The changing world of Japan’s Geisha from Matthew Allard on Vimeo.

The changing face of geishas was one of the stories I covered on a recent assignment to Japan. For centuries their mysterious world was reserved for the elite, with wealthy men paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of a geisha’s company.
Times in Japan have changed and the modern geisha has had to adapt to survive. With the financial crisis that has swept across the world, the number of clients has greatly declined. Geishas or Maiko (the trainees) have now had to look for other sources of income. In Kyoto, beer gardens are now using them to mingle with customers and dance on a small stage. This is a far cry from the exclusivity the culture thrived on for generations. It has brought them out of teahouses and into the world of the common person.

Correspondent Steve Chao and I pre-planned to shoot this story on a DSLR. I usually shoot on Sony XDCAM HD cameras, but they are not great in low light and are big and heavy and don’t allow you to get that intimate with your subject. Our shoot involved filming at night in a rooftop beer garden and also in a small teahouse. It is very difficult and usually horribly expensive to film a geisha; we were very lucky and managed to find a young Maiko to shoot, but were given limited access and time. I wanted an intimate feel to the story, to take you into the geishas’ world but also show you how they have been forced to adapt to modern times.

Armed with a Canon 7D, 5Dmk2 and 7 lenses we got to work. The beer garden was crowded and dark, but the 7D allowed me to shoot in an intimate environment where the light wasn’t ideal. I don’t like using artificial light unless It is absolutely necessary and most of the shots in the beer garden were made using ambient light. On a few, I had Steve hold a Litepanels 1×1 light on a boom pole above the table. These are fantastic and produce a beautiful soft light that imitates ambient light. All the sound was recorded separately on a Zoom H4N using either Seinnheiser radio or shotgun mics.

The next part of the story involved shooting the Maiko doing her make-up in a small traditional Japanese house. This is extremely rare to get and I wanted to make it look as good as I could in the limited time we had with her. She would put her make-up on in front of a large mirror with traditional Japanese sliding doors in the background so I turned off all the lights in the room and placed two 1×1 Litepanel LED lights dimmed down on either side of the mirror. Given the small room and the size of the mirror I wanted to get 3 different angles of her transforming herself into a geisha. I placed the 5D with a Canon 16-35mm f2.8 lens at a low angle right underneath the mirror. This camera was going to record the wide shot for the whole sequence. The 7D was placed very close up to the edge of the mirror but it had to be far back enough that it couldn’t be seen in the wide shot by the other camera. This made the 7D very hard to operate as it was in an awkward position, but the compromise had to be made.

The 7D was running a Canon 100mm f2.8 macro (the non-stabilized version). I wanted to shoot very close details of the make-up being applied. I also wanted very shallow depth of field. I was unable to use my Zacuto Z-finder or a monitor due to the position of the camera.  I was also forced to continually rack focus as the shot was so tight and the talent was constantly moving. After 45 minutes my eyes were watering from having to concentrate so hard. To add to the difficulty, she couldn’t stop or repeat anything. I had one shot at it and if I got it wrong or out of focus I couldn’t do it again.

This shoot proved to be very difficult but I was happy with the end result. The 7D was set in 720p/50fps as I wanted to slow down the make-up sequence in Apple’s Cinema tools. It was cut on FCP and there was no use of Magic Bullet or fancy color correction programs. I’m shooting for international broadcast and I don’t want soft, overly colour-corrected images. The joy for me is getting it right when you shoot it and not having  to say….”I’ll fix it in post” I’m not sure if I just happened to get a great 7D, but I shoot on the standard camera profile and I’m more than happy with the image it produces. The DSLR still provides me with a lot of problems; bad moire, rolling shutter and – in almost all situations without a very good shoulder support – terrible hand-held results. The cameras provide spectacular bang for your buck but if you use them you have to know their limitations and plan accordingly. I travel almost every week to shoot stories across Asia-Pacific. This is only the third story I have shot completely on DSLRs because in most cases I don’t have the time or the limitations of the cameras make it too hard to use on many assignments. While they do have their place in my kit, I’m excited about the new breed of hybrid video/DSLR cameras that are on the horizon. I don’t ever see DSLRs getting proper audio, full HDMI out or all the features we crave. Technology is moving so quickly that a new breed of cameras will ultimately outdate the video DSLR.

Lenses used on this shoot were a Canon 70-200mm f2.8 IS II, 50mm f1.2, 135mm f2, 24-70mm f2.8, 100mm Macro f2.8, 16-35mm f2.8 and a Tokina 11-16mm   f2.8. All interviews were shot on the 70-200mm.

