Getting to this point was hard enough. We arrived in Mongolia less than a day earlier so had little time to prepare.  I had briefed a local fixer ahead of our arrival that I wanted to follow a young jockey through his day.  But while he found a suitable child in the capital he could not find a local race where we could get sufficient access to the subjects.  Luckily I’d researched online and found a possible alternative, so taking a bit of a gamble we drove half a day out of Ulan Bator to the town of Kharkhorin (a bumpy ride despite the 4×4).
Luckily the local race organisers agreed to all our requests. Our next task was to find our subject. It didn’t seem that hard given the tens of competitors, but I should have known better. With weeks to befriend one it might have been different, but every child we spoke to was incredibly shy.  Tania decided it would be far to follow one of the horse trainers instead and managed to find Tsedendamba – an amazingly eloquent 61-year-old who has been in the saddle since he was four. He had a young jockey called Purevsuren who was racing the next day and we agreed to meet them just before sunrise.

I had anticipated just how hard it would be to get all the shots I wanted so I packed accordingly, bringing five HD cameras – a Canon 1DmkIV, 5DmkII, 550D and two GoPro HD cams.  As I was travelling light I also chose three slower, ligher weight, f4 aperture Canon L lenses – a 17-40mm, 24-105mm and a 70-200mm.   I also had a 50mm f1.2L and a Sigma 12-24mm lens which I intended to use on the 550D in cases where it ran the risk of getting damaged.  Even though I only had a 20kg checked baggage allowance I also managed to bring with me a Manfrotto 561BHDV monopod, Redrockmicro shoulder rig, Zacuto Z-finder, Steadicam Merlin, Juicedlink DT454, Sanken CS-1 shotgun mic, Sennheiser G2 radio mics and a Gitzo 2941LVL tripod with Manfrotto 701HDV head…with a bit of help from Tania.

After a few hours sleep in our ger – the traditional Mongolian round, felted tents that herders live in – we headed out to the location in the dark.  Tsedendamba had been up the whole night, preparing for the race, but greeted us enthusiastically.  We started to interview him as the sun began to rise, as this is when herders look to the skies to predict what kind of horse will win that day.

For the extreme close up of his eyes I used a Canon EF12 extension tube on the 50mm f1.2L. Normally I would use a 100mm macro lens but I had no room for it this time.  For audio I used radio mics into the Juicedlink DT454 on one channel and then a camera-mounted Sanken CS-1 shotgun mic into the other as a fallback.  Thanks to the Juicedlink’s headphone monitor I was able to hear what was being fed to the camera.  
For the long shots of the sunrise I fitted a Canon 2x convertor to the 70-200 f4L.   The resulting f8 maximum aperture wasn’t an issue because most of these shots were quite bright and shot as a silhoutte.  

Sunrise shot with Canon 70-200f4L IS and 2x convertor

Next I fitted a 550D with the Sigma 12-24 to a Steadicam Merlin and filmed some walking shots of the boy and trainer.  Even though I’ve had a little hands-on instruction with the Merlin from its inventor Garrett Brown, I still find it hard to set up and use in a hurry; hopefully my Steadicam skills will improve in time.  Setting the lens aperture at f8 allowed me to set the focus at around 2 metres and get pretty much everything in focus so I wasn’t constantly trying to adjust it.

One shot I was keen to get was of the boy and trainer walking off, from a high angle.  Sadly I didn’t have a Kessler Crane to hand so I had to make do.  I held up in the air my 5DmkII with the 12-24mm on top of a Manfrotto video monopod, wedging the monopod’s little feet against my body.  I started with it at head height next to the trainer and, as they walked off, slowly raised the camera to fake a jib effect.  It’s far from perfect but I think it was worth a try.  When I came to edit it I applied Final Cut Pro’s Smoothcam filter to iron out any minor bumps.

