You may remember when the 5dMkII or 5d2 came out with 1080p video that there was a video posted by director/photographer Vincent Laforet. It was called Reverie. It was quick, to the point and a very expensive short. I liked it. And it was the first video of it’s kind to be shot on an still camera. Now, we have hundreds of great videos out there all shot on SLR cameras. One of my favourite at the moment is by a photographer in Atlanta, USA. Andrew Kornylak did a whole series on bouldering and rock climbing where he shot interviews with the Nikon D5000 and then did still-video with the Nikon D3 by just blasting away and getting a cool, stop motion like feel.

Here is one of the videos from Andrew.

You can’t always tell when it switches from the 720p video of the D5000 to the D3 which tops out at 11fps.

Unfortunately, Laforet’s newest movie Nocturne isn’t available at the moment because there seems to be some strife between Canon Inc. and Canon USA. Hopefully it will be up on the web soon. Of course you can always find it on YouTube. Because everything is on YouTube. Laforet wrote on his blog that he has agreed to take the video down until Canon gets it together. If you missed it, here is Vincent Laforet’s Reverie.

Just so you know, Nikon isn’t sitting by with there video/still cameras and not producing movies. Bill Frakes did an amazing video with the new Nikon D3s. And yes, ballerinas in Austrailia.

Say you walk in to a room that you’re going to photograph for editorial, architecture, food. Whatever. The light sucks. Plain and simple, you need to add flash but you need the ambient for fill or maybe you can’t turn it off. Matching the colour of your flash to the ambient can be a pain. Especially, if you have no idea what the colour is!

Both Nikon and Canon do a very good job of the custom white balance, based on the ambient environment. If you are shooting available light, you just shoot a white (or grey) card and set a new white balance to match your mystery ambient light. With a little in-camera calculation, the camera manufacturers out there (Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax, Fuji, etc.) can correct to any CC-pack (colour correct) out there. You do your white balance, it tells you what colour gel to put on your flashes and you have a colour balanced flash! Wouldn’t that be nice?

Alright, here’s the tricky part. Nikon, (or Canon, Sony, etc.) you already have the ambient offset color information available in the camera, and it works great. How about you just give us a menu option to know how to CC our flashes so we can match the ambient without buying an expensive flash color meter?

Now all that has to happen is we have to get the companies listening. So if you like the idea (I do, and I know David Hobby does) go out and re-post this blog or strobist.com, or tweet it, facebook, delicious, digg, reddit, or any thing else you can think of. Let’s see if we can get someone to see us.

Add your guess as a comment below and I’ll let you know if you’re right. Don’t forget, if you like what you see, go to the 2009 Photoblog Awards site and vote for my photoblog.

Click here if you are using a reader to view this post, so you can view the video. I hope you enjoyed that video, I’m going to have to get out the scrim and head downtown to try a little of this out.

I recently photographed my first wedding ever. It was even more stressful than just being a wedding. My first wedding. For family. The last part hits a little harder than most because if I missed something or didn’t do something it was family! Not only that, the Groom has years of motion picture experience so he knows how light works, depth of field, and all the tricks to keep people busy while you’re fiddling around with settings. I just couldn’t fool him. I do think, however, that the day went by just fine. Here are a few of the shots that I took. I might be uploading the rest to my Flickr account over the next couple of weeks.

The cake above tells a little story about how the Chris and Shalome met. It was designed and made by the Grooms Mother, Jan. Shooting this was very tricky. During the rehearsal, I sneaked away and grabbed a quick shot of the cake and had it posted to Facebook by that evening. I tagged as many photographers as I could in a short period of time and asked, “How do I light this”? I got various responses ranging from very technical light sandwiches to, just stick it next to a window and shoot it with a long lens. I could do neither. I shot it from about 2-3 feet away with a 20mm lens and flash pointing straight up at the ceiling and a bounce card. I through the wine bottle in to soften the lights in the background and the square crop is because the cake was right in front of a fire exit. In my opinion, not bad in the circumstances given.

During the wedding there was a crasher on the loose. The daughter of the best man Rob, brother of the groom, decided she needed to go see him. There is always, so I’ve been told, that one kid who looks back down the aisle at the wedding. I think this was that moment. That’s all for now, to see more of the images, go check out my Flickr account.

Jon is an aspiring actor/model here in Victoria who needed some headshots and I needed portraits for my portfolio. It worked out really well and we managed to get some great images.

This image will also show up in my ‘people’ gallery on my website which can be found here.

Kyrstin coming back to the beach after some pictures.

A 50 minute star trail over the west end of Lake Cowichan.

Around 6 vertical images taken with an 85mm lens stiched together to create this panoramic.

The raw power of the ocean.

More images at flickr.