About Matthew Allard, Aljazeera Senior Field Cameraman, Kuala Lumpur:
Matt has been a Camera/Editor in TV news for 20 years, previously working for both Channel 9 and Channel 10 in Australia. Twice Network Ten Australia’s cameraman of the year as well as being a Walkley Finalist for outstanding camerawork in 2006 (for coverage of the Cronulla Race Riots) and a Logie Finalist for outstanding news coverage 2006 (Bali 9). He has covered news events in more than 30 countries, from major sporting events to terrorist bombings. Based out of the Kuala Lumpur broadcast centre in Malaysia he is an avid user and follower of new technology, shooting stories on HD broadcast cameras as well as new Canon DSLR’s.

Sony NEX-5 with Carl Zeiss 24-70 f2.8 and LA-EA1 adapter

Sony NEX-5 Test from Matthew Allard on Vimeo.

The Sony NEX-5 is an intriguing little digital camera that gives you a lot of bang for your buck: its currently the world’s smallest and lightest with an interchangeable lens. This camera has amazing quality for something so small. It gives you compact camera design with the sensor size and internals of a DSLR – its sensor is roughly the same size as that of a Canon 550D. As I already own a Canon 7D and am very familiar with the 5D Mark 2 and the 550D I was interested to see how it stacks up. I could talk about its still images, but let’s be honest; I know we are all mainly interested in its video potential.

The Sony NEX-5 with Sony Alpha zoom lens fitted using adapter

There are only two lenses currently available for the NEX series cameras. I chose the 16mm f2.8 pancake lens, which isn’t great, but is hardly terrible either. My main reason for purchasing the NEX-5 was that I already own a Sony A900 full frame DSLR and several Alpha lenses (Carl Zeiss 24-70mm f2.8 and the Sony G series 70-400 f4 to 5.6), so with an LA-EA1 adaptor I could use the same lenses. The only downside is that when you put an Alpha series lens on the camera you can only use manual focus and aperture is fixed wide open in video mode.

The NEX-5 uses Sony’s AVCHD codec. I know a lot of people have complained about this codec in the past, but it has improved. It is a lot easier to deal with than the H.264 codec used on the Canon DSLRs; it is a simple process of attaching the camera with the supplied USB cable and turning it on. Once you launch Final Cut Pro you just launch log and transfer and in come the clips. Working in international news I find it far quicker and far easier to import than H.264.

So how does it stack up as far as video quality goes? I was sceptical at first as most of the small compact cameras that can shoot video are terrible and I knew before I purchased this camera that it had a lot of limitations. With the standard NEX lenses it has auto focus and can also auto track. The auto tracking isn’t spot on but it is still fairly good. Once you attach an Alpha series lens it’s back to manual focus only. The Carl Zeiss lenses that are made for the Sony Alpha series are very, very good optically and I was intrigued to see how these lenses would go hooked on to the NEX-5. The lens clicks straight on to the adaptor and away you go. It does look very strange to have such a heavy, big lens on a tiny compact camera, but I was surprised to find it wasn’t too awkward to use (and it is, of course, much easier to use when put it on a tripod). The NEX-5 comes with a very impressive LED display that is super sharp and it also adjusts up to a 45-degree angle – perfect for low angle shots. Unfortunately it doesn’t rotate down so it’s no good if you hold the camera up high in the air.

The NEX-5 LCD display is clear and tilts upwards

Even in manual focus mode it is easy to use. The focus assist button is very handy and remarkably easy to use to get crisp focus. Unfortunately you can only use this feature before you start recording video. You can’t adjust aperture once recording either but you can adjust aperture compensation by + or – 2 stops if you’re not happy with the auto aperture.

I found that even with all these limitations the NEX-5 is easy to use and the picture quality is very good, much better than I expected. The images are very sharp, with fantastic vivid colour reproduction and nice shallow DOF with a fast lens. It has a maximum record time of 30 minutes instead of the Canon’s 12 minute limitation. While it still has a very slight Jello effect when panning very fast it’s nothing like what I’ve experienced with the Canons. It’s true it doesn’t do progressive, only interlace – which may put some people off – but in the news business very few of us shoot progressive anyway. The auto iris function during video record is pretty impressive and does a great job in even high contrast situations. There are no audio inputs either but the on-board microphone is fairly good. There is also a hot shoe attachment to mount an optional Sony microphone.

