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.

Recently, a couple people have asked me about my (and these are not my words) ghetto fabulous or franken-camera Canon Eos 7D video system. In some ways, the DSLR system for me simply represents a better camera, not a fundamental shift in video storytelling. Over the years, I’ve changed cameras when technology changed and quality got better but my style has more-or-less remained constant.

The biggest reason I had for not adopting DSLRs sooner was ergonomics. I could deal with the lack of timecode, the audio fixes and the overheating, but I simply couldn’t handhold the thing steady and interact with my characters at the same time. I wanted a DSLR built like the Sony Z1U, which I used lovingly for years. I checked out all the standard “rigs”, the Zacuto and the Redrockmicro, but they seemed to push me towards holding the camera like a Betacam, not cradling it like a baby or a football as is my practice.

In the end, I ended up saving money and getting a kit I could deal with. A $8 bracket (it’s literally the cheapest flash bracket that B&H stocks) holds the Ikan V5600 monitor out in front to the left of the lens just like the Sony Z1U. I splurged on another bracket (it was a hundred bucks), which holds the audio gear and balances the camera out by moving weight to the back of the camera.

When setting up a DSLR rig, it always seems to be two steps forward and one step back. I was concerned about weight so I opted for the M-Audio Microtrack audio recorder instead of the other options with XLR inputs. (I had long ago abandoned trying to deal with the camera’s audio) But the battery on the Microtrack sucks, so I had to use a separate USB battery to charge the thing when its non-replaceable battery dies in the middle of the day. Still, the weight of both units is still considerably less than the other options.

With the ergonomics worked out, one of the first assignments I had was a series of stories with NPR’s Adam Davidson in Haiti for PBS/FRONTLINE. As soon as I headed out in the hot Haitian sun I was confronted with new issues to work out. The biggest surprise was the overheating. I had worked with a 5DmkII in the Chihuahuan desert in July, so I thought I was prepared, but in Haiti the 7D would shut down sometimes after only 30 minutes of shooting in the heat of the day. I quickly changed the way I work in order to minimize this DSLR flaw.

The other big headache was one I expected. My plan was to sync the audio at the end of each day of shooting. I used Pluraleyes and it worked about 90 percent of the time. Great, but that other 10 percent had a detrimental effect on my sleep during the 12 days I was in Haiti. After I had synced the audio, I exported the whole day’s shoot into one file in XDCAM422 30p format (This is a standard at FRONTLINE and we chose the format so it would more easily integrate with their Avid systems). That exported file became, for all practical purposes, my raw file. I imported into a new project to edit the piece. I also sent these files to FRONTLINE for them to prep the films for television broadcast.

Solving the Tap Tap Puzzle from Travis Fox on Vimeo.

Since the Haitian trip, the newest headache is keeping pace of changes to the DSLR system. Manual audio controls on the 5DmkII has made me question my decision to go with the 7D and makes me wonder if a similar audio fix will come to the 7D or if I should switch back to the 5DmkII. And with the release of Avid 5, the technical folks at FRONTLINE report that they will soon be able to deal with native 5DmkII/7D files, which will (thank god!) save me tons of time converting everything to other formats.

For more info in Travis and his work head over to his new blog http://blog.travisfox.com/

NG Earth Explorer Desert Adventure from Johnnie Behiri on Vimeo.

Being a freelance cameraman/editor gives me the freedom to accept other interesting projects when not working with the BBC.

When National Geographic approached and asked me to make a film about their “Earth explorer bag collection” I had no doubt that the Canon 7d was the right tool for the job.

Production notes
The task I got was to produce/direct/film/edit a short film that will be presented in NG megastores, exhibitions and at distributors’ point of sales. The main idea was to try and keep the “NG spirit” although we are talking about a commercial product.

