Gear Check

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Gisteq PhotoTrackr review

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I’ve had a mild curiosity in geotagging for a while. Years from now, i’ve always thought that it wold be very cool to know exactly where some of my photos were taken. Especially my backcountry skiing photos where they are not necessarily taken near any recognizable landmarks. As I travel more and more to other parts of the world too, it would be nice to look back at that in the future and see exactly where I was. For Canon shooters you instantly run into a problem though. So far Canon has refused to add geotagging to any of their …

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Packing for a skiing photo trip to Japan

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A few months ago I got a call from Salomon asking if I would like to be part of a trip to Japan in February. The crew would be Sammy Carlson, Dane Tudor and Mike Henitiuk along with filmers from Salomon and also Poorboyz Productions. I was stoked! Japan was right up there on the list of places I wanted to go and I knew the proposed crew for the trip would be a good one…. We left Vancouver airport heading for Tokyo and then a flight from there to Sapporo on Hokaido, Japan’s North Island. Trying to pack gear …

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Camera choice, thoughts from an over crowded camera bag.

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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. …

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10 Things you will need to be a ski photographer

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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 …

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Glidecam HD-2000 review

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Since I took delivery of my Canon 5dMKII last year I have had a lot of fun learning about shooting video and investigating the potential that the Canon DSLRs have in shooting HD movies. With so many people embracing the movie making capabilities of these new cameras, I wanted to check out some products that can potentially make your videos stand out from the crowd. A commenter on a previous post about video accessories for the 5dMKII, suggested that I try out some of the products from the US company Glidecam. At the time I had a few other things …

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Ikan Cheese Stick JR & Articulating Arm

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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 …

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Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA review.

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This past Autumn I was in Mexico on holiday. I took my newly purchased Canon S90 camera with me and was having a great time snapping pics with that little thing. The quality of the shots coming out of that tiny thing was really blowing me away. I wasn’t traveling with a laptop computer so my photos remained on the camera’s memory card. Unfortunately, on the fifth day of my trip, my camera was stolen while I was in a restaurant. This was the first time I have ever lost photos and I was truly gutted, more so than I …

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Winter Is Coming – How to do slow motion with the Canon 7d

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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. …

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F-Stop Satori Camera Pack

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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 …

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Shooting Video with the Canon 5dMKII – Part 2

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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. …

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Shooting video with a Canon 5dMKII – Part 1

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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 …

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NZ Trip – What worked and what didn’t

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I’ve seen similar post on a couple of other photographers blogs before and always found them to be interesting and useful. When heading off on a long trip it can be tough to figure out how much gear to take and in what combination. On my recent trip I had to do just about every type of ski photography you can imagine. Backcountry skiing, heli skiing, daytime and night time park shooting, product shooting and portraiture. I was trying to accomplish this with only 2 pieces of checked in baggage (32KG each) and one piece of hand baggage and that …

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