Kevin Warnock

I was looking at videos tagged with 5DM2 on Vimeo today. Vimeo hosts the videos on this blog, and can be thought of as a high end YouTube without ads. 5DM2 is short for Canon 5D Mark II, the digital still camera that shoots outstanding video as well. It’s the camera I use for the stills and video on this blog.

I came across a thought provoking video tonight that shows a Canon 7D matched up with Panavision lenses. Panavision lenses are for Hollywood style movie cameras. Panavision rents rather than sells their cameras, and the lenses can’t be rented without a camera, so it’s unclear how likely it will be for anyone to actually use a Panavision lens with a Canon camera. Also, if one were able to buy a Panavision lens, I suspect they would cost as much as a new car each.

The Canon 7D shoots at a lower resolution than my camera, but it shoots at 24P, while my camera only shoots at the video rate of 30P. Serious film fans mostly prefer 24P, which is the rate film motion picture cameras shoot at. The video from the 7D thus looks more film like than video from the 5D Mark II. I prefer the later, as I also shoot stills, and the 5D Mark II shoots at 21 megapixels and has a full frame sensor, while the 7D has a cropped sensor with a lower number of pixels.

This 7D/Panavision experiment was conducted by Zacuto USA, which rents and sells professional motion picture equipment.

Here is a simply outstanding clip of the results that were obtained with the 7D/Panavision rig. This clip has all the quality of a major Hollywood blockbuster from what I can see on my laptop. The low light capability of the Canon DSLRs are amazing.

I saw three dimensional television for the first time tonight. It’s a remarkably captivating experience. I don’t know if it will ever take off, but it sure made an impression on the audience at the Intel Capital CEO Summit today in Huntington Beach, CA.

Here is a video I shot of a 3D television camera. It looks very expensive, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The flat panel TV in the video costs $8,500.00. When you put on the 3D glasses, look at the flat panel, and move your hand toward the TV camera, it looks to you like your hand is coming out of the TV screen. It’s stunning.

My wife Monika and I went pumpkin shopping today at 7th Avenue and Lawton Avenue.

I took a lot of pictures of the scarecrows, which were all different. I thought they were all handmade by children, but Monika tells me that the art supply store named Michaels sells scarecrows just like these. Here is a link to my shots on Flickr. I uploaded them at very high resolution, and I shot them at f 1.4 for very shallow depth of field.

My favorite photographer, Irving Penn, died today at age 92. Here’s one of my favorite photographs by Penn.