A budget and a very tight timeline for the production were set and my first task was to find a proper filming location. I needed a place that would look like an “international desert”. Furthermore, if I could get a few “desert looks” in one location that did not require long travelling time it would be even better. The other thing I needed was a desert that allowed me easy access to its inhabitants and where the language barrier would not be a problem. The reason is that NG is very strict with its copyright policy. Anybody and anything that moves in the frame must give permission to be filmed and any other brand (in my case Land Rover and Canon) filmed in the video must give permission for their product to be shown in the video.
Last, I needed to shoot in a country that was potentially reliable when dealing with the different service providers and – not forgetting – that would be cost effective too….

The place I chose to go to was the Negev desert in the south of Israel.
I planned 3 shooting days and knew in advance that days would be short and nights very cold. In order to stay in my budget and timeline there was no way I could go to Israel in advance and do full preproduction preparations so I had to heavily rely on my previous experience when shooting there and I found a great desert guide from a reliable company which could match the places I imagined and wanted to film to the actual locations on the ground.

The crew was minimal. On set I had at times 2 people from NG, the desert guide, my two actors and me, doing the shooting…
Using the 7d allowed me to be fast, very light and flexible.

The camera survived through the desert heat, sand and long shooting days without any problems (from previous experience, only when shooting 50 frames per second did I get the overheating problem).

Choosing camera profile
Before starting the project I was looking for a picture profile that would give me “out of the box” warm, nice “desert colors”. Then I came across the “custom 7d picture styles” thread on Cinema 5d. A forum member Sumitagarwal posted some promising profiles. His “Kodachrome” profile looked very interesting.
After adjusting the profile even more for my liking I felt like I had a nice “out of the box” color to start with. When shooting, I was using a combination of graduated ND 0.3/0.6/0.9 filters (Formatt filters) to enhance the beautiful blue skies or, in other shots, darken the shiny brown earth.
Vari-ND came in very useful in other shots when I wanted to keep the aperture wide open in midday strong light using the 70-200mm lens as you can see at 4:14 min of the video.
Setting up the camera LCD brightness to ”manual- step no. 3”, gave me the closest WYSWYG when filming so I felt very comfortable with what I saw in the VF.
Later in editing, I was using Cineform “First light” to slightly colour correct and mostly to match colour differences between the different lenses/ND filters used.

Aerial shots (00:29)
These were done with the Canon 17-55mm lens, stabilizer switched on. It is not easy to shoot when the airplane door is taken off and winds are blowing strongly, yet it was a quick and dirty solution allowing me to achieve some nice usable aerial shots.

Shooting “documentary style” (1:47)
Most of the Bedouin scene was shot while things were happening without interfering in the situation. The Rode stereo mic was connected directly to the camera capturing sufficient ambient audio (quality-wise) for this type of project. The DVtec multirig was chosen because it was small and could be folded any time, allowing me to store the camera with the rig attached into my Kata bag protecting the camera and lens from heat and sand

Time-lapse (3:53)
This was my first attempt shooting time-lapse and let me tell you, the actual shooting is extremely boring (looonnng hours) but the final result it worth every minute spent on it. The time-lapse sequence was shot with the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens and JENIS TC-80N3 Remote Switch with Digital Timer for Canon.
You will find many great time-lapse videos and tutorials on-line, but my suggestion is to try it for yourself; it is not difficult at all.

When did the camera perform not so well?
On one occasion we had an amazing minor sandstorm. The sand created horizontal “sand steps”. When attempting to shoot the sand I got terrible moiré and had to give up shooting.

Equipment I chose to have with me:
Canon 7d
Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 AT-X
Canon EF-S 17-55mm f2.8 IS USM
Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L USM
Samyang 85mm f1.4
Samyang 8mm f3.5
Vari-ND
Formatt filters graduated ND 0.3/0.6/0.9
Zacuto z-finder
Rode SVM stereo mic
Manfrotto 756XB with 701HDVminihead

Sachtler DV8 SB
Litepanels 1×1
4 Canon E-6 battaries
1 Kingston 133X 32GB
3 Sandisk extreme III 8GB CF cards
DVtec multirig
Kata T-214 bag
Kata OC-82 bag
Kata PR-460 bag
Netbook and a WD external hard disk to back up the material
JENIS TC-80N3 For time-lapse shooting

Editing was done on Adobe Premiere CS2
All files were converted before editing to Cineform files using the Prospect 4k plugin.
Slight colour correction and matching colours in scenes was done with Cineform “First light”.