Next I had to quickly shoot a montage of shots to illustrate the festival itself.  The bulk of shots were on the 70-200 f4L IS, with the new Genus Fader ND and Zacuto Z-finder fitted, using the monopod and with the lens image stabilizer to help steady the image.  The focus pulls I did were all done by hand with no follow focus (again I had no room in my luggage); most were bad, but a couple came off okay.  For the slow motion shots of the wrestlers I switched the camera to 720p/50 and conformed the footage to 25p afterwards in Apple’s Cinematools.  I was allowed to go into the wrestling ring for only a few minutes to get the wide shots, so I had to go handheld using the 17-40mm lens on my Redrockmicro custom rig. Steadicam would have been better but was too hard to get right in the time I had.  Most of the time I was just trying to avoid the wrestlers so I couldn’t really get as close as I wanted either.

For the horse race I wanted to make sure I had enough shots to allow me to cut a fast-paced sequence that showed just how intense it was.  I also needed to make sure there was no additional danger to the jockeys from what I was doing – especially as there are ethical questions about whether such young children should be racing like this.  I had brought a pair of GoPro HD cameras with me for this very purpose.  The boy jockeys were very happy to wear them so we attached one on Purevsuren’s chest, and another on the helmet of another rider.  The GoPro’s record in 1080p but have no viewfinder so setting up can be a little tricky.  I guestimated the framing by looking at the reflection of the image in the lens head-on.  GoPros have an amazing battery life and can record uninterrupted for long periods.  This was important as I had to set the cameras running a long time before the race actually started.  Unfortunately it was very dusty and one of the cameras somehow got a smudge in the lens between setting up and the race – in the end I had to use the footage as I couldn’t shoot it again.

One other downside to the GoPros is that there is no easy way to fit Neutral Density filters (apart from a small custom one, which I didn’t have, which goes inside the case).   This meant that the GoPro was going to be using fast shutter speeds in the bright light of the race.  Luckily this wasn’t a complete disaster as I had made the creative decision to shoot all the race footage at high shutter speed anyway for an action movie feel.  I set the DSLRs at shutter speed around 1/2000th/sec when shooting the race.

Ready to shoot from the sunroof using Redrockmicro rig and Z-finder

We had arranged with officials for our 4×4 to follow the race along with the other escort vehicles.  For the race start I had Tania shoot a wide shot on my second camera.  This worked out well as I needed both wide and long shots.  I stood out of the car sunroof ready to roll.  We had to maintain a safe distance so as not to frighten the horses; as a result most of the shooting was on the Canon 70-200mm with the Redrockmicro shoulder rig for support.  The terrain was very rough and it was going to be impossible to get smooth shots for more than a few seconds at a time.  Focussing was going to be tough too, as much as I love faster apertures I decided to shoot at around f5.6 or f8 instead so that focus was not so critical.  I had also tested the Steadicam Merlin but there was no way to make it work in the high wind and with a long enough lens – I reckon the best way to do this properly would be a r/c helicopter mounted camera. I also equipped the 550D with a tripod for wide angle shots; the aim was to get ahead of the riders during parts of the race and put the camera down on its own near the track so the horses would come past it.  Occasions like this are perfect for the 550D as if it were to get destroyed by a stray rider or car it would not be as bad as a dead 5DMkII.

Our 4x4 needing a clean

When it came down to it, the whole race took less than half an hour.  I got almost enough usable footage to string together in the edit.  There were a couple of shots missing however and though we were only able to follow one race all the way though I was able to pick up some b-roll from static positions on a second race later in the day.

If I were to do it again I would certainly bring a bigger crew and more equipment. That said, I hope the end result is watchable and more cinematic that one of our regular news reports.  Let me know what you think.

The following fixes have been incorporated.

Fixes a phenomenon in which the set aperture moves unexpectedly when shooting movies in manual exposure mode using some Canon lenses (such as macro lenses).
Supplemental Information: This phenomenon involves the aperture of the lens moving unexpectedly when the focusing ring moves (during focusing). Please note that aperture values also change when operating the zoom ring of a zoom lens that has variable maximum aperture values; however, this is a normal operation because the camera controls aperture values properly depending on the focal length (zoom position).

Corrects misspellings in the French and Spanish menus for applicable products.
How do I check the camera’s current firmware version number?

