from scratches then this is a great option. They make a variety of cases for lenses and bodies in different combinations and I was so impressed by this one that I ordered a couple of cases to hold camera bodies on their own for a little added protection when inside your regular camera bag.
Almost more than any other question I get asked is ” What camera bag do you use?” This is the answer…… well, one of them anyway. F-Stop is a company which specializes in camera bags for the adventure minded photographer. If you like to ski, hike, climb or ride a bike with your gear these are the bags for you. My main use for the Satori is backcountry skiing and my previous one saw some heavy action over an 18 month period. During this time, F-Stop was constantly seeking feedback from a group of action sports photographers including myself and others like pro climbing photog Tim Kemple. The result of our findings and feedback is this newly updated pack released this month. F-Stop bags are available in limited stores but also available directly from their web store HERE. Hopefully the photos at the bottom give you an idea of just how much stuff you can fit in this bag. There is plenty of room in the pack for all my camera gear as well as things like shovel and avalanche probe ( see photos below). This new version is available in Red, Black or Green. If you are looking for something similar but a little bit smaller then check out the F-Stop Tilopa. It is almost identical in design, only slightly smaller.
Most photographers go through a perpetual search for the perfect camera bag. Well I can finally stop that search, for backcountry ski photography this is THE bag and it will also suit photographers of many other outdoor sports. The seam-sealed zippers keep your kit safe and dry and the material is incredibly durable. The last version I had showed hardly a scuff after 18 months of use!
The HUGE internal camera compartment allows me enormous flexibility in choosing what equipment I carry with me and with the excellent harness system I can easily carry 30-40lbs all day long with no problems.
By removing the XL camera block and replacing it with a smaller one I can also use this bag for an overnight camping trip or a weekend trip away to the city where I only need a 1 camera, 1 lens setup with room for clothing and a laptop.
When I decided I needed to get this video stuff dialed, I needed something to shoot. There’s no point trying to figure this all out unless you have a purpose and some footage to play with. Leigh Powis, a local skier from Whistler, told about his crazy plan to put a trampoline on top of a cliff to help him practice a few new tricks before the winter. This was the perfect chance to try filming some action AND some lifestyle.
So below is my very first ever video with the 5dMKII. We shot it on 3 different days for about 2 hours on each day. Please click through to the actual Vimeo page if you want to watch the video in HD. But come back to find out more about the video!!
The lenses I used to shoot it were the 85mm1.8 , 17-40 f4, 24-105 f4, 70-200 f4,45mm 2.8 Tilt Shift, 15mm fisheye and the 50mm 1.8.
There are many people out there shooting videos with the 5dMKII right now. The new intro for Saturday Night Live was even shot with one last week! A lot of these video pros are attaching all sorts of accessories to the camera to make it easier to shoot video. External monitors, follow focus systems, matte boxes, shotgun mics and all manner of crazy rigs to hold them all together. This video though was shot with a 5dMKII on a tripod. Nothing else.
The tripod had a manfrotto 701HDV video head on it but that’s about the only difference to what I would usually carry for shooting photos. That’s not to say that all those potential accessories don’t make a difference, they undoubtedly do, but they are not a necessity if you want to travel light.
The whole video was shot in full manual mode so that I had total control over the aperture. In order to shoot at very wide apertures and keep the shutter speed down to something normal, I used a 2-stop neutral density filter on some of the lenses. Occasionally I also put a polarizing filter stacked on to the ND filter which has the effect of cutting down the light even more. This did produce some vignetting which you can see in a couple of the shots, but it actually looks like a nice effect! A 2 Stop ND is going to be the absolute minimum you need to get a nice looking DOF on a bright day though.
For a couple of shots I attached the camera to the end of a Manfrotto studio lighting boom arm. Not what it was intended for at all!! But it produced a dramatic angle. The panning shot right before the action starts at 2min08sec was shot like this. The camera fixed to the studio boom with a manfrotto magic arm and then panning on the mount on top of my regular Benro tripod. Again, a nice video boom would have been great, but I wanted to make this with just the gear I had access to. If you have read much about DSLR video before ,you will probably be aware of what “rolling shutter” is. You really have to be careful with your panning to avoid this. Slow and smooth is absolute necessity or you will get the jello effect. I also found that the visibility of this effect was somewhat dependent on what shutter speed I was shooting at. With a higher shutter speed it seemed to show up a lot easier.
Speaking of shutter speed, I experimented with that a bit too. My preference was for the footage that was shot between 1/120 and 1/250 for the action stuff. Anything faster than that and it gives it a sort of weird digital jerky effect. For the lifestyle shots and interview shots I think I used it down at around 1/60 though. I basically set the shutter speed I wanted, then used the filters to get to the aperture I wanted and then dialed in the ISO speed to get the correct exposure. Incidentally, that is something that I found frustrating. Its VERY easy to miss your exposure by a 1/3 of a stop because the “blinking highlights” feature is only available in playback. Most times I would shoot a quick 2 second clip to check exposure before shooting the shot. It would be great if there were some zebra lines to show overexposure. They are available int he Magic Lantern firmware hack but I haven’t ventured that far yet….
One thing that I was pleasantly surprised about was how easily I managed to nail the focus in the shots even though it is fully manual. The screen on the 5dMKII really is great and considering I wasn’t using any type of screen shade or eye-piece, I found it quite easy to get the focus right first time. Pulling focus between 2 subjects takes a bit of practice to do smoothly, but its possible.
So once you have all of your video in a format that you can work with, import it all into Final Cut and set up a new project. This is where you need to tread carefully, depending on which version of FCP you have. I have Final Cut 5 and that caused some problems to begin with because I had no clue what I was doing. In FCP 6 and later, when you drag a clip into the timeline, it automatically converts the timeline/sequence settings to conform to the setting of your clip. In this case 1920×1080 , 30fps, AIC. In FCP5 though, this does not happen and it caught me out for a while. I had changed the Video&Audio settings under the file menu, but I was not aware that there is a settings panel for the sequence under the “sequence” menu, or ou can hit Command+zero. In this menu, you also need to specify the video size (1920×1080), the codec used (in my case AIC), and also the frames per second (30fps NOT 29.97fps). You will have to enter the “advanced” menu to find the drop down menu for frames per second and change it from the 29.97 default to 30fps.
If you forget to change these settings, when you export the finished product you will be left with video that has been stretched from the default 720p size up to 1080p and it will look terrible! This took me a while to figure out….which some of you will no doubt find amusing. But bear in mind I am speaking as a person who only just opened Final Cut Pro for the first time and there’s a lot to take in!
As you now have your timeline set up as an AIC timeline, all the transcoded clips you made will now play and edit in real time. Once you have that setup its plane sailing. With a reasonable amount of RAM in your computer (i’d recommend 4gb or more) you will be able to throw clips around and add transitions to them in no time at all. For me, once I had those steps figure out, it all started to come together. Video with a 5dMKII is not that daunting after all.
Tomorrow I will post the first video that I made and also some practical information about the physical shooting side of things. Lens choice, shutter speeds and ND filters.
