Photography tips: Extend the range of the Pocketwizard FlexTT5

I’ve been using vari­ety of pock­etwiz­ard sys­tem through out my career.  Pock­etwiz­ard mul­ti­max never failed and has always been my #1 choice  of  wire­less trans­mit­ting unit when I shoot bas­ket­ball, and stu­dio work.  My expe­ri­ence with pock­etwiz­ard mini TT1 and Flex TT5 wasn’t so great. After com­mu­ni­cat­ing back and forth with pocket wiz­ard, they sent me a  test ver­sion of AC7 which reduce the RF noise from Canon 580 EXII.

MG 1641 Many peo­ple reported that AC7 won’t work with exter­nal bat­tery pack.  But this new ver­sion actu­ally comes with AC57 adapter which can be used with an exter­nal bat­tery pack.   Read more





Hood Hat

Some­times, I wor­ried about my gear espe­cially fans with beer on his / her hands dur­ing sport­ing events.  Canon 300 2.8 is comes with cover but I really don’t like to use them — it’s huge.  I found really good prod­uct called hood hat from : OP Tech USA.  It fits per­fectly (mine is XL size) and it’s not that expen­sive at all.

IMG 2910 Sports Port­fo­lio ~ Con­tact





On Camera Microphone + Portable Recorder

Bat­tery pow­ered on cam­era micro­phones are easy to use and good solu­tions for cap­tur­ing high qual­ity sounds.  I’ve been using Rode videomic for some time but soon ditched it away due to poor build qual­ity .  It’s made of  plas­tic and the shock mount sys­tem is held together by rub­ber bands.  I’ve been shoot­ing some video with sim­ply wired lava­liere mic con­nected to Olym­pus DS-40.  Here’s my post .

Portrait Frame

azden smx-10 con­nected to Zoom H4N

The video mic I have now is Azden SMX-10: light weight and short in length.  It is a lot eas­ier to carry and sound qual­ity is decent.  Azden SMX-10 is con­nected to Zoom H4N to record long period of time.  I also use a split­ter out of Zoom H4N (line): one for mic input to Canon 5D Mark II and the other for mon­i­tor­ing sound.  Here’s my post on how to con­nect canon 5d mark ii to Zoom H4N audio recorder

It may not be the the best audio solu­tion as it picks up lens motor as well as han­dling noise.  But I think it’s great solu­tion for cov­er­ing events and news cov­er­age (it’s still bet­ter than built in cam­era mic).

Wed­ding Port­fo­lio ~ Con­tact ~ Pric­ing





LED light for DSLR Camera

I’ve been using pop­u­lar 126 LED DSLR Video Light for shoot­ing DSLR photo and video.  This thing is really great and last really long time.  One thing I don’t like about this is the bot­tom hot shoe mount.  It’s not sta­ble at all and I had to drill and replace with shoe mount-swivel shoe adapter from LED 4 Video.  It’s prob­a­bly Best Bang for the Buck. I highly rec­om­mend this ball head.  Here’s some of the images with Jag 35 fol­low focus.





{ San Antonio Wedding Photography | How do I record sound with Canon 5D Mark II }

The sound qual­ity off the canon 5d mark II is not great  (I posted how I get around this on this post).   Eter­nal micro­phones such as Rode ViodeoMic is good option but not great cap­tur­ing sounds that are far away.  Only option for cap­tur­ing sound dur­ing cer­e­mony is using lava­lier micro­phone sys­tem, prefer­ably wire­less.  I am a wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher and don’t really want to think about wire­less lav mic sys­tem and record­ing device on a wed­ding day (I am a pho­tog­ra­pher not video­g­ra­pher).  I just found great way to record sound.  It’s Olym­pus DS-40 and I picked up $50 on ebay.  I also pur­chased olym­pus  ME-15 mic lava­lier micro­phone that clips grooms cloth­ing.  The whole sys­tem is less than $100 and very very small.

