We celebrated Lindsay’s bat mitzvah last night, and had a terrific time. I am rarely without my Canon 5D Mark II these days, because I find the ability to fuse my photography with little video moments to be invaluable. And here was such a moment.
Lindsay’s dad was at the microphone delivering a touching and fun tribute to his daughter when, out of nowhere, one of Lindsay’s little cousins provided a moment of comic (and sagely!) relief. Watch and listen here…
Was playing around with the 5D Mark II at a Mothers’ Day gathering at my sister’s house today and shot some nice video with it. I used the 35/1.4L and 85/1.2L, both wide open using exposure lock. I killed off the audio track in Quicktime Pro, conformed the video to 24fps (slowing it slightly) using Cinema Tools, then re-compressed it to 720P at about 2800bps using DV Kitchen.
Make sure your web browser window is stretched out as big as you can get it.
If you don’t know what any of that means, just watch and enjoy. 
Today the Jewish community celebrated Purim. I was at the Wornick Jewish Day School, and I shot a little video showing all the fun that was had there.
Please click on the picture below to play the video. If it doesn’t play properly, you probably have to upgrade to the latest version of Quicktime from Apple. It’s a free download for both Mac and Windows. Enjoy!
I was hired to do a marketing piece for a company that does high-end digital sales training, and when I told them I could do not only photographs (as I have done for them before) but video, too, they jumped at the opportunity. I decided that I would commit to the Canon EOS 5D Mark II to film this piece for a few reasons.
Overall, I was extremely pleased with the results. And my clients were flabbergasted when I was not only able to show them results in near real-time, but I was able to edit together a fun slideshow recap with about 10 different video clips embedded in the show.
Anyway, here’s a photo of the rig perched on the camera. It’s an Azden dual-mic receiver with two XLR outputs. I ran its outputs into a BeachTek XLR-Pro adapter, which in turn has a stereo miniplug output, which works nicely with the 5D Mark II’s audio input.
Now here is a very short example of what the video looks and sounds like. It’s sampled way, way down so as not to swamp my poor server. See what you think…
I was leaving my studio mid-day today and noticed that the cherry blossoms (is that what they are?) have opened up, and they’re simply gorgeous. So I grabbed my Canon 5D Mark II and figured out how to get it to capture this scene. It was done hand-held, conformed to 24fps, then slowed down by 50% to 12fps, then compressed using DV Kitchen.
Beautiful stuff! You’ll need the latest version of Quicktime, a fast internet connection, and a reasonably fast computer, too. There’s no audio on this one.
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