Glidecam HD-2000 review

October 10, 2023December 30, 2009 by Dan Carr

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 …

Ikan Cheese Stick JR & Articulating Arm

September 12, 2023December 6, 2009 by Dan Carr

Sometimes you stumble across somethingÂ 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.Â 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.

Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA review.

September 12, 2023November 26, 2009 by Dan Carr

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 ever thought I would be. I didn’t give the camera a second thought, but all I could think about was all the photos I had just lost. When I got back home I started to look into some possible solutions to this problem in the future. Sometimes it’s just not practical to travel with a laptop, so how do you keep your photos safe?

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

September 12, 2023November 7, 2009 by Dan Carr

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. …

F-Stop Satori Camera Pack

April 10, 2018October 14, 2009 by Dan Carr

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 …

Shooting Video with the Canon 5dMKII – Part 2

September 12, 2023October 2, 2009 by Dan Carr

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. …

Shooting video with a Canon 5dMKII – Part 1

September 12, 2023October 1, 2009 by Dan Carr

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 …

NZ Trip – What worked and what didn’t

May 24, 2019September 3, 2009 by Dan Carr

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 …

Flying with an Elinchrom Ranger

October 10, 2023August 29, 2009 by Dan Carr

This morning I was woken up at 4am by someone hammering on my front door. I was ecstatic. Why? Because the guy who was banging 7 shades out of my door, was also carrying my pelican case full of flash equipment that I had last seen at Queenstown airport in New Zealand 4 days ago. If you own and travel with an Elinchrom Ranger (or similar batery powered flash) then you would be advised to read on. Let’s face it, if you put a Ranger through an x-ray scanner at an airport , it’s going to trigger some alarms. And …

Portable Storage – LaCie Rugged drives

May 24, 2019July 20, 2009 by Dan Carr

I just picked up another LaCie Rugged drive for an upcoming trip to New Zealand so I thought I’d take a second to post about them. The Rugged line of drives from LaCie are designed with the traveling photographer in mind and are encased in a protective rubber shell. I have been using a 120gb Rugged for about 2 years now and it has been faultless so far. If you take a look at the larger version of the photo on the left you will even see a sizable dent in the case on the top but still it keeps …

Think Tank Wired Up Collection – Review

May 28, 2019June 26, 2009 by Dan Carr

This Month, Think Tank Photo will be releasing an entire new collection of camera bags designed specifically with the Multimedia photographer in mind. With the advent of cameras such as the Canon 5dMKII and the the Panasonic GH-1, more and more photographers are being asked to shoot video and/or audio on photographic assignments. More to shoot means more to carry and these new bags are designed specifically to meet the new challenges associated with multimedia shooting. If you decide to purchase any of the bags, Think Tank has a special offer on at the moment. If you go to their …

Pocketwizard TT1 Review

September 12, 2023May 11, 2009 by Dan Carr

Be prepared… this is a long one. A few months ago I wrote a post HERE about a couple of exciting new products from LPA designs, the makers of the pocketwizard triggering system. If you are entirely unfamiliar with these products i suggest a quick read of my earlier post as there is a bit of assumed knowledge. I’m not initially interested in the wireless ETTL modes for these new models so i just bought myself a TT1 transmitter to try out the Hypersync mode which supposedly allows you to achieve a much higher x-sync with your strobes. Unfortunately I …