Monday, March 19, 2012

HD Video For Great Wedding Sequences, Cheap Fisheyes, & My New Wedding Camera ;~)

Good (late) Afternoon Everybody,

This day is really got the best of me hence, the very late post today. We returned home yesterday late afternoon from our wedding in the mid-Ohio area. 13 hours and over 4000 exposures later we wrapped the job.  I had a midmorning appointment today that took a little longer than usual and then spent some time importing those 4000+ photographs and videos into Lightroom 4. That's about the time I started getting sidetracked - to many new goodies to experiment with and too little time ;~)

A Cool Way To Get A Great Series Of Images!

One thing we tried this weekend was to use my Canon 7D to shoot HD video of the couple as they interacted romantically with each other. My game plan was to do the frame grabs from the HD video in Lightroom 4 and then create some album pages from the sequence of images I captured from the video.

Album 2

It took a little bit of time to work through the sequence but once we figured it out LaDawn was able to create some really fabulous looking pages. I'll go into more detail about what I was up to in tomorrow's Technique Tuesday post.

My New Wedding Camera ;~)

Mobile HotspotI was also experimenting with my new iPad 3 at the wedding. Yes, I'm the proud owner of the brand new iPad. I opted for the Verizon version this time around because of one very compelling feature. The Verizon version has one very cool feature not yet enabled on the AT&T iPad. The Verizon feature lets you use your iPad 3 as a hot-spot supporting up to five devices once enabled.

I was already paying Verizon $60 a month for my MiFi hot-spot card. I was able to cancel the MiFi card subscription and then I re-upped for the 5gig data plan on my new iPad which gives me plenty of bandwidth for my web surfing and hot-spot functions. In effect it was a $35 monthly savings for me. After I cancel my 2gig data plan on my old iPad, saving me $25 a month, and I've saved $10 with the 5gig plan on my Verizon iPad leaving $35/month extra cash in my back pocket - where it rightfully belongs.

Photographing with the iPad is like shooting with a view camera. We've all seen plenty of blog posts around the web showing people shooting with their iPad but, with the brand-new 5 Meg iSight camera on the iPad 3 it really is a lot of fun.  The images look quite good and will easily enlarge to an 8x10 photograph.

iPad3 church

It's also easy to get those images into Lightroom with the Photo Stream feature on the new iPad 3 and iCloud. With the Photo Stream feature enabled, any images I capture on the iPad are immediately sent to iCloud. There I can easily retrieve those images onto my desktop computer.

Once retrieved I simply import them into the job in Lightroom and I'm good to go. Do I plan to make my iPad 3 my new backup camera for my weddings – no not really. It's just kind of fun to play but more importantly the iPad is an integral part of our wedding coverages as I've mentioned many, many times. It's easy to do a quick selection of the images, get them imported into the iPad, and then have a slide presentation ready to go for your clients.  A great WOW factor for any photographer photographing weddings.

A Handy Dandy Fisheye Lens For Only $349!

Eric Cameron, a great photographer from Dover, Ohio came down and helped me with the wedding shoot this weekend.  It was great to have Eric on the job.  He has a terrific eye and a nice sense of timing in capturing the image.

Eric also brought along his Bower Fisheye lens [link].  It’s a totally manual lens but you can get the hang of it in no time at all.  It does a great job producing a full 180 degree field of view on the APS size sensor cameras like my Canon 7D.

Fisheye

Eric and I both had a good time “playing” with the Bower Fisheye lens for both stills and video.  The image quality, at first glance,   looks quite good to me – more later on our results.  Needless to say, it was a BEAUTIFUL wedding celebration with perfect weather. Chelsea and Joe were a great, easy going couple to photograph. The wedding party was fun. We captured some gorgeous images, and I can’t wait to take a closer look at them in Lightroom.

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I started working on my Technique Tuesday for tomorrow and I can't wait to tell you what I discovered. Why not tune in and I’ll give you the full report on the HD video experience I had.

On that note, I'm out here. Everybody have a great rest of the day and I'll see you tomorrow.

Adios, David

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