Hello from Culver City, LA. I spent most of this week up in Hollywood showing of the Genus Hurricane 3D rig on the Manfrotto booth at Cinegear. It’s the first time I have ever gotten sun burnt at a trade show! Most of the show is outside on a back lot at Paramount Studios and the weather was just beautiful. The booth was swamped most of the time, sadly not because I was selling lots of 3D rigs but because we were giving away free ice cream! As usual there was good interest in the rig and it was good to meet some of the people already out there shooting stuff with it. I took a little bit of time out to go and mooch around the show… I’ve never seen so many sliders in one place, almost every booth appeared to have one! I also got a sneak peak at the new Cineroid EVF with HDSDi inputs. Looks promising and it’s made of metal rather than plastic so has a very robust feel.

Genus were also showing their new Elite matte box which can take 5.65 x 5.65 filters as well as 4 x 4 and 5 x 5. It comes with a nice folding top flag as well as side flags. If you need a matte box for bigger lenses and bigger filters you should definitely take a look. The build quality is very good. Another nifty Genus product is the new lens support bracket for 15mm rods. This can support long or heavy lenses and has a 1/4″ screw to bolt to the lens or a pair of rollers that will support a big lens allowing the focus ring to rotate even if the lens does not have a proper attachment point. Clever stuff! Hopefully I will be able to get one to review properly (and the matte box).

Today I was at Samy’s Camera in Culver City running the first day of a 2 day 3D workshop. It was really busy with some well know DoP’s in attendance including Geoff Boyle, I think we had about 50 students in total. It was a fun day (apart from an LG 3D TV that refused to play ball), with some very intelligent questions being asked by the group. Tomorrow we have the second more advanced part of the course with a slightly smaller group. As soon as the class finishes I’m dashing off to the airport to fly to London to meet a courier with my  F3 camera kit and then on to Berlin to shoot the Duran Duran gig at the Tempodrom on Wednesday.

What do you think of the new look to the website? I was getting bored with the old look. This is a little more interesting. Any issues or problems do let me know. Coming soon I will have a review of the Vinten 100 tripod head (big thumbs up) and a SxS to SD adapter card from Sonnet, plus hopefully the full Duran Duran story.