Turn the Power Switch , and press the

button to display the menu. Turn the Main Dial and the Quick Control Dial, and you will see the “Firmware Ver.X.X.X” at the end of the settings shown in “Set-up 3 (Yellow)”, which is the currently installed firmware version number.

How do I update the firmware?

These are two ways to update the camera’s firmware.

Download the firmware file from this web site and install the update as shown in the updating procedure.
Bring the camera to a Canon Customer Support Center and have the firmware updated by the center.
If you choose this method, contact a Canon Customer Support Center in your region

You can download the Eos 1DmkIV firmware here
and the Eos 550D/T2i firmware here

NAB 2010 – Jag35 DSLR cage system from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

The 1DmkIV and 7D video featured on the front of the Guardian website

I’m back in Beijing after my travels and I’ve finally had a chance to get out and shoot a piece for my newspaper’s website with the 1DmkIV. It’s nothing too complicated but a good excuse to put the camera through its paces in bright daylight. I set it in 720p/60, put a 70-200 lens on it and ventured down to a frozen lake in Beijing to see how it performed in daylight.

1DmkIV and 7D on Ice – Winter fun on Beijing’s Houhai lake from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

When it came to editing the 1DmkIV footage was changed into slow motion by using Apple’s Cinematools to conform it to 25p. All the footage is graded using Magic Bullet looks.

Canon Eos7D ice cycle cam ready to roll

To get the moving shots I attached my 7D on the front of an ice-bike that I’d rented, using a super clamp. The camera was fitted with a Tokina 11-16mm lens and to get the exposure I wanted I fitted a Genus Fader ND filter to the front. I would have put the 1DmkIV on there but I didn’t really want to be the first person to write one off; imagine how embarrassing that would be. I got some strange looks as it was – and had some near misses.

This camera was set to shoot 1080p/30 and then conformed to 25p to give a very slight slowdown, then downsized to 720p in the final output.

The 7D was fitted with a Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 and a Genus Fader ND filter

Sadly the ice was not as smooth as I’d expected and ideally I should have used some kind of stabilisation rig for the 7D. So the result was not perfect and needed a little help from Final Cut’s smoothcam filter to get rid of some of the worst wobbling. I guess a better solution might have been a gyro stabilizer and some kind of arm, but I have neither. Maybe I’ll treat myself later in the year.

Fully loaded 1DmkIV with Tokina 11-16 f2.8, Genus Wideangle Mattebox and bars, Zacuto Z-finder

Eos1DmkIV with Tokina 11-16mm and Genus Mattebox from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Since getting my shiny new 1DmkIV I’ve been rebuilding my standard go everywhere kit to accomodate the new camera. The 1.3x crop factor has been seen as limiting by many who have got used to a ‘full frame’ body like the 5DmkII. Some users have sited the lack of good, fast aperture wide angle lenses and it is true there are few options. I’m specifically going to focus on video here but much of this applies to stills too.

The widest Canon f2.8 zoom is the 16-35 f2.8L II, a fine lens but when put on the 1DmkIV it becomes the 35mm equivalent of approximately a 21-45mm, certainly not too shabby and probably as wide as you need to go in many circumstances. It also takes 82mm screw in filters and also takes a Mattebox easily. However if you do want to stray wider the options are more limited. I have a Canon 17-40 f4L which is also nice but not quite as wide or as fast aperture as I’d like.

Canon make the 10-22 f3.5-4.5 EF-S lens which sadly does not fit the 1DmkIV as its only designed to fit the 7D and other EF-S mount bodies. It can be modified through surgery to fit a 1D body but it hardly seems worth it as it is still slow aperture and it will of course vignette.

Canon do offer the very nice 14mm f2.8L II lens I recently used for my horses shoot in Singapore, its very sharp and quite compact, however it is also has a very bulbous protruding front element that you can’t easilty get a filter onto. For video this is problematic as Neutral density filters are pretty much essential for daylight shooting at wide aperture whilst maintaining a shutter speed between 1/50th and 1/125th for natural looking motion. Front filters simply can’t be fitted to the Canon 14mm and the only option is to put filter gels behind the lens where there is a slot – not convenient.

