whistlerdan

I hadn’t taken the time yet to try shooting 60fps with my Canon 7d.  But it started to snow heavily in Whistler village this morning and as I watched out of the window it looked like the perfect chance to try it out.  I put the Canon 85mm 1.8 lens on the 7d and opened [...]

I was hoping to have a lengthy review of the Canon S90 having recently taken it on vacation to Mexico.  Unfortunately the camera was stolen 2/3 through my stay there.  I will get a replacement but the review will have to wait a bit. Sadly I had taken a few hundred photos with it before [...]

When I decided I needed to get this video stuff dialed, I needed something to shoot.  There’s no point trying to figure this all out unless you have a purpose and some footage to play with.  Leigh Powis, a local skier from Whistler, told about his crazy plan to put a trampoline on top of [...]

Bit of an odds and ends posting this one.  I’ve been shooting a few things up on Blackcomb glacier in the last week or so.  The progression of skiing over the last year is pretty impressive.  It seems everyone has a new variation on a double cork or double flip these days.  Paul Bergeron (photo [...]

A couple of days ago we took some time off sledding here in Whistler with the PBP crew to shoot a jib setup that I had found before the season started.  The setup was a double bomb drop, one drop followed immediately by another one into some trees.  I thought i’d take a bit of time to go over my thought processes when i’m shooting something like this.  Unfortunately I can’t show you the final shot from the shoot but you’ll see it soon enough….
One of the first things you want to remember with this stuff is to try and make the setup look good.  Take the time to make things look nice for the cameras.  In this case it was being filmed too so it needed to look neat and tidy but even if i’m just shooting stills , its a good idea to keep it clean and tidy.  Put square edges on your jumps and landings and try not to put unnecessary footprints in the background.  These things wont always end up in your shot but if you do the work beforehand, once you have started shooting you won’t have to stop halfway and fix something up just because you have changed angles.
Next up, pick an angle or two.  Normally I find there is one angle that jumps out at me as “The one”.  I’ll fire off a couple of test shots shutter priority set to 1/320 (max sync speed on my canon 1DMKIIN) so I can get an idea for the angle and also what the exposure is going to be.  Then I’ll stick the camera in Manual at 1/320 and guestimate f-stop for the ambient exposure i’m going to need to underexpose by a stop or two in order to stop ghosting.  The exact amount or underexposure really depends on how much ambient is hitting the feature , in this case the rock was actually pretty well shaded so i hardly needed to underexpose the sky by much at all and the rock was almost totally dark.  We were also shooting at the end of the day so the sky had a nice deep color to it.
Now I know what my exposure setting is going to be it’s time to get out some lighting kit.  I shot this w..

Today Poorboyz productions released the official trailer for their new movie Everyday Is A Saturday.  With the most comprehensive list of athletes ever featured in one ski movie this is a guaranteed hit.  For the last few months I have spent a lot of time with the crew up here in British Columbia shooting rails, backcountry jumps and lines.  Let me tell you right now, this movie will be ridiculous!  Check out a few behind the scenes photos below, click for larger versions

Today the makers of Pocketwizards announced two new models to add to their lineup.  I’m not going to go into details about what the current PWs do, if you don’t know then this isn’t going to be of interest to you at all….
First the good news, the new TT1 and TT5 are backwards compatible with the old models so there is no need to go out and replace the whole lot!  The big new feature is that with a TT1 or TT5 on your camera and a TT5 on your canon speedlight - you can do wireless remote ETTL.  Great for some people but whilst I do own a Canon speedlight , it hasn’t been out of its bag in 2 years so this feature would not make me buy the new models.  So what is there in here that might be useful to a action sports photographer like me?  I always use all of my remote strobes in manual mode so the ETTL capabilities are useless.  But hidden away in all of the technical jargon and PR speak in the press releases is something VERY interesting and it’s called Hypersync……
It sounds like wizardry to me but the long and the short of it is that the TT1 (or TT5) on the camera can be programmed to fire your flash a few microseconds BEFORE your old pocketwizards could.  They do this because they know when you are about to fire the flash and you can program it to jump the gun slightly.  The exact amount of time can be programmed by hooking it up to your computer so that you can experiment with finding the best timing for your strobes.  What this does for you is allow you to typically find a setting that will allow you to shoot with a higher sync speed than you normally would be able to.