Johnnie Behiri is a BBC freelance cameraman operating from Vienna, Austria.
When not working for the BBC, Johnnie films documentaries, commercials, music videos, and testimonial/marketing videos

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!).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I’m the freelance correspondent of Polish TV station Polsat News and have been based in China for almost 4 years. The arrival of the Canon Eos 7D marked my evolution into a DSLR news videographer – I now shoot all my TV reports on the 7D. Fellow media people at press events here still give me a strange look when I appear with my 7D to shoot TV. Luckily enough when I go out to shoot in the field with the 7D the Chinese people around me think I’m just another tourist with a photo camera. It’s a good thing not to drag attention to yourself around here, so the 7D gives me the possibility to stay almost unnoticed while shooting video of everyday life on Chinese streets.

I’ve always been a big fan of multimedia and am fascinated with the tools that make it easier to create a video report. I believe that very soon most newspapers will have a video content on their sites, not just the big ones. Below is one of my latest reports about the cancellation of the Mr Gay China event – shot entirely on the 7D, when broadcast it would have a Polish voice over track to explain everything, but I’ve left that off here.

Beijing police cancel China’s first gay pageant from Janek Zdzarski on Vimeo.

For most of my years in the media I’ve been a news photographer for daily newspapers and also writing articles. In 2004 I obtained an MA from Warsaw University, my major was TV and Photojournalism. Then 2 years ago, right before Beijing Olympics, I was being offered a freelance job for TV.

I was using regular video cameras, the Panasonic AG DVX100, Sony PD150 and Z1. For unobtrusive field work I was carrying my small Sanyo Xacti 1010HD. But then 7D appeared. The image quality, ability to shoot in low light and portability are the things that make this camera a dream tool for me. I usually equip mine with the a LCDVF LCD loupe to make viewing the back screen easier, a small stabilizing rig and sometimes a monopod. For audio I mount a Zoom H4N audio recorder to the camera and then sync it with the camera’s audio track using PluralEyes from Singular software.

Moving pictures are rapidly taking place of stills. Generally my view is that people are bored and fed up with stills, they don’t have time or will to scroll pages full of pictures online. The video format makes it easier, especially when you add some visual devices like timelapse or maybe some stills – this makes the story visually more attractive. That kind of moving news feature or report can reach a far broader audience and the new video DSLR’s are the perfect tool to make this thing happen. For me another good thing about 7d is its price: it’s a really affordable camera for the quality it offers and that gives it potential to change our industry. Here’s another example of the street shooting I’ve been doing.

Merry Christmas in Beijing from Janek Zdzarski on Vimeo.

A couple more things – for me after shooting news photographs for many years I am familiar with DSLR cameras. I understand how to move around with them and the whole philosophy of being a photographer. But not I’m shooting video, I just need to wait longer to capture not just 1/250th of a second, but let’s say 10 seconds. I also need to take care with the audio (as one of my friend said: in the film the good light means good sound). The other area a photographer coming to DSLR video needs to learn and manage is the editing. It evolves more senses and more dimensions than straight stills. Take time to learn all these things.

I still take photographs though, using the 7D and also sometimes a Mamiya 7. I’d like to take the opportunity here to really encourage photographers to learn how to edit and produce a video features. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that photography is about to die; for me video is another challenge and as said before – the video story can reach the broader audience.

Anybody interested in these kind of News/Documentary features from China, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
I publish some of my stuff on my photoblog and here’s my picture’s portfolio: www.zdzarski.com

Below is CNN’s version of the Mr Gay China story – look closely and you’ll see it features Janek in action with his 7D.

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.

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.

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.

“Shooting video is easy”, was a quote on another post on this blog. Like many DSLR shooters, I’m from a stills background so just learning but this is what I know. Shooting video is engaging, challenging, testing, difficult and great great fun – anything but easy

Shooting 25p progressive is even harder than that because you need to be super smooth – a shocking leap from the 30p 5d or an interlaced video camera. The mind is busting with thought for every moment that you roll. Focus, pan speed, shooting angles that will cut, following the action or letting it move into the frame and of course composition, but as a DSLR shooter that is easy and has to be instant.

