Hot Rod Canon 7D with PL mount

I was set to shoot some interviews with my Canon 7D when I got an interesting offer from a colleague. He asked my to try out his new Hot Rod mod 7D with a PL mount. How could I turn that down? I just needed a lens. For interviews on the 7D, a fast 85mm lens is as close to perfect as you can get. I chose the RED 85mm prime.

click images to enlarge

I was very impressed with this setup, although you really need to be extra careful to keep your subjects relatively still. If they rock forward or backward, they can easily drift out of that shallow field of focus. The interview image above, a grab from the video, is unretouched, shot at t/2, so one stop below wide open on this lens.

MLB League Championship Series

I had a great time working with the folks from MLB.com during the League Championship Series in Philadelphia. I had to do live shots from the field before and after the games, as well as shoot and feed post-game clubhouse interviews.

I have done all kinds of sports shoots but there really is nothing quite like post season baseball. It’s where awesome fall weather meets old school American tradition. I’m really fortunate to be able to have a job that provides such amazing access to these events.

Richard Branson Shoot

How many billionaires have bought you a shot of tequila? For me it’s just one, Sir Richard Branson. What an interesting guy. I did a shoot with him as he passed through New York recently and he couldn’t have been nicer. We did a sit-down interview using a couple of Canon 5Ds and the full complement of lights and audio. We were a bit rushed but thankfully we had three video pros in the room and we managed to make it look and sound great.

grabs from unretouched Canon 5D video – click to enlarge

Part two of the shoot saw us moving to the fabulous restaurant called La Esquina. I highly recommend it if you’re in the area. Branson was at the restaurant for a surprise meeting with some Virgin employees who had never met him. It was a really fun shoot but the light was just about as bad as it could be. This is where the Canon 5D with a 50mm f/1.4 lens was worth its weight in gold. I never could have shot these striking images with a video camera. No way.

Shooting Lacrosse with the RED Camera

I had a really fun shoot this past weekend with the RED Mysterium X camera. Sounds scary, huh? It was a little intimidating at first but I got the hang of it very quickly and soon it was smooth sailing.

We were shooting the Major League Lacrosse championship weekend in Annapolis, Maryland. ESPN was carrying the games live. My job was to shoot super slo-mo (120 frames per second to be exact) for promotional videos for clothing manufacturer and presenting sponsor Warrior. They’re actually a division of New Balance.

We got some great footage of the Warrior products that the players were wearing. It was incredibly hot on the synthetic turf at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium. My camera assistant Armanda had to keep putting bags of ice on top of the camera to keep it cool enough to operate!

I’ll post a link when the spots are available for viewing.

NLArts Camp

There’s a great summer camp for kids in my neighborhood called the Northern Liberties Arts Camp. The director contacted me about having something shot and edited so that parents could see some of the behind the scenes stuff at the camp. I had some free time last week so I decided to take it on myself and give them something more than their budget might otherwise have allowed. This is what we came up with!

Turkey Chili

The secret is out. I love cooking turkey chili. And I love eating turkey chili. I have wanted to make a chili cooking video for a while now and I finally mustered up the motivation to put something together. This was a great, batch by the way.

music credit: The Chili Song by Gary P. Nunn

GoPro File Recovery

So you’re super psyched to use your new GoPro Hero HD camera on your next big shoot. You have the perfect scenario; the head of a Fortune 500 company is being featured in a video as he rides with a technician on a service call. What an opportunity! You only have one chance to get the shot and you definitely don’t wanna screw it up.

This was the scenario last week when the stars aligned on my shoot and something bad happened. The GoPro camera that I had mounted on the windshield – my money shot – mysteriously stopped recording and issued an SOS reading on its tiny display.

The GoPro SOS display is an undocumented warning that lets you know you may be screwed. Pressing any button on the camera is supposed to force the camera to fix the file. The problem is, if the file doesn’t get fixed the first time, there’s no way to tell the camera to try again.

I was left with a 256MB corrupted mp4 file that wouldn’t open with any of my usual tools. It wouldn’t open in the camera, or with QuickTime on the Mac or even with VLC .

To recover the file I tried Card Rescue and Disk Warrior, two data rescue programs that have always worked well for me. Nothing. This was a tough one.

After spending hours combing through a slew of message boards, I learned that many, many other professionals were in the same boat as me and there were very few answers. Some involved using cheap, buggy, non-intuitive Windows apps to strip the audio and video layers apart but this was so far over my head that I just couldn’t figure it out.

Then someone suggested I try a fairly new bit of software called Treasured. Treasured is a free tool from Aero Quartet that scans your defective file and tells you what it finds. After running the free scan, I was thrilled to see full-resolution screen grabs from the video and a proclamation that my video was 99 percent recoverable!

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I followed the prompts to initiate the recovery process. Treasured asked me to upload a small sample clip that had been shot at the same settings so that it could match those settings to the damaged file.

I got a confirmation that my fix was underway and that it would cost $79. It was well worth it for me since this was a professional job and I needed to save face here.

After several hours I was emailed a download link for a free repair tool. I was to open the damaged movie with the repair tool and wait while it worked its magic. I was soon presented with a repaired video that looked to be prefect except for a bit of intentional artifacts that the tool introduces into the video.

You inspect the video, make sure it’s what you want, and then pay for a key to unlock the repair tool. In my case, the fee was US$79. Then you run the repair sequence again with the unlocked version of the repair tool and this time the video is pristine.

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If you’re a video professional using the GoPro cameras, Treasured could easily save your bacon. Even if you’re just a hobbyist, you may find that your images are worth the recovery fee. Fees vary depending on the length of the clip and the format that you were shooting but the beauty is that you can see everything before you lay out any cash. I hope this post saves you some time!

Boxing in HD

I was on a really cool shoot the other night in South Philadelphia – big-time professional boxing at the legendary venue called the Arena.

I can’t believe I’ve worked as a news and sports shooter in this town for 20 years and have never been inside the gym that’s just a couple of blocks from Tony Luke’s. On this night, I was shooting 60fps slow motion on the Sony SRW-9000, a high end camera that has been used for films like Star Wars. Very cool indeed.

Potato Gun

Every once in a while I am charged with rigging a small, high-quality video camera with a depth of field adapter in order to pull off a more filmic look. Such was the case this week when I shot interviews and b-roll for a corporate client.

I built a Sony EX-3 setup with the Letus Extreme35 DoF adapter. The lens on this beast looks like the potato launchers we used to build from soup cans when I was a kid! Where’s my lighter fluid?

5D Makes Fabulous Looking Interviews

I spent the other day shooting corporate interviews for my colleague Denis O’Keefe. We used a combination of 5D and 7D setups to shoot some really great looking interviews. These cameras a a real joy for this kind of shoot. We used on-camera mics for reference and the Zoom H4n for our clean audio.

We used a few different lenses but primarily, we stuck with the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS.