Friday, November 9, 2012

Secret Canon Settings from Alex Buono



Forgot to do this blog entry from PhotoPlus. Sat in on this informative talk
at the Canon booth from cameraman Alex Buono. Who's Alex Buono? The DP for
the filmed segments of Saturday Night Live, amongst other things.

He embraced shooting on DSLRs way back and loves them, and Saturday Night
Live retired their Reds in favour of 5Ds and 7Ds a while back. (They have
since moved to the C300). Amongst other things he discussed was his
recommendations for settings on the cameras. So 2 tips for you today.

TIP #1 - Alex strongly recommends setting the ISO in multiples of 160. So
set it at 160, 320, 640, 800, 1600... He has found through trial and error
that doing it in multiples of 160 results in cleaner images. He doesn't know
why, but 320 is cleaner than 200.

TIP #2 - And for the User settings, he sets Sharpness at 1, Contrast at -4,
Saturation -2, and Color Tone at 0. He has found this gives a good, flat
image that responds to colour correction the best. Out of the camera the
image won't look so great, but once you run it through colour correction,
these settings retain the most information to allow maximum flexibility.

So there you have it - the secret sauce from Alex Buono.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Canon's Best Announcement This Year



We've seen numerous big announcements from Canon this year, but this announcement, about new lens caps, is by far the most important and best announcement they've made.

Not sure when we'll see these revolutionary lens caps... But now Canon users won't have to buy Nikon lens caps anymore.