Soccer Girl and DSLR Viewfinder Loupes
by rfquerin
Very proud of the way my daughter is playing soccer these days. No lack of effort for sure. I shot a couple of clips the other night with my Canon 7D using my 75-300 lens and edited them up quickly using Blender 2.5. The original was shot at 1280×720 at 60fps in manual mode with an aperture setting of 1/60 (thanks to Troy for that bit of advice) and then slowed down to 24fps on output from Blender.
I’m really thinking about getting a viewfinder loupe for my camera. I always forget my reading glasses when shooting and even with that nice 3″ LCD screen, focus is clearly guesswork. It wasn’t too bad on most of these shots, but it can be frustrating. I’ve been thinking about the Zacuto Z-Finder, Lcdvf or Hoodman products to help solve this problem (note: Hoodman’s site is well.. extremely jarring in terms of design. Think Geocities meets Schoolbus. You’ve been warned. 
).
If anybody has experience with these things and how they perform, let me know.
No Lack of Hustle from Richard Querin on Vimeo.
Wow.
While it is fantastic to get a plethora of emails telling you how you helped someone achieve something, it has very little impact compared to something that somehow helped someone capture a personal moment in a tiny way.
* Good focus work. Extremely good. That’s darn tricky stuff on those longer focal lengths even stopped down.
* If you are going to do grading with the 7D in Blender, use an SVN version with a custom FFMPEG. There is a thing known as 16-235 clamping (long boring story there) that will occur on if you don’t use the newer code with custom FFMPEG. DSLRs shoot full 0-255 range, so you end up throwing out valuable data for grading. Yellow has a fantastic blog up regarding VSE work. He touches the topic here http://blendervse.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/video-import-into-blender/. There is now a patch in place that addresses it.
* You will likely buy a loupe and still be frustrated. The image is too damn small to get a feel for it. Thankfully, larger LCDs can be had for dirt cheap that offer the 1080 output useful for focus work. For example, http://www.coollcd.com/lilliput-669gl70npc-7-inch-hdmi-dvi-tft-lcd-vga-monitor-no-touchscreen-free-14-canon-shoe-mount-free-mini-hdmi-cable_p670.html?zenid=8da4969e3d71b495457803f002900b18. That offer comes with a mini HDMI and hotshoe for $200. There are also a large variety of inexpensive add ons for such tools there as you can see, such as a battery. The battery lasts about four hours.