Ever since the lens arrived it has lived on my GF1 and the GF1 has lived in my man bag! It’s such a fun lens to shoot with.

Of course being 50mm on a micro four thirds give it an equivalent field of view of what you would get with a 100mm on a 5dmkII, so it’s not a very wide lens. Much more of a portrait lens which is not a bad thing at all.

First off for a lens this fast….it’s cheap. It is retailing for $750. For a lens this fast you would normally have to pay a lot more.

Wide open obviously it isn’t super sharp, it’s what I would call soft focus dreamy, stop down to F1.4 and it’s surprisingly sharp.

It has a minimal focus distance of 0.6m, a filter size of 62mm and 8 aperture blades. I noticed that when stopped down a little the “Circle of confusion” was hexagonal in shape but wide open was circular. Apart from from the edges which where more half moon. I actually was actually quite partial to this look…Check out these stills I took with camera below. Some are wide open, some are stopped down…

Sara

Shooting video with it on the GF1 was a challenge. With no manual controls in video mode I set the camera to shutter priority and 1/50th of a second which is optimum shutter speed for 25p. I set the ISO to lowest possible, set the iris it the F stop I wanted and using the Fader ND 72mm (with a 62mm step up ring) I got exposure and hit the exposure lock button so nothing could change. It’s a sort of way around the auto issues on the GF1. I also used a Zacuto Z-Finder, essential for me to get even close to focus with this lens!

The Fader ND  is essential if you want to shoot video on this camera or even stills and shoot wide open during daylight. It’s my HD-DSLR number one accessory.

The image was definitely sharper closed down but wide open I was very please with the image. I did a few tests shots under and on Santa Monica Pier. I really want to try and use this lens on the GH1 as soon as I can to see what it really is capable of in video mode.

It’s got lovely smooth iris and smooth focus, no vignetting and it’s not too heavy it has the right balance of weight for me and build quality is excellent.

All in all a very nice lens for the price, lovely to be able to shoot is really low light. I would love to see them make one for the Canons now! You can order one here, or at least be put in line for one!

For comparison below is a shot taken on the Leica F .95 50mm.

Thanks to Sara Collaton for the BTS photos.

The Pier: Test shots done with Noktor F0.95 50mm with Panasonic GF1 from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Shot on and under Santa Monica Pier in California using a Noktor F0.95 50mm lens with a Panasonic GF1 shooting AVCHD lite in 25p.

Music is by Bernard Herrmann from “Vertigo”

It was shown for the first time at the LA HD-DSLR masterclass I took yesterday in Hollywood that was a great success. Two 4 hour classes one after the other. A lot of fun, killed my voice though!

Jeremy Thomas from Raw Works cut the short and colour graded it and did a great job on it. The crew was minimal about 4 of us in total.

It was shot using 3 lenses. Two Cooke S4s… 25mm and 100m and a PL modified Tokina 11-16mm for the big wide.

The filming was about 2 and a half hours very early morning at Hollywood Park then another couple of hours at Santa Anita race track. Sound was recorded separately using the Zoom H4n and a Rode shotgun boom. I also used a 6×6 Mattebox and some ND filters. .9 .6 and .2.

Music by Loscil

Song: Charlie

Album: Plume

Do check out the previous blog here for loads more info and behind the scenes photos!

Today  I spent a day at the Races. Starting at the ungodly hour of 430am we filmed with trainer Mike Mitchell at the Hollywood stables. It was funny, I have family in the racing business in England and generally the people working in the stables are generally young blonde students (huge sweeping generalising there!) here they seemed to be Latin American guys with MASSIVE filmic moustaches. Much more fun for me to film, as people know I tend to like to film interesting looking people than the obvious pretty ones!

The idea for this shoot was to do some test footage using Illya Friedman’s new PL CAMERA. Which is simply a very nicely modified 7D. Read the linked blog for more info on it.

We had a great crew. Jarred from Cinema 5D who provided the fantastic Cooke lenses as well as a RED zoom and a Century Optics zoom as well as the Matte Box and filters. Chuck with his litepanels (which we didn’t need in the end), RAWworks owner Neil who is organising the event, Creative Director Jeremy and sound man Bobby…very very odd Bobby!

