Embarcadero Ride

San Francisco, California.

Mechanical Ballet

Short montage video of the machines that drive the cables for San Francisco's famous cable cars. The contra-rotating wheels are hypnotic.

Music is 'Funny' by Daniel Licht from the soundtrack to TV series Dexter.

Video Star: A Taste of the Canon 5D Mark II

Today I got the chance to handle the new Canon 5D Mark II and gave its video capabilites a all-too-short roadtest.

I work at the online video desk of a large Canadian newsroom for my day job. We use several kinds of cameras for reporters to use to shoot video for the web, and our photojournalists use Canon's G7 or G9. 

Our photographers are very interested in the new 5D Mark II for its video capabilites which is where I got involved. We had a pre-production model under the watchful eye of a Canon rep to play with for a morning.

We shot some test video around the newsroom which I am unable to share at this stage, but I feel I can give some impressions of how the camera performed for video.

To put it simply, the video looks stunning. We had a 17-24mm [i think] lens on it and to see such wide angle video is mindblowing. The shallow depth of field added a cinematic feel. The video was superbly crisp and the colour was smooth and natural.

I could not believe such rich HD video had come from a camera costing less than $3000. My jaw literally dropped when reviewing the video clips.

The sound was also good, with a nice sense of space and a richness to it. The mic is just below the 5D logo on the front of the camera. The Canon rep said that it can pick up the whine of AF motors in some lenses from that position, and when shooting a still in video mode the sound of the shutter activating was clear. He said that the pickup of the mic will be improved in production models, but its somewhat academic as the camera has an 1/8th inch jack, so adding external audio input would be a snap.

The next nice feature of the camera when in video mode is you can make a still shot at any time. Hit the shutter release and a full-resolution still is made. This interrupts the flow of video being recorded for about a second, with a jumpy return to video afterwards. The rep said the length of this video break when shooting stills would be shorter in the production model.

Exposure in video mode is handled automatically, but its possible to lock the exposure. Settings made on the camera while in still mode will carry over into video mode initially, so you can set it up how you want. However, if the camera thinks it needs to change a setting it will.

In one important video area this camera trumps the Nikon D90. The 5D MarkII will autofocus while in video mode, where the D90 is manual. The focus point can also be moved while recording using a very small directional joystick at the back of the camera.

On top of this the camera felt very solid and comfortable in my hands, and the large LCD screen on the back made shooting video comfortable, albeit slightly odd initially. Holding an SLR away from your body is not a natural pose for me.

I can see people buying this camera purely for its video capabilities, where on the D90 the video has been described as a nice extra, but not somthing you'd run out and buy the camera for.

As I said to the Canon rep as he packed up the camera to head off, they'll sell as many of these as they can make, and deservedly so.

Leaving Union Station

Toronto, Canada.

Data Disaster Averted

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Its one of those catchy slogans which should be forefront in the minds of photographers.

Over the last few days I had the hard drive in my computer which stores all my photos begin to fail. This drive is dedicated to photos and only photos. No programs or anything else goes on it.

Because I had a solid backup strategy what could have been a catastrophic loss became a fairly minor inconvenience and an investment of a few hours.

Here's how it played out and from this I hope you can draw some ideas to have a plan in place to backup and recover your data if the primary copy goes south.

When I am done importing images from a shoot and after an editing session I do a backup to my RAID1 NAS drive using Allway Sync of my photo drive. Always. Every time.

Once a week I also backup the photo drive to two external hard drives, again using Allway Sync. One copy stays at home, another goes to the office so there is physical redundancy, as well as drive redundancy. So at any one time I have four drives with my complete photo archive on.

Once a week I also backup my Lightroom catalog to the same photo drive, so that gets backed up along with everything else on this schedule.

Last week I began to see some odd behavior when I browsed my photo drive. It would be slow, there would be a lot of hard drive activity with little to show for it, and then the kicker: I got a Windows delayed write error and then the drive appeared to vanish from My Computer.

Not good.

During a reboot Windows automatically performed a check disk on the photo drive and it seemed to be back in action, but I knew that was going to be short-lived.

I backed up the photo drive to one of my external drives, but not the NAS. That way if there were any corrupted files they wouldn't get copied out to all my backups. I also did a fresh backup the Lightroom catalog. This last step alone is probably the one thing that saved me the most time and made me love Lightroom even more.

Time to get out the tools and swap some drives. Out came the old photo drive and in went a fresh 500gb. A few hours of formatting and copying the 250gb of photos from the backup external drive and all seemed to be back in order. But then I tried to launch my primary Lightroom catalog.

The program said it was corrupt and its attempts at fixing it came to nothing.

Throughout this entire process this was the one moment I began to sweat just a litle. Thousands of indexed, keyworded, named and filtered shots are managed in this catalog. Was that work I would have to start again from scratch?

Fortunately no.

I was able to launch the backup Lightroom catalog I had made before swapping drives and I was back in business.

Bottom line was a few hours of large-scale data moving and not a single byte of data lost and almost no stress on my part.

This is the second time I have had my primary photo drive in my computer fail, and its the second time I've had an up-to-date backup that saved me from disaster.

The hardware and software to protect your images is a small price to pay for the insurance against losing them all. If what happened to me struck you right now, how much would you lose?