I had the pleasure of meeting Naomi Goggin to review her stills portfolio at the Canon Pro Solutions show in London earlier this year. Later that same day she was awarded the Times Canon Young Photographer of the Year at the show and given a six month contract to work at the paper. Not content to shoot just stills she has decided to venture into learning video on the DSLR, which as she says “requires some solid investments in kit.”

The Sennheiser MKE400 mini shotgun mic

She has had some video training and found the “sound is more important than the picture itself – a slightly alien concept for photographers. A video with bad picture, can be saved by good sound, but the reverse, a video with bad sound quality, cannot be saved with good picture.”

To prove her point Naomi has posted a couple of short test videos demonstrating how a simple Sennheiser MKE400 on camera mic can make a difference in a noisy environment. She shot it in a busy restaurant using a 50mm f1.2 prime lens and says her “focusing practice is under way!”

How to look like a Pirate – without Sennheiser from Naomi Goggin on Vimeo.

How to Look Like a Pirate – with Sennheiser MKE 400 from Naomi Goggin on Vimeo.

We wish Naomi the best as she embarks on her career (I’m guessing that video will play a large part in it). You can follow Naomi’s progress at the Times of London on her blog.

Nathan Mauger is a Beijing-based freelance cameraman who has shot for the likes of National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes Benz, Rolex, CNN, CNBC, ESPN, CBS, Bloomberg, Louis Vuitton and Nike.

In January 2010 I bought a Canon 7D kit solely for the purpose of shooting video. I’ve always loved doing time lapses with cameras like the Panasonic Varicam and Sony PDW-700, and was anxious to try DSLR time lapses with longer exposures and higher resolution.

“Too Fast, Too Much” from Nathan Mauger on Vimeo.

Here in Beijing we have no sky, only heavy pollution, so there are few opportunities for time lapses of clouds, sunrises or sunsets. (The pollution is so bad that most attempts at a sunset time lapse would turn out looking like a simple fade-to-black.) The traffic is horrible, but great for time lapses.

So in July I started doing traffic time lapses at night for fun. I didn’t know what the project would look like when finished, but I knew it had to be fast, loud and violent. After a week of shooting I had to stop for over a month because of pollution. I finished in late September; a total of fifteen nights shooting.

I have a pretty big video-DSLR kit, but for this project the equipment was very simple: a Canon 7D, Sachtler FSB-8 tripod and a Canon intervalometer. As for lenses, 95% of the video was done with a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L USM IS II, Tokina 10-17mm fisheye, and a Canon 2x extender. A couple of shots were done with the Canon 50mm f/1.2L. Fast lenses were NOT needed; apertures were usually between f16 and f22. And I always leave the image stabilizer off.

Another important piece of equipment was an iPod. When alone and filming on the street with a tripod-mounted DSLR I’ve found there’s always at least one stupid motherf*****r who comes up and puts his eye up to the viewfinder and jiggle the camera and ruining the time lapse. Normally you need to make a physical intervention. But with earphones on, for some reason these guys magically stay away. Don’t ask me why.

Next up I had to determine which shutter speeds to use. A few of the early time lapses were at four seconds, then I settled on 3.2 seconds with a four-second interval after the first couple days. On Beijing’s Sanlitun intersection time lapses it would have been better to use a four-second shutter with a longer interval (the traffic there moves damn slowly). I sped those shots up in Final Cut Pro, but longer exposures would have been better.

Exposure for traffic time lapses is important and I wish I had good advice here, but the truth is with each clip the color grading is so extreme that even shots I completely screwed up exposure-wise turned out basically ok. One key point however is to expose off of the taillights. Overexpose and they blow out towards the center and the tracers become white, yellow and red; just right exposure they’ll retain the redness without blowing out. When time lapsing cars come head-on at an angle in a medium shot you have to compromise between having the headlights massively blow out or having everything else be way too underexposed. Unwisely, I usually went the way too underexposed route and it shows, but now I know better.

In post I had a pretty good archiving system. First I would separate all the photo sequences into folders, then use Quicktime Pro to output a ProRes HQ version. (There are tutorials everywhere on the net on how to do this, so no need to rehash it here.) This makes a monstrous 5148×3456 clip. It’s so big it can’t really be played on a normal computer. From this, I created 1920×1080 clips exported from Final Cut Pro, but I always kept the original 5k clip too (maybe it will be useful in several years when we all have 4k TV’s). In FCP you can zoom in a little and move the picture vertically to fit it into a 1080p timeline. Keeping the original 5k file also gives you options for the future if you want to reframe a clip. Then after everything was processed and downconverted I would throw out the original photos. Knowing next to nothing about photography, I just shot JPEG’s, not RAW. (What does “knowing next to nothing” mean? It means I had to look up “ISO” on Wikipedia!)

Early on, I tried putting the big 5K clips into a 1080P timeline and adding some color filters and then rendering. Bad idea — this crashes FCP 7.0 every time. I found the best way is to import the 5k clip; put it into a 1080P timeline, rescale to 37.5%, and reframe. I then export with current settings, without sound but with compression markers, and with the recompress all frames box clicked.

Everything at night in Beijing except bus stops is lit with unflattering sodium vapor lights, so all or almost all clips have the FCP Color Corrector 3-Way on them to combat this. Color grading was radical. Most of the clips have the Magic Bullet Look Suite Max Contrast filter on, with post-contrast and saturation both at about +30 to +60 and pre-gamma at around +15. If you’re familiar with Looks Suite then you know how screwed up this is!

Titles were done in Apple Motion with a simple image mask and a basic motion zoom in/out.

Compressing this video for the web didn’t turn out too well. With the picture changing so fast, the compressions I did turned out very blocky, and with reduced dynamic range and detail.

The work of the lens doctor

Eddie Houston used to be a guitarist playing alongside the likes of Thin Lizzy and Status Quo. Before that he was a technical manager for Canon back in the days of the old FD cameras and lenses. He has now returned to his photographic roots and is running a small family business selling and servicing old stills lenses. Based in Scotland he has gained quite a reputation recently. Manual lenses are often better suited to video than their AF counterparts because they have a smoother, more damped manual focus action along with manual aperture control. The excellent Carl Zeiss ZF range of lenses are probably the most popular and best known examples of manual lenses that are well suited to video. There are however a great range of other older lenses that can be easily adapted to your EOS, Nikon or Micro 4/3 HDDSLR – these are what Eddie specialises in.

I had the opportunity to meet up with Eddie when I was talking at a Canon event in Glasgow. We talked old lenses and got to discussing lens de-clicking of stills lenses for video use. I left a few vintage lenses for Eddie to experiment with and he recently returned them to me after a full service and his own version of de-clicking called the ’fluid variable aperture system’ installed.

Eddie at work measuring a lens iris blade

For those who don’t know about de-clicking, most manual focus stills lenses have an aperture iris that is controlled in click stops as opposed to a continuously variable aperture like those found on Cine lenses. The problem is that these click stops don’t allow you to set a precise aperture in between the marked stops. When you vary it while shooting video the iris will not close smoothly but rather in steps with a clicking noise. This is clearly not ideal for video. A stills lens can de-clicked but care has to be taken and lubrication added to make sure the aperture runs smoothly – a job for a skilled technician.

Below is a little test video I made using an old Tamron 90mm f2.5 SP macro lens that I had lying around. It’s super sharp and now with the ‘fluid variable aperture’ fitted it makes a useful video lens. It’s easy to fit to an EOS camera using a cheap adapter from Ebay.

Tamron 90mm de-clicked by the Lens Doctor from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Eddie was dissatisfied with how slack the aperture control was on my lenses when he de-clicked them, claiming that they were disturbed by even the slightest movement. He wanted to make the aperture fully variable but still easy to set in a specific position, to do this he made the resistance on the aperture ring more positive and fluid. I am really impressed with the results and plan to have more lenses de-clicked by Eddie asap. He has since opened up this service to everybody, cost varies from lens to lens as not all lenses are the same. You can contact him directly at enquiries@thelensdoctor.co.uk to discuss your specific requirements. You can also buy pre-modified lenses from time to time on Eddie’s Ebay store.

Measuring click stops

One question I am asked a lot is whether older Canon FD lenses can be converted to work on an EOS. Generally the answer till now has been no because of the 42mm flange focal depth of FD bodies being shorter than the 44mm of an EOS body. There are some adapters with an optical element in them to compensate for this difference, but the third party examples of these are generally not high quality and I do not recommend them. Canon used to make such an adapter for their FD Super telephoto lenses but these are super rare and usually expensive secondhand. A few FD lenses have been successfully modified to EOS in the past, I remember Vincent Laforet used to have a FD 35mm Tilt and Shift lens converted for EOS use.

In early 2011 Eddie will be offering a service to permanently convert Canon FD lenses to EOS/EF fitting without the need for corrective glass, this is under development at the moment and he already has a small selection on offer but plans to increase the range over the coming months to include all FD lenses. I predict he is going to be very busy when this service starts.

Vivitar 24mm f2 converted from FD to EOS and variable aperture fitted

Another thing Eddie has on offer is his own special build FD 50mm F1.4 with a ‘chrome nose’. These are specially built, Eddie adds Super Spectra Coatings to the glass and add another iris blade to the system. The regular Canon FD 50mm F1.4 has only seven blades, this special build has eight, creating a much smoother bokeh. I have yet to see one and am very curious indeed.

50mm f1.4 FD lens with improved bokeh

For more information on Eddie and his other services you can check out his website here.

(Note – If you are based in the US then the best place to send your stills lenses to be modified is Duclos lenses. The run an excellent service where a lens can be declicked, a follow focus gear added and a 80mm standard size lens front added. I highly recommend them also.)

To celebrate the end of the year I wanted to highlight a couple of special offers for readers of this blog.

First off, Hosa technology are offering a special price on the miniature Que audio ENG shotgun mic kit which we featured on the blog earlier in the year. It’s the perfect size for a DSLR and for a limited time it’s available for a very reasonable $349 with free delivery in the US. To get this price simply enter the code dslrnewsshooter when you go to check out from the Hosatech webstore here http://www.hosatech.com/product/380886/QENG-KIT/_/ELECTRONIC_NEWS_GATHERING_MICROPHONE_KIT.

Hosa Technology Que audio mini shotgun mic kit from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Next up, the F-Stop academy are offering 50% off their entire line of training downloads, which include Philip Bloom’s excellent 5DmkII and 7D videos as well as my own ‘DSLR video on Assignment’ where I demonstrate how I work in the field. The promotion runs till tomorrow, December 24th. Simply go to http://www.learndslrvideostore.com/ and enter the code snow50

D-SLR Video On Assignment with Dan Chung Trailer from Den Lennie on Vimeo.