I mostly shot using the 25mm and 100mm Cooke S4 T2 primes. What a GORGEOUS image these lenses give you. Yes it was a lot more fiddly and time consuming using these lenses with a mattebox for NDs than my normal “run and gun” set up but it was worth it. The images below speak for themselves!

Jeremy is going to do an edit together of the material and we will premiere it my HD-DSLR masterclass on Saturday on the Warner Bros lot in Hollywood. I saw the venue today and it’s fantastic. There are still some places left so please come. You don’t need to own a camera to come, just have an interest in these camera. We will be projecting lots of cool stuff on a great big screen Your chance to see how well these cameras hold up.

One very cool thing is Illya had a wide zoom that I used on one of the frame grabs of the horses walking in circles…this is a Tokina 11-16mm modified into a PL mount lens and now cost $3500. Same optics though…show you how good that lens is!

Below are some screen grabs of the shoot and some BTS pictures taken with my GF1 and the new Noktor.

Bobby!

Illya

Jarred

Jeremy and Bobby

In a press release from Canon UK the following was announced at 0001 Tuesday 2nd March GMT. Thanks to Canonrumors.com for this

Canon adds 24 and 25fps HD Movie recording to the EOS 5D Mark II with Firmware 2.0.3

London, 2nd March 2010 – Canon today pre-announces the release of a firmware update for the multiple award-winning EOS 5D Mark II. Originally announced in late 2009, the update adds 24* and 25 frames per second (fps) recording to the camera’s EOS MOVIE video function, and will be available as a free download from the middle of March.

Developed following feedback from photographers and cinematographers, Firmware 2.0.3 further enhances the EOS 5D Mark II’s excellent video performance. The addition of new frame rates expands the camera’s video potential, providing filmmakers with the ability to shoot 1080p Full HD footage at 24fps (actual 23.976fps) – the optimum frame rate for cinematic video. 25fps support at both 1920×1080 and 640×480 resolutions will allow users to film at the frame rate required for the PAL broadcast standard, while the new firmware will also change the 30fps option to the NTSC video standard of 29.97fps.

A new histogram display for shooting movies in manual exposure, shutter-priority (Tv) and aperture-priority (Av) have been added, and exposure modes will also be available in movie mode. Improved audio functionality will allow users to set sound record levels manually using a sound-level meter displayed on the LCD screen. The audio sampling frequency has also been increased from 44.1KHz to 48KHz, providing the optimum audio signal typically required for professional or broadcast material.

With its full frame CMOS sensor and compatibility with Canon’s wide range of premium lenses, the EOS 5D Mark II is already recognised for its outstanding HD video performance. Launched in September 2008, the camera immediately created a wide range of new possibilities for photographers and videographers, and the addition of new frame rates and manual audio levels extends those possibilities even further – allowing movie makers to shoot stunning movies to suit practically any creative purpose.

Extreme sports photographer Richard Walch was one of the first to be given the chance to use the newly updated EOS 5D Mark II to shoot the snowboarding movie “I Love My Friends”. Commenting on the EOS 5D Mark II’s video performance, Richard said: “The addition of the new frame rates opens up a whole new range of possibilities. If you’re a cinematographer, independent film maker or just enthusiastic about making your own movies, get out there and give it a try”.

The download will be available from here

I will be doing a number of workshops across the USA and Europe (and hopefully further afield) throughout the year.  I will try and make these all as hands on as possible. I will be putting more info on the content of this LA masterclass on this page over the next few days. You can book now by clicking here. Any suggestions are welcome on the blog  post about this year’s classes.

There will also of course be an informal meet up like last time sometime during my time in LA. Looking at the Kodak Theatre on Sunday the 7th of March. Should be a good turnout for that one!!! (please do not turn up to this as it’s a joke!)

Philip Bloom Master Class Promo from RAWworks on Vimeo.

Don’t forget to get your entry made for the Can-Do Film Festival being arranged by RAWworks. This is a different competition to the “Beyond the Still” and is cross genre. I am a judge for both. Do enter both if you can, the prizes for both are excellent!