Shooting action with strobes is a constant battle with ambient light (unless it’s dark).  You have to under power the ambient enough that you wont have any ghosting in your action image but this can be a struggle in full sunlight, especially if you are shooting with fairly low powered strobes.  Using the new Hypersync technology will enable you to shoot in brighter light

The lack of updates over the last few weeks might lead you to believe that I have been off adventuring round the world chasing snow storms….not quite.
It’s been a strange winter here in British Columbia.  The snow didn’t really come in November and December leaving the mountains still looking like mountain bike resorts.  A lot of my plans went down the plughole and I was left twiddling my thumbs for a few weeks.  Then on December 26th Vancouver received nearly 60cm of snow (though nearby Whistler got only a couple of inches).  With more snow than Vancouver had ever seen I quickly organized a trip down there to meet up with the Poorboyz crew and we hit some rails for a few days with Mike Henitiuk, Matt Margetts and Leigh Powis.  When a city that normally doesnt get any snow, receives nearly 2 feet, the place comes to a standstill.  Jeff Thomas met me at his house in North Vancouver by coming down his road on his snowmobile…..

As soon as that trip was done I headed back to Whistler for the Deep Winter photo challenge that I wrote about last week.  After the Deep Winter I headed back down to Vancouver for a shoot at Grouse Mountain which saw the beginning of another strage weather pattern.  As we arrived at Grouse it looked like the day was going to be foggy and overcast but a quick trip up the gondola quickly showed that the temperatures were inverted and the top of the mountain was bathed in a beautiful orange glow as the sun rose above the cloud layer.  This inverted weather pattern stayed around for the next 10 days though bringing unseasonally high temperatures to the alpine regions while the valleys hovered around 0.  Up in whistler the temperature in the alpine shot up to a high of 10 degrees and stayed there for the week.  The already thin snowpack was melting away…….

Booter shooting in whistler from Dan Carr on Vimeo.
With no real powder to ski anywhere I spent the week building backcountry jumps with the PBP crew.  We discovered

The snow has been falling in Vancouver, and that means its time to shoot urban!  I took a break from shooting stills yesterday though to film for a couple of minutes with my 5DMKII to see just what sort of video you can get with fast moving subjects and panning.  I think I have a lot to learn about video if i’m to put it to good use.  As usual, pointing a camera at a snowy scene provides less than stellar results from autoexposure mechanisms.  Snow is typically rendered 2/3 of a stop or more underexposed as the camera exposes it for a neutral grey instead of white.  If you are shooting stills you can just shoot on manual but the video on the 5DMKII doesnt allow this so generous application fo the exposure compensation dial is in order, with hindsight i might have been a touch heavy handed with this example…. but I did learn something.  The exposure compensation dial in movie mode seems to adjust the ISO setting and not the shutter speed or the aperture.  I haven’t figured out if this is the same in all situations yet though. Click here to view the HD version.

5dMKII test from Dan Carr on Vimeo.
To me it looks like the shutter speed it picked for this shot was too slow?  It was very dark , far far darker than this video would have you believe.  The sun was long below the horizon.  But I haven’t found a way yet to check what shutter speed was used after you have shot it.  I think the results would have been far better in brighter light.  Perhaps I will give it another try next week.

I get asked this question every week so I have finally got round to making a tutorial video about it.

Photoshop Tutorial :: How to make a sequence from Dan Carr on Vimeo.

Tanner Hall has finally released the teaser for his new movie “The Massive”.
Starring Tanner, Sean and Cal Pettit, Frank Raymond, Dana Flahr and others.
The song used is “Jah Rule The World” by Cali P.

The latest film from ski film maker Jeff Thomas. Buy the movie at poorboyz.com

Austin's B-Reel.
Cinematography by Jeff Thomas, Theory-3 Media.
Photography by Dan Carr & Josh Ander