Canon 1DmkIV at the races – test shoot from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Sigma and Tamron both make cheaper fixed 14mm lenses but neither is as sharp as the Canon and they have the same issues with filters. There is apparantly a remarkably inexpensive Korean manual focus 14mm f2.8 from Samyang coming out as well but I’ve never tried it.

Many stills shooters have adapted the Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 for use in Canon, I have this lens and the appropriate adapter from 16-9.net but its a bit of a faff for video and not a cheap option either. On the plus side filter makers Lee have developed a filter holder to fit the front of the lens so ND and ND grad filters will be no problem. There are also some interesting home brew filter solutions for that lens.

Then there is the Sigma 12-24 f4.5-f5.6, lovely and wide but very slow aperture. I also have this lens and for a corrected (non-fisheye) lens it is about as wide as you can go and is very sharp. On a bright day its fine but no good for low light.

There are also a multitude of non-corrected fisheye lenses like the Canon 15mm f2.8 or Sigma 8mm f3.5 which some people ‘de-fish’ in software when shooting stills, however I’m really not sure how well that would work in video.

Which leads me to my current best solution, the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 which I originally purchased for my Eos7D. Now this is a very sharp EF-S crop factor lens designed for the smaller 1.5 crop so it doesn’t cover the whole 35mm frame. It is f2.8 all the way through and has a nice wide manual focus ring.

Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 mounted on the 1DmkIV

When fitted to a 1DmkIV it vignettes heavily at the 11mm end but when you start zooming in the vignette goes. By about 13mm its virtually gone and you can use the lens normally even when stopped down to f16. It really is quite sharp even in the corners and shows only minimal Chromatic abberation. The AF in stills mode is pretty average but in video I’d manual focus anyway so this is not a problem. Essentially what you have is a usable range of 13mm to 16mm which in 35mm terms would be approximately a 17-21mm f2.8.

Why would I choose this lens over say the Canon 14mm for video? simple – the Tokina has a 77mm front thread which can be used with screw in filters or in my case a Genus Wide Angle Mattebox (from about 13.5mm with no problems using an adapter ring, you can probably get 13mm with flexible cloth nun’s knickers instead of a fixed ring). You can also fit the popular Genus 77mm Fader ND filter to this lens but it will vignette from about 14mm, still pretty good.

Genus 77mm Fader ND filter fitted to the Tokina 11-16mm

Until Canon bring out something better this is currently the most practical fast aperture ultra-wide angle for video use on the 1DmkIV. I hope this New Year will see other innovative lens options and a Canon 14-24 f2.8 has been long rumoured, I just hope whatever comes out can take filters.

In action at Singapore Turf club with the Canon 1DmkIV, 300mm f2.8 lens

The Beast - A 1DmkIV all tricked out with Genus Mattebox and follow focus

When Canon Singapore contacted me to see if I wanted to test drive a pre-productin shiny new Canon 1DmkIV I jumped at the chance. Up till now I’ve had to lay down my own cash to try the 5DmkII and 7D so this was a great opportunity to form an opinion about the camera without going bankrupt and I was due to be in Singapore anyway for an event at Cathay Photo. I had a few days to really put the camera through it paces shooting mainly at night to see if it lived up to the hype. I’m glad to say that the short answer is that it does and its low light video is truly stellar, easily beating my 5DmkII and 7D.

The film you see here was filmed in just one night of horse racing at the Singapore Turf Club. Shooting at between 1600 and 6400 ASA under just the floodlights I got results that were far cleaner than I’d expected. The rolling shutter effects seem to be improved over the 5DmkII too, its still there but you need to look much harder for it. The one thing that is still evident on the pre-production model I was testing is aliasing, personally I didn’t find it too distracting but make up your own mind.

Canon 1DmkIV _ The races from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

I had not one but two 1DmkIV bodies from Canon to play with along with a selection for lenses from a 14mm right up to a 300mm f2.8. I wanted to test not just the low light but the slow motion capability as well so I shot this whole film on 720p/60 and then slowed it down to 23.98 fps using Cinematools, before editing in Final Cut Pro. The final footage you see here is ungraded and pretty much straight from the camera. The picture profile was set to neutral with contrast and sharpness reduced to min. If I have time I will try and grade this piece later and re-post it.