For a great review on the T2i please check out Nino Leitner’s review here. Thanks for the photos which I stole from him for this blog

I love cameras, anyone who knows me knows I have more cameras than one person could ever have a use for!

There is no need for me to buy the new 550D/ T2i. I have a 7D and two 5DmkIIs after all, I even have a 500d! So why would i buy one? I simply wanted to see just how capable it was as a video camera. I don’t care too much about it’s still camera abilities, apart from for timelapse, but it’s identical video frame rates to the 7D and that price tag meant could become a very popular camera in the mass market. I wanted to get one so I could review it, test it, be able to answer people’s questions about it which I am bound to get and of course shoot on it. After all I love shooting more than anything and this is a small, light, cheap camera. Just how good can it be?

The Eos Video line up thanks to Dan Chung

I bought mine from B&H as soon as I saw it was available and in stock. Next day delivery and she arrived. I had to buy it with the stock lens as that’s all they had. Not a good lens. I recommend body only for sure! Just because the camera is cheap it doesn’t mean you should buy cheap glass for it! Anyone want that lens?!

First Impressions: Wow it’s light! Really light. The 7D and 5DmkII weigh a bit, this doesn’t. Straight off I notice some things missing that I love about my pro cameras, the T2i is part of the consumer division whereas the 7D etc are part of the pro division. So what does this mean to you and I?

Build quality is good on the T2i but not in the same league as the Pro cameras. First off weatherproofing. I wouldn’t want to get the T2i wet like my 7d does all the time, even the 5DmkII with lesser weatherproofing is still very very good at it. Have left both cameras out in the cold rain all night, have had them frost over and they work just fine afterwards. I wouldn’t do this with the T2i. Like a Mogwai, don’t get her wet. Also it’s very plasticky, as expected. I have dropped my pro cameras once or twice…oops. They survived fine. T2i…keep secure. Treat her gently!

Due to the smaller size we are missing some things I really miss on pro cameras. The dial on the back of the camera, the LCD panel telling me my metering, fstop etc on top. You get this info on the screen by half pressing the shutter button but I like having the LCD screen and miss it. The dial especially is a pain. I now have no individual iris and shutter controls. I have to effectively press a “shift button” to get aperture to change.

Image wise from my very limited tests the video looks as close to identical as I can tell with 30 minutes of filming. There may be a stronger difference and I am sure many people will do loads of side by side tests of this camera. I will over the next few weeks shoot more and more stuff with it and share my experiences. Last night I did some simple low light tests. Same shot at ISO 800 and 1600 on both cameras lit with candlelight. That brings me to another couple of things I am missing on the T2i. Manual white balance. You cannot dial in the colour temperature like you can on the 7D etc. Also ISO are limited to 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200 and the unusable higher ones. In tests recently I found the quieter ISO on the 5DmkII to be 160, 320, 640 etc…I haven’t done any tests like this on the T2i, but hopefully will get a chance soon.

The skater dolly I used in the tests was the Omni tracker slim line pro. It’s great and cheap. I also have the new Humble Monkey Camera truck. Both of which I will review fully soon. The Humble monkey costs more but is lighter…as I said review coming soon!

Humble Monkey Camera Truck

Omni Tracker slim line pro

Frame rates are what we want 24p, 25p, 30p, 720p 50p, 60p. There is no manual control on audio unfortunately. Same crappy AGC we have on the 7D that looks like will be fixed on the new 5DmkII firmware.

Timelapse is of course easily done on this, just get the right controller (7D one does not work on this camera). Below is the one to get.

There were a number of people saying should I sell my 7D and buy a T2i and use the extra money to buy glass. I would say no. Simply because the 7D is a robust beast that will take a lot you throw at it. It’s a pro camera with pro build. Yes, the video is bloody close to each other and I can barely tell them apart but it comes down to more than just video quality. It’s the whole package.