The NEX-5 basically uses the same sensor that is in the new Sony NEX-VG10 camcorder that Dan has already written about. We’ll see how that camera compares in due course. Would I recommend this camera? Yes, but only if you already own a Sony camera and have a few good Alpha series lenses. The NEX-5 is a brilliant little camera given its size and abilities. Yes, it has limitations and yes, we would love full manual control and an audio input, but you have to remember this is a $600 compact.
It is good to see that Sony has finally entered the game even if it is from a different direction. With the upcoming release of Sony’s new prosumer camcorder and other releases from different companies, the DSLR video features we all love are quickly moving into proper video cameras that we all want.

About Matthew Allard, Aljazeera Senior Field Cameraman, Kuala Lumpur:
Matt has been a Camera/Editor in TV news for 20 years, previously working for both Channel 9 and Channel 10 in Australia. Twice Network Ten Australia’s cameraman of the year as well as being a Walkley Finalist for outstanding camerawork in 2006 (for coverage of the Cronulla Race Riots) and a Logie Finalist for outstanding news coverage 2006 (Bali 9). He has covered news events in more than 30 countries, from major sporting events to terrorist bombings. Based out of the Kuala Lumpur broadcast centre in Malaysia he is an avid user and follower of new technology, shooting stories on HD broadcast cameras as well as new Canon DSLR’s.

I usually shoot news and long feature pieces, but sometimes I get the chance to shoot something different. Bufori is a custom car company that hand makes luxury saloons and sports cars. They unveiled their brand new Bufori “Geneva” at the 80th Geneva International Motor Show and approached me about making a short film to showcase it, to be shown on various screens at the show. I decided to shoot this on my Canon 7D and also used three GoPro Hero Cams. In the old days I would have had to take a big broadcast camera and all the accessories to shoot something like this. Now I can take a much smaller DSLR camera, a few lenses and accomplish what you could only dream about a few years ago.

Bufori Geneva from Matthew Allard on Vimeo.

I shot both stills and a video for the company that were played on screens at the motor show. I decided to shoot the video on my Canon 7D using the following lenses – Canon 16-35mm f2.8, Canon 50mm f1.2 and a Tokina 11-16mm f2.8. For the on-board driving shots I utilized the GoPro HD Hero cams mounted on various parts of the car. I do have mounts and arms to put a full size DSLR on a car but decided against it (better to risk a $300 camera as opposed to a $1700 one!).

A GoPro HD ready to go

Inside the factory I shot various parts being manufactured and tried to concentrate on the detail of having almost every component made by hand. I cannot stress enough the importance of using good, fast glass when you shoot. Don’t let anyone tell you that it doesn’t matter as much which lenses you use when you’re shooting video, because it does. Would you put cheap tires on a Ferrari? In most cases you get what you pay for. My Canon 50mm f1.2 cost more than my camera but is worth every cent – the difference between the F1.2 and F1.4 is huge. My advice is to buy the most expensive lenses you can afford on your budget.

Dolly and 7D rig in action

For the shots of the car inside the factory I also utilized a broadcast jib and dolly. The Genus adapter plate is a fantastic piece of kit; it enables me to put my 7D straight onto my broadcast tripod or jib so you get rock-solid movement. I also used two Litepanels 1×1 LED lights to illuminate the car. I actually needed more light than I had but time constraints and the fact that I was doing this alone limited my options. The 7D was an absolute joy to use. It enabled me to work in low light with a small depth of field that allowed me to show incredible detail. I would not have been able to use a broadcast camera when shooting in the factory unless I used excessive light, something I try to stay away from.

7D ringlight rig

For the outside shots of the car I found a small road that had lots of twists and turns and plenty of character. By setting up in a variety of spots I was able to get plenty of different angles of the car without having to move around a lot. This was the first shoot that I used the Zacuto Z-Finder on. It is brilliant, but having said that I’m still waiting for someone to come out with an adjustable viewfinder so you can use it in whatever position you like. Coming from a broadcast background, I’m used to using cameras with viewfinders that move up and down so you can see what you’re doing regardless of where you put the camera. Someone needs to come up with one or take a leaf out of Sony’s Alpha range of DSLRs that have a moveable LCD screen on the back (are you listening Canon?). I spent a lot of time lying on the ground in the middle of the road to get some of the angles O wanted.

No matter how much I use the 7D, I’m continually blown away by the quality of the images. The DSLR has revolutionized the way I work. While it is not suitable for everything, it gives me a very useful addition to my arsenal of different cameras that I use on a daily basis.