Shooting motion puts your thoughts under a microscope there is no doubt, I shot this for fun having shot stills of the gang for a magazine last month

Fight Club Truro – Canon 7d from Sam Morgan Moore on Vimeo.

We arrived at nine and departed by eleven, my edit was done by 3am having shot another job in the afternoon. The majority is done with a 70-200 nikkor G lens with the aperture jammed open at f2.8 , stuck on a good Miller tripod which has a wide choice of panning frictions right down to nearly nothing. Follow focus with the lens was the main challenge of the day particularly the lack of monitor and the minute adjustments that the small sensor and DSLR AF lens implies, I used a home made Follow Focus.

Other shots are done on my shoulder rig (www.halfinchrails.com) using both a 14mm nikkor 2.8 and a 50 1.4 nikkor at 2.8. Slo mo reallys cheats handheld moves, but it just doesnt look good with my 14mm – I think I need to stop down a little to sharpen it up

The 50mm lens sings for both perspective and sharpness at f2.8

The edit is probably a bit weak, it starts a little slow and I should change my POV more in some of the cuts – I hope the video is fun

Oh ? the camera – 7d – my initial appraisal is you need a lot of light to keep the ISO down and give yourself some options with aperture to sustain focus, especially in 50FPS mode – Im loving the look of the camera having been initially scared of a ‘small’ chip

I think what DSLR shooters can take away from this is the selection of shot angles and cut choices, Im trying to make an engaging sequence – not a moving slide show which is what I think a lot of DSLR shooters are tempted to do.

SMM

Sam Morgan Moore is a professional stills photographer who works for the ‘heavy’ newspapers and commercial clients in the south west of the uk
he is available to hire to create stills, motion or preferably both
www.sammorganmoore.com

China’s 60th Anniversary national day – timelapse and slow motion – 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

This is my short film from China’s huge national day parade in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the people’s republic.

The challenge was to come up with something different with so many different Chinese and international media covering the event from every angle. After waiting half the previous night for a pass and then catching only 3 hours sleep in the press centre lobby, I got put on a stand with a hundred odd of my media collegues including the likes of the BBC, Reuters, AP and AFP so there was no point doing the same as they were.

I decided to shoot the whole video on D-SLRs using a combination of time lapse and slow motion. The 7D was equipped with an adapted Nikon 300mm f2.8 lens and a 1.4x convertor set at 720p/60 and then slowed down to 25fps in Final Cut Pro. The 5DmkII and Nikon D700 were both mounted remotely high up in the air, one atop a big studio light stand, the other in a Manfrotto super arm clamped to a lampost, both also had tilt and shift lenses fitted.

It was a quite hot for an October day in Beijing and I think this coupled with my heavy use of the 720p movie mode caused my 7D to overheat a lot. The camera would flash a red warning on the LCD and three times the camera overheated so much that it decided to stop me filming. This is documented in the user manual which also states that overheating can also cause the image quality to degrade. In future I’m going to being more with me to protect the camera from the heat.

This said the footage I did get was amazing and is only lightly adjusted for colour and contrast, otherwise its pretty much how it came out the camera.

You can see video as it originally on the Guardian here
There is an great tutorial on timelapse processing from Eos-network here
To see some astounding Timelapse work check out the work of Tom at Timescapes[caption

Matt Jasper, a cameraman for the UK’s Channel 4 news, picked up his Canon Eos7D this weekend and promptly rigged it up with some cool toys so he can use it for ENG. He’s planning to blog here about the experience of changing from a big, heavy ENG camera to a 7D rig, stay tuned. Here’s a quick video we did as his first instalment.

Products from Canon, Redrockmicro, Genus, Zacuto, Zoom, Sony and Pinknoise systems.

Canon 7D – TV cameraman Matt Jasper unboxes and rigs up his new 7D from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

You can see more about Matt and his work covering the Chinese earthquake on the Channel 4 news website here