Just got back from helping Geoff Boyle run a 3D workshop in Hemavan, Sweden. It was a great week and I think everyone, me include learnt a great deal. We shot quite a few scenes of snow scooters, skiers and snowboarders in all kinds of weather from blizzard to beautiful sunshine. We also shot a local band at a ski party.

The TD300 performed very well, especially when conditions were extreme. We had one morning up on the mountain where it was -18c with a howling blizzard. The main TD300 issue was with the concentric control rings for the lens and rotary iris dial. All impossible to use with gloves and constantly getting bumped and knocked. The TD300 however was a bit of a disaster when we came to shoot the music gig as the sound pressure from the bass was making the vertical alignment vibrate up and down. Not pleasant to watch! The Hurricane Rig performed very well at the gig without any vibration issues. However when up on the mountain, keeping snow out of the mirror box in the blizzard was a bit of a pain. We also got completely buried by a blast of snow from a close pass by one of the snow scooters. The shot looks great as a wall of snow flies towards you.

I think everyones favourite camera though was the little NEX 3D1E. You could get this camera into all kinds of places. You could ski with it, do on stage handheld with it and the pictures are pretty good for such a small camera. Being so small it’s a hard to operate the tiny controls and we ended up resorting to using the auto set function to set up conversion and focus most of the time, but it generally did a good job.

Pictures and clips will follow when I have some more time. I have more workshops coming up soon for 3D, S-Log and grading. Watch this space.

Here’s a new video about my recent adventures in Norway. The video is all F3 S-Log. The time-lapse sequences were done with a Canon 550D and a Teletrack motorised pan and tilt head.

I was recently asked to clarify the exposure levels I use when shooting S-Log, especially why mid grey is set at 38IRE. Here’s my reply.

Exposure is not something that is set in stone. The idea behind setting reflected mid grey at 38 IRE is that you place the middle of your tonal range slightly below the mid point of your full latitude range. Reflected white should then come out around 68-70IRE. This then gives you further headroom for direct light sources such as lamps, the sky or specular reflections. In addition, video cameras tend to perform better in shadow and underexposure compared to highlights and over exposure, so it’s generally considered better to be slightly under rather than slightly over.

But, all this theory is based on shooting some imaginary generic scene and as a result is a generalisation and may not be optimum in many lighting conditions. You also need to consider how S-Log works. Each stop is getting allocated roughly the same amount of data as the next. But when you consider that each brighter stop is has twice the brightness range as the previous stop then you need to consider that to some degree, each brighter stop is being recorded more highly compressed than the previous. This means that you can stretch and pull the darker parts of the exposure range more effectively than the brighter part, so you don’t want your images to be too bright as this may not grade as well as the same scene exposed a little darker. Now on top of all this you need to consider noise. Underexpose too much and you will have issues with noise when you start lifting the shadow areas and darker parts of the image. So what I’m trying to say is that you don’t want to overexpose and you don’t want to underexpose, obvious perhaps, but where exactly you set your exposure will depend on the tonal range of the scene you are shooting. A dimly lit interior may have a much reduced range compared to a sunny exterior and this is where the skill of the operator comes in, knowing when it is desirable to push your exposure up or down.

Normally, mid grey at 38IRE works well and will put you in the right ball park. But if you don’t have any direct light sources then you can probably lift mid grey a little, but in my opinion you must always, always protect your highlights. Small specular highlights or a small bright cloud may not show up on a small monitor or VF and might not register on the histogram or zebras so often it’s good to have a bit of headroom in reserve.  A small area of overexposure can easily spoil an otherwise correctly exposed scene and it’s impossible to correct a blown out highlight in post production, once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Sadly I can’t say you should always expose “x” at “y” as it’s just not that simple. You have to judge for yourself depending on the scene you are shooting and the look you want to achieve. With S-Log, I would not get too hung up on white not reaching 100%, reflected white should only be at around 70%, it’s direct light sources you need to watch as these are what will give you your biggest exposure headaches.

Well the gap between video cameras and DSLR’s continues to become more and more blurred. Canon started it all with the 5D Mk2 and it’s rather good video performance. I was never a fan of the 5D as a video camera, it had too many issues for my liking, but it certainly shook the video camera industry up. Nikons latest offering, the D800 offers full 1920×1080 recording at 24, 25 or 30P as well as a clean uncompressed HDMI output so you can use one of the many external recorders available today. It also has proper control over audio levels, audio in and audio out. Now it is a stills camera and it does have a 36 Mega pixel sensor, which is way to high a pixel count to be optimum for HD video, so I would expect there to be some aliasing issues (unless they do some very clever pixel binning). But, it has to be said that the £2399 price tag is extremely attractive compared to the £10k of an F3 or C300. I’d love to try one out and see what it can do. I’m particularly intrigued by the ability to use either FX or DX sensor crops giving you the option to use lower cost DX lenses or get wider FOV which full frame lenses.

I received more details today of the new viewfinder soon to be launched by Alphatron. Made to Alphatrons specifications by TV logic the new EVF-035W sounds like it will be a nice improvement over the current Cineroid and Zacuto EVF’s. More details here: http://www.alphatron.tv/evf/?utm_source=AlphatronTV&utm_medium=brandpage

UPDATE: This does NOT come on an SxS card or include an SxS card. The camera must be sent to a Sony service centre to be upgraded, and I’ve only seen the offer for USA customers.

Hot news is that the S-Log option for the PMW-F3 can now be had for  $899 USD. You can have all the benefits of S-Log and 4:4:4 RGB out. If you paid full whack for the S-Log option then you can get $2500 USD off a Sony SR-R1 or the Sony F3 servo zoom lens.

Here’s a full HD version of my real time Aurora video, shot with the PMW-F3.

2013 Northern Lights Expeditions to Norway, staying in mountain cabins. Including food, ice fishing, snow scooter use and photo/video tuition. You must book your own flights to Tromso or Alta.

Arrive 1st Feb – Depart 7th Feb 2013 £1175 per person, Max 8 persons includes extra snow scooter excursion to second mountain cabin on high plateaux.

Arrive 7th Feb 2013 – Depart 13th Feb 2013 £1125 per person. Max 8 people.

Please use the contact form to hold a place and for more details. Spaces limited.

You have to watch this. It is REAL TIME footage of the Northern Lights. Not the usual time-lapse that I have shot lots of in the past, but real time, as it happened footage. The motion you see in the Aurora is real, this is what I saw watching it. I was able to get this because the F3 with S-Log at +18db gain is 6400 ISO. That combined with a 2 frame slow shutter made it possible to shoot the Solar Storm of the 24th of January in real time. The current on-line clip is quite low quality. I’ll get a higher quality version online when I get home. The camera footage does not have the banding issues that the online versions have (caused by H264).

Also available to view on Vimeo.

Im in my hotel room in Norway editing the real time f3 footage from the Jan 24th Solar Storm. You won’t believe the footage when you see it. I’m stoked with what I have in the can. Almost 2 hours of beautiful real time Aurora footage. Incredible overhead bursts, flashing and waving pillars of light that stretch from horizon to horizon. Please please check back over the next couple of days, as it should be on both Youtube and Vimeo by the weekend. Tomorrow I head back out into the wilderness to try and capture more footage!