Apart from the Hero cam vision all material is ungraded and shot on the standard camera settings. The entire video was shot in less than one day and I’d like to say thank you to Lee Ali, Mark Phillips and Felix Haller for all their help.

I was sent recently on a two week assignment to cover the Presidential elections in Sri Lanka. This trip would take me from the far south of the country to Jaffna in the extreme north.

A soldier in Northern Sri Lanka

A destroyed building in Jaffna

Sri Lanka is not the easiest place to report or shoot in. The media is controlled heavily by the government and you need permission to do just about anything.

The last time i was in Sri lanka i spent more than a week with the Tamil Tigers during the middle of the civil war in a town called Killinochi. Most of the people i met and filmed are now dead. Killinochi itself is a virtual ghost town, having almost been completely destroyed during the Sri Lankan military’s main northern assault last year.

Young girl in an IDP camp

The majority  who have suffered have been the Tamil people. Hundreds of thousands are now without a place to live or living in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. For those who have left the camps they are now returning to find their houses and lively hoods have been completely destroyed by war.

Myself and correspondent Wayne Hay spent a week in Jaffna, a place that until recently had been impossible to go to. The army have controlled Jaffna for more than 10 years but it still bears the scars of more than 30 years of cival war. 98% of the population are Tamil and most of them are still living in terrible conditions with their houses either having been destroyed or been taken over by the military. Such is the level of censorship over the media that we were removed from Jaffna on the morning of the elections. At 4am in the morning four large explosions rocked the windows of the guest house we were staying in. The government had complained about a few of the stories we had done in the north of the country and had sent the military around to demand that we left and to escort us more than 200km away. We were not allowed to film any election activity that took place in the north of the country. Only 17% of voters turned out to vote in the north according to government figures. Were they intimidated? Were they free and fare? Who knows….with no media allowed to report in the area the outside world would just have to assume they were.

Sri Lanka Tamils from Matthew Allard on Vimeo.

I created this small short film of Tamils praying in a Hindu temple using my 7D. It was quite dark and very early in the morning meaning it was too difficult to shoot with my broadcast camera. The camera worked well for this situation. I would of liked to have used it more on my trip but due to time constraints and remote filing of stories using a BGAN satphone it was not possible. I hope in the future that conversion times and ease of use will improve on DSLR cameras as i love the images they produce and would use them a lot more. Still for most news gathering events such as this trip the broadcast cameras convenience and quick turn around time meant i had to use it on 90% of occasions. Aljazeera’s response to me using a DSLR continues to be fantastic and i am now blogging about it on the Aljazeera website. They will continue to post not only the stories but short films i shoot in various countries. I commend them on their forward thinking and hope other news networks jump on board the DSLR revolution.

This same film will be running on the Aljazeera website shortly. Here are some of the other stories that ran on Aljazeera from Sri Lanka:

My article on using DSLR cameras to shoot the news is also running on the Aljazeera website. Click this link

The Sword Maker & The Swordsman from Matthew Allard on Vimeo.

Shooting the Sword Maker and the Swordsman using the 7D rig attached to a Sachtler tripod

I bought a Canon 7D in Seoul during a work trip to South Korea last year. I have always been interested in trying new equipment and techniques to capture images. Previously to get the film look required an expensive film camera or buying something like a Letus 35mm adapter setup for a broadcast camera. Either way was very expensive and out of reach for most of us.

At Aljazeera we shoot on Sony XDCAM HD and while being a pretty good camera it gets let down with poor dynamic range, sharpness issues and bad depth of field. Working for a 24 hour Global news network the camera is great for the fast turn around of breaking news stories. Currently the work flow of a using a DSLR camera is not quick enough in most cases to meet these requirements. There are the problems with audio, transcoding, lack of full HDMI out and not being able to use a fluent zoom lens, these issues would probably most TV news networks away from wanting to use them. I have found working at Aljazeera that i have had quite a bit of freedom to try new cameras and ways of doing things. There are always conservative factions in most media organisations that don’t like anything new or different, but Aljazeera has been very supportive. Asia Correspondent Steve Chao has been fantastic and shown great patience in letting me use the 7D on certain stories, knowing full well that it takes a lot longer to shoot with than using our regular TV equipment. Aljazeera has been very pleased with the results and i hope that more people will follow my example and start using this sort of technology.

Matt in action with his regular Sony XDCAM kit

Recently Correspondent Steve Chao and I went to Taiwan to do a few stories and one of them was in Cheding in the south of Taiwan. It was a story on the dying tradition of sword making. Kuo Chang Shi has been a sword maker for more than 50 years and is the man who made the Green Destiny sword that featured in the the Oscar winning movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I decided to shoot it on the 7D because it suited the old, poorly lit workshop he was in and he would be dealing with fire so I would have to shoot in high contrast conditions. Anyone who has used an XDCAM will tell you that they are terrible in low light and cannot reproduce high dynamic range scenes.

I shot with the 7D in 720p/50fps. I did this for two reasons: I wanted to slow a lot of the material down to 25fps and it tends to work better if you are using it with any XDCAM vision. Our work cameras only shoot 50i (35mb/s) so when you shoot in 25p it doesn’t tend to blend in very well.

Using the 7D with Genus Mattebox to capture the atmosphere

I initially had the idea to go to a temple to get some mood shots. This story was about old world traditions and customs. The incense burning and people praying would make a great introduction to the story. I didn’t set up much with the sword maker as what he does is very repetitive. I tend to prefer to let people do what they normally do and work around them. This way you get a more fluid natural look to your story. The shoot took about 4-5 hours to do. I was lucky enough to have one of the worlds top Tai Chi experts turn up to get his swords sharpened while we were filming. We politely asked him to demonstrate some moves for us which again looked great when slowed from 50fps to 25fps. I still record my audio on my broadcast cameras as I’m still waiting for either a Magic Lantern firmware upgrade or the new Juicelink system that is is pre production.

Once I’d finished the story I then imported the shots onto an external hard drive, then used MPEG Streamclip to convert them into Apple ProRes 422. There is a catch with doing this though, the file sizes created are enormous and you have to own a huge external hard drive. If I’m mixing 7D with other footage I usually convert them to XDCAM 1080i50 (35mbs) as that is the format my broadcast camera records in. The file sizes are a lot smaller when you do this however they take a lot longer to convert than turning them into ProRes 422. The advantage of doing this is that I don’t have to render the material if i’m dropping it onto a XDCAM timeline in FCP. Because this story was shot solely on a 7D I turned them into ProRes 422 and created a 720p/50fps timeline. I also turned most of my material from 50fps to 25fps using Cinema Tools so I had nice slow motion footage. I did this because I wanted to emphasise every little detail from the drifting of the smoke to the tiny bits of metal and sparks coming off the steel.

The whole edit took about 7-8 hours to do as I spent a lot of time fiddling with it and making slight adjustments – I was running five tracks of audio. I didn’t use any grading tool like Magic Bullet Looks and the camera was simply on the Standard setting. Once completed I had to export it as a Quicktime file and then bring it back into FCP. The reason for this was I had to turn it into an XDCAM sequence to be able to play out off the timeline through a Matrox MXO box than converts the signal into an HDSDI so i could record it onto an XDCAM F70 machine. I wish i could create a ProRes timeline and play it out as ProRes, but the approximately four year old work issued 17″ Macbook Pro cannot play a ProRes timeline out. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to cut and output in ProRes because the quality is a lot better if you do it that way.

Click to see another Aljazeera film shot on the 7D

I’ve used the 7D for about 3 months now and am still getting used to it. I have a few basic items for it including a Genus mattebox and adaptor plate that lets me put the camera straight on my professional Sachtler 18P tripod. I still don’t have a viewfinder (although I just ordered a Zacuto Z-Finder) or anything for audio. I make do with the lights, audio and other equipment from my regular broadcast kit. I own a Canon 50mm f1.2 and a 16-35mm f2.8 and I hope to get a 70-200 eventually.

Overall I was happy with the result of the story. There are a lot of situations that i can think of, especially in news, where this camera would be useless for shooting with. That said it is certainly is a useful addition to my kit and something I will continue to use in the future.

About Matthew Allard, Aljazeera Senior Field Cameraman, Kuala Lumpur:
Matt has been a Camera/Editor in TV news for 20 years, previously working for both Channel 9 and Channel 10 in Australia. Twice Network Ten Australia’s cameraman of the year as well as being a Walkley Finalist for outstanding camerawork in 2006 (for coverage of the Cronulla Race Riots) and a Logie Finalist for outstanding news coverage 2006 (Bali 9). He has covered news events in more than 30 countries, from major sporting events to terrorist bombings. Based out of the Kuala Lumpur broadcast centre in Malaysia he is an avid user and follower of new technology, shooting stories on HD broadcast cameras as well as new Canon DSLR’s.