So what do I think about the T2i then? I think it’s superb. For $800 (Sorry people in England, I know pricing sucks there) you are getting a video tool that really is incredible. A great B camera for 7D and 5dmkII owners and I really do recommend having two bodies on pro shoots. It’s also a great A camera for people wanted to get into HD-DSLR filming, students, keen enthusiasts or people with an addiction to buying cameras like me! From what I have seen the video is excellent, the screen is slightly bigger and higher resolution that the 7D one but a Z-Finder still fits. Time will tell how well these two cameras will compare. For now just be happy that we live in incredibly exciting times and don’t whinge that it has more video modes than the 5DmkII or you just bought a 7D and this has come out etc…Canon have brought out a camera that blitzes the competition in the consumer market for HD video and beats all the other brands out there in the pro market with video too. This is a game changer for many. It’s just this damn game changes very often and it’s hard to keep up!

Do check out Nino’s review linked up top and also look at JJ Kim’s excellent comparison video below.

7D vs. T2i Comparison Video from Orange Wedding Films on Vimeo.

(For better viewing experience:
PLEASE PRESS PLAY AND PAUSE RIGHT WAY.
Wait for the grey bar to fill up, then press play)

Blog post with details at http://orangevp.blogspot.com/

Please watch in Full Screen if you can.

Follow me at www.twitter.com/jjkim123go for updates!

We are getting live histogram for exposure, manual audio with 64 level increments and change to 48khz for sound. All good stuff. Strange we are getting details released so oddly…we also had earlier reports that Canon had the timeframe as mid March on their site but that vanished quickly.

Well I guess we will find out what is and isn’t true soon. I am assuming there is not a second slide showing Zebras, headphone, 720p etc…!!

I shot this over a couple of hours on a rotten windy day in San Francisco. It was filmed at Sutro Baths ruins.

The opening shots of the frothy water are straight out of the camera with no colour correction, real black and white, the light flickering is all natural light.

The “alien” cave shot onwards is all graded with Magic Bullet which you can get 20% off with code bloom 20 at the redgiantsoftware checkout.

Music is by James Newton Howard from Lady in the Water.

I will have some of these shots up soon with natural sound recorded with the Holophone Portamic Pro 5.1.

I used the DP slider for the dolly shot. Review coming soon.

5DmkII conformed to 24p and also Twixtor plug in used.

Lenses. 14mm F2.8L, 50mm F1.2L, 100mm Macro F2.8L, 90mm F2.8 TS, 70-200mm F2.8 IS

Sea from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Photos all courtesy of Sara Collaton

I met Illya Friedman from hotrodcameras.com last year when I went to Joshua Tree with a pre-production GH1. He had a PL lens adaptor for the GH1 and brought some very nice Glass with him.

Well he has done something pretty serious here and taken a normal 7D and turned it into a serious movie making machine by removing the mirror box and replacing the EOS mount with a rugged as hell PL mount. This is serious stuff!!

PL lenses, if you don’t know are positive lock lenses are the mount that cinema lenses use. There were a number of Panavision PL mount adaptors out there for the 7D but there were are molten down by Panavison!

This means you can use the same lenses that you would use on 35mm film or cameras like the F35 on your 7D. This is not a indie filmmakers setup but if you are shooting a movie and want a B camera or two or three or you are using it as your A camera and you have the budget or access to high end glass then this is the way forward.

The sensor on the 7D is similar is size to a super 35mm sensor hence that is why he has done this on a 7D, not a 1dmkiv or a 5d2 as their sensors are too big and vignettting will occur.

Standard 7D

No viewfinder

There is a new sensor protector added

His modification is really well done. Incredibly solid. Unfortunately as I have no lenses right now to use on the camera, I cannot test it out fully. But I will have some lenses next week.

He charges 3k to mod your 7D or will sell you one all done for just under 5k with an extended warranty to cover the fact you have voided the Canon Warranty.

Sound has always been one of the biggest stumbling blocks for HD-DSLRs for me. Documentary filming is one of my biggest passions and until now I have always had to try and cope with dual system sound or a mic like the Rode Video Mic plugged into the mic input of the camera and left on auto.

XLR adaptors for cameras are nothing new. Beachtek and other companies have been doing them for donkey’s years. But the HD-DSLRs that I use. The Canon 7D, 1DmkiV and 7D have big problems with sound. The input being a puny 3.5mm jack is of course fixed by these XLR adaptors but that is only part of the issue. The main problems are auto gain control, otherwise known as AGC. The lack of a headphone jack (!), no onscreen meters. It just plain sucks!!