Shooting with a prototype Singapore made high quality slider and the 1DmkIV with 14mm lens

I should mention that the LCD screen somehow seems to be better than that of the 5DmkII or 7D, it is the same resolution but I found it easier to focus with. Which brings me on to one of the other new gadgets I had to test. The LCDVF viewfinder from Estonia, although I am used to the more expensive Z-finder from Zacuto, this little gadget worked quite well. It doesn’t have a diopter adjustment but I didn’t find that to be a problem with my eyesight. I actually quite like the image it gave with the 1DmkIV, being slightly smaller than the Z-finder it was still a breeze to focus. I did have one annoying problem though, the magnetic frame that attaches to the back of the camera kept falling off, I didn’t have long to allow it to set on the back before shooting and it was damned hot so maybe that caused the fault. LCDVF recommend a certain way of applying the frame which I had no time to do so maybe I’m being a little unfair. It is also possible that the new LCD on the 1DmkIV has a slightly different coating to the 5DmkII that is less sticky, who knows? sadly I had to give the 1DmkIV back so someone else will have to figure that one out.

I also tested the camera with a new as yet unreleased prototype heavy duty slider by local Singaporean designer Lee Kang Swee, this is like my original Glidetrack slider but far more heavy duty and probably better suited to the weight of a fully loaded 1DmkIV. I used it for all the slider shot you see in this film, I’m going to keep in touch and see how this product develops.

Lastly, I couldn’t have done it without the help of Singaporean photographer and filmmaker Wee Han Yeo who organised the shoot and assisted me throughout, you can see his great work at www.tripeaksimagery.com

Not one but two Canon 1DmkIV cameras out on the track

Brian Worley is Project manager – Photo Education and Canon Europe and we were very lucky to get time with him and the 1D Mk IV, we talked to him about the camera and it’s video functions. We also had a good play with the camera ourselves.

Den and I were able to see that the high ISO performance is definitely improved over the 5DmkII – as Vincent Laforet has already ably demonstrated with his film ‘Nocturne’. The rear LCD screen also seemed to give a much nicer image than the previous Canons, working really well with the Zacuto Z-finder I test with it. The activation of video shooting using the FEL button by the shutter button seemed quite intuitive for news shooters trying to get video clips in between stills. The build quality is as expected with a 1 series body – which is to say better than on the 5DmkII and 7D, it feels solid. It shoots all the same resolutions and video sizes as the 7D so basically it does PAL friendly 1080P/25 along with 24P and 30P plus 720P 50 and 60fps so for news its pretty adaptable to your workflow. I’m glad Canon recognised the importance of 25p and 50p PAL rates as like many other newspaper video people I often have to cut Reuters or AP video PAL footage into my finished films, messing around with multiple frame rates on a timeline can be a real pain. The 1.3x crop remains from the previous 1D Mk III – I’d have preferred full frame – but many will not see this as a disadvantage.

We also tested the camera with a couple of video support rigs from Redrockmicro and Zacuto along with a Genus mattebox and bars setup, all worked fine. I was worried the extra weight of the camera compared to the 5DmkII would make these lightweight rigs less usable but actually found that if anything it actually improved handling – with short lenses at least. Audio is the main area where there has been little change, with the minijack mic input still being limited to automatic gain control – we didn’t have time to test any audio adapters like the Beachtek or Juicedlink but I have no reason to think they function any differently to the way they do with the 5DmkII.

This camera rounds out Canon’s video capable D-SLR range, users of pro 1-series bodies can now choose to do the same other Canon users, there is no excuse not to give video a go. I think that with Canon and Nikon now offering video in their top end pro cameras there are very interesting times ahead for the news industry – convergence between video and stills is now technically possible for many assignments, the question is whether the likes Reuters, The Associated Press, Getty Images and the larger newspaper groups will choose to move it forward.

A big thank you to Den and F-Stop academy for shooting this video with me and editing it – he’s a top guy and I’d recommend you to drop by his site. I hope we can do more with him in the future. Thanks also to Felix Clay for helping out during the shoot.