Soobumim Photography IMG 2038

DS-40 Dig­i­tal Voice Recorder I use on wed­ding day

I used this setup dur­ing recent engage­ment ses­sion and sound qual­ity was pretty good.  I had some prob­lems with sync and align­ment using this sys­tem.  The solu­tion that I found was to use MPEG Stream­clip soft­ware by Squared 5 (here’s a link to down­load) and it’s free.  Only tricky thing was to change some of pre­sets.  I use fol­low­ing presets:

I use apple inter­medi­iate codec at %80 qual­ity and set audio at 44.1 khz when I use Olym­pus DS-40.  Some peo­ple sug­gested to man­u­ally change audio speed to solve sync and align­ment or recoded again with 48 khz record­ing device.  But I found this is easy way to solve this problem.

Wed­ding Port­fo­lio ~ Con­tact ~ Pric­ing





Canon 5d mark II audio with Zoom H4N

With 5D mark II man­ual audio con­trol, I’ve been try­ing to con­fig­ure out ways to record bet­ter sounds. Canon 5D Mark II has a 1/8th inch stereo input which allow to use exter­nal micro­phones such as Rode ViodeoMic.

363083 150x150

Rode VideoMic

Like

  • small
  • doesn’t require exter­nal power source (with 9v bat­tery, gets 100 hours of power)
  • switch­able high-pass fil­ter (works fairly well)

Dis­like

  • build qual­ity (it’s made of plas­tic and fragile)

Later, I returned the Rode VideoMic and bought pop­u­lar Zoom H4N by Samson.

600761 150x150

pop­u­lar Zoom H4N by Samson.

Excel­lent audio qual­ity and 4 chan­nel record­ing allow me so much flex­i­bil­ity (adding lav mic etc).  I am going with dual sys­tem which means I will have to record sounds sep­a­rately and edit them in Final cut.  If dual sys­tem is has­sle, try this:

I just found a spe­cial cable with 25 dB atten­u­a­tion from Mark­ertek allow me to con­nect Zoom H4N line out to 5D Mark II stereo mic level input.

Soobumim Photography 5A2O6423 150x150

Zoom H4N with 5D Mark II

Set cam­era vol­ume around 30% (with man­ual vol­ume con­trol, you can do this) and always use wind screen.  I’ve been test­ing audio (ambi­ent) qual­ity with it and it’s been great so far.  I also have stereo Y-cable so that I can mon­i­tor sound at the same time.





Wedding Photography Gear | San Antonio Wedding Photographer

I’ve been trav­el­ing a lot this year and thought I’d post wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy gear that I nor­mally bring.

Bag: Think Tank Inter­na­tional V2.0.  I was lit­tle afraid about car­ry­ing this with me since I’ve never travel this before.  It fit­ted over­head with­out any problem.

Cam­era

Lems

  • Canon 17–40 4.0:  for out­door por­trait.  I usu­ally over­power the sun with light­ing and don’t need 2.8 at that point
  • Canon 35 1.4 : stays 5D Mark II 90% of the time.  very sharp, great image quality
  • Canon 85 1.2: for low­light ceremony
  • Canon 70–200 2.8: stays  1D Mark III 90% of the time.  can shoot jour­nal­is­tic style with this and that’s way it’s my favorite lens
  • Canon 15 2.8 fish­eye: maybe used 3–4 time but it’s great cap­tur­ing the whole venue

Light­ing

Com­puter: Mac book pro

Also carry 2 light stands, umbrella,westcott apollo soft­box in small tri­pod bag

Gear that I no longer use

  • canon 24–70 2.8: too heavy
  • canon 24–105: great focal length, image sta­bi­liza­tion is great but I like prime lens a lot bet­ter for some reason
  • canon 100 macro: it just too many lens to carry
  • canon st-e2: never used
  • flash bracket: never used
  • gary fong light­sphere: I don’t know why I pur­chase this

These are all the gear I bring for wed­ding and I trust them to work 100% of time.





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