Incase you haven’t noticed, I’ve been busy lately.  For the most part, Redhat has been taking up the majority of my time, but I’ve also had time to launch a website for my Dad’s artwork and do a bit of traveling.

Since my last post I’ve made my way to Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, NYC, and back home to the Outer-Banks.  Now I’m back in Raleigh, the weather is amazing, and I’m ready to skate.  So check out these photos and I’ll go make some videos asap.

Murphy and Friends

First Time to NYC

Local Flavor

I picked up a Bower 8mm fisheye lens the other day and took it on a couple test runs.  So far, from a video perspective, I’m more than impressed with this lens. It’s very wide and very well constructed.  I feel like this thing can take a solid beating.

I don’t have a lot of experience with professional still photography, but in my opinion, this lens is great in that realm too.  It’s very sharp and produces some great color. The biggest flaw that I’ve noticed is some slight chromatic aberration around the edges at full res but once the image is scaled down, it looks fine.  It flares up quite a bit when pointed directly at the sun, but I’m guessing that’s normal.

It was $400 with a really good insurance plan.  I’m counting on this lens getting hit by a board at some point, so the insurance is nice.  Can anybody compare the Bower to the Samyang and Sigma counterparts?  I’d love to know the difference between the three.

Video starring: Brett Abramsky, Jed Shooter, Sturgil Horn

A collection of some of my favorite clips from behind the scenes of Issue 20. I included some footage of us using our gear, so if you have any questions about that, just leave a comment. Enjoy!

I’ve been getting a lot of equipment-related questions lately, so I figured it would be helpful to write a quick article on what gear we have been using and why we are completely happy with our current setup.

• Canon HV30
  This is the backbone of our filming operation. Rather than buying a single HVX200 (or similar option), I just picked up several of these little guys.  With a little editing love, you can get amazing images out of this camera. And because it is so cheap ($400 or so on ebay now), I can fearlessly lend them out to my friends which subsequently helps me acquire footage much faster.  99% of the HD footage on Post22 is filmed with the HV30.
• Century .3x fisheye (GL1 bayonet version)
  Century makes a fisheye specifically for the HV30 now, so this might be a null topic.  However, I thought it would be worth mentioning that I hacked my GL1 bayonet fisheye to fit onto my HV30.  All it took was removing the bayonet mount / threading and buying a few step-up adapters.  It looks great, but the new one from Century is a little more sharp.
• Canon EOS 7D
  Ah the 7D.  The camera that makes everything look “like a movie.”  I love this thing.  There are dozens of great articles out there already on why it’s amazing so I’m going to be short.  The 7D is a great companion to the HV30.   I’m using this camera increasingly more to film skateboarding, and the compression is good enough to where I can seamlessly mix it into my HDV sequences.  Although most of our skateboard filming will still be filmed with the HV30, the cinematic “gloss” that may be present in the newer Post22 clips is all thanks to this camera.
• SLR Lenses
  Pretty standard, boring stuff here.  I use the kit zoom lens and an old Nikkor 50mm 1.4 most of the time.  I also have a 16mm fisheye and a 24mm wide-angle that we use occasionally.
• Macbook Pro 13″
  Much to the dismay of my vision and overall comfort level, every part of Post22 is created with a 13″ Macbook Pro – using only the touch pad.  I’m all about portability, so having my entire editing workstation with me whenever I want is convenient.  If I fill up my flash card at a spot, then I can offload the footage onto my computer in a few minutes and continue shooting.

The combination of the HV30 and 7D is no doubt my favorite filming rig that I’ve used.  At work, we use  HPX170s, and as amazing as those cameras are, and they are truly awesome, I still prefer to shoot with a tiny toy-like camera.  The portability is nice, but creating high-value videos with a $400 camera is what I enjoy the most.

In case you haven’t heard, Raleigh is a damn cool city.  And if you’ve been wondering why the site was down for so long, it’s for that reason.  We’ve been enjoying the hell out of this place.

Now that we’ve got our new camera gear (much more on that later), we’ll be happily documenting and reporting all of the fun we have, skateboarding and beyond.  This video is a glimpse of what’s been happening in our neck of the woods. Enjoy.

Skaters: Sam Buxton, Jed Shooter, Cameron Keene, Dirt Diggler, Travis Knapp-Prasek, Justin Brock