Now the previous Beachtek adaptor that I played with really wasn’t good enough for me. It’s passive so had no amplification making using certain microphones a real no-no. The AGC of the camera would try and bump up the levels if the signal was too low causing nasty hiss all over the sound. Also the HD-DSLRs with their current firmware have no audio meters. The SLR has no proper meters on it. But it does have lights that flicker green for good levels and red for bad. Not exactly ideal but better than nothing.  The new 5Da does have proper meters but is’s passive device.

I have just received a pre-production DXA-SLR XLR adaptors from Beachtek. I have been bugging them for ages to try and review one of their units and finally have got one! The SLR is an active adaptor and has pre-amps in it making it usable for just about all mics out there. It also has +48v phantom power so can power your mics that need it. There are also gain switches underneath the unit. There is a +15db switch for either of the two channels.

Other plusses. It’s smaller and more sturdy. Made of die cast aluminium.  The old one also covered the battery compartment. A right pain. This one doesn’t!

A very key and incredibly neat feature is the ability to “disable” auto gain control on the camera. It does this in a very clever way. This is from the manual…”This switch is a means to disable the wild swings of the Auto Gain Control in the camera. It activates an inaudible tone of 20 kHz to the left channel (when set to STEREO operation) that prevents the Auto Gain Control from increasing the gain to its maximum level. This reduces the hiss that normally occurs when the camera is recording audio during quiet moments. This inaudible tone is recorded by the camera but can be easily filtered out if necessary.”…and you know what…it actually bloody works…remarkably well!! This is a big deal, until we get official firmware that disables this that bloody AGC for us,  this feature it a bit of major step forward for HD-DSLR sound, not quite a game changer but damn close! Of course magic lantern firmware does this too, but this is much simpler and easier and just a flick of a switch. Although magic lantern offers way more additional features than this.

Auto Gain Control Disable!!!!

Another very neat feature (if you aren’t using magic lantern as that disables the AV port and turns it into a headphone only output without disabling the LCD screen) is the phono jack inputs which when plugged into the AV jack of the camera let you hear, through the Beachtek box, the sound that has been recorded in camera. This was previously not possible. Of course the LCD screen will turn off when you play back sound with the AV lead plugged in and the only way you will see a see a picture is if you have a composite monitor plugged into the video signal. But it’s GREAT to finally be able to play back sound recorded in camera and check how it sounds. Before this I had to use the awful crappy in built speaker of the camera or offload the clip to the computer. Again, not ideal. Be great if we just had a headphone jack, but a nice feature that Beachtek have added. This is unique to the SLR adaptor.

I have used the Juiced Link XLR adaptor too, this does have pre-amps and gives you very nice sound, but is lacking a few important connections for me, although their new DN101 accessory fixes most of issues by giving it  headphone jack, meters and an AGC disable trick too I hope to use this one too soon, it’s sitting in London waiting for me!!… this new Beachtek adaptor has set the new bar for XLR adaptors and means the next time I shoot a doc with my 5D I am going to probably record in camera sound for the very first time. This is a quite a big deal!

I am going to use this with my incredibly cool new microphone. The Holophone Portamic 5.1 pro. That captures Pro logic II sound straight into the Beachtek box!! when played back through an amp with Pro Logic II decoding you should get great sound. Also you can take the 6 channels of sounds embedded in the stereo and decode them with a piece of software called Surcode for Pro Logic II.

Of course REALLY good sound is key and this won’t be as good quality as recording sound on say a Zoom H4N which can record at a much higher bit rate and sound a lot better…but when operating one man band I feel we finally have a really usable option now. This is great news for a lot of people.

One thing I would love to see on this is proper audio meters like the new DXA-5DA has…but all the other new features make up for it…just. But please Beachtek stick some proper meters on this!

I understand this won’t be available until around the end of March. But make sure you get in early to get one. Beachtek sold out of the DXA-5D adaptor pretty fast!!