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Every once in a while, I find myself on Rob Skeoch’s site, The Picture Desk.

I enjoy this blog for a few reasons. For one, Rob is into film and digital photography and is a working pro. For another, he has his own company selling photography equipment – rangefinder cameras and lenses, large format cameras (Toyo and Canham) and lenses and manual focus lenses for DSLRs, such as Zeiss lenses for Canon EOS bodies and Zeiss lenses for Nikon bodies

Now, I’m not so much into sports photography, and he shoots a lot of it. What I like, though, is that he is not afraid to buck the trends.

When everyone else is only shooting a Nikon or Canon DSLR, he’s out there with a Sony A500, Sony A550, or Sony A850. Sometimes, he shoots a Leica or has even borrowed a friend’s Nikon D700 to try it out with one of the manual Zeiss lenses he sells.

Canon recently released a new firmware update for the EOS 5D Mk II, Update v. 2.0.4. These are some sweet updates that allow manual control of audio levels, higher sample rates for audio, new shutter priority and aperture priority modes, and a new histogram for manual exposure modes.
These make this camera even better for video than it was before. Read the article to see how to update your camera.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II cameras for sale – Click here

The good people at Zacuto put together this year’s DSLR shootout comparing Kodak and Fuji movie films with video footage shot on some top DSLR cameras.

This year’s shootout used the Canon 7D, Canon 5D Mk II, Canon T2i, Canon 1D Mk IV, Nikon D3s, and Panasonic GH1.

They compared the same footage shot with each camera. To take away as much variability as they could, they used Zeiss lenses on all the cameras.

The commentary about each was provided by top film industry people. The Zacuto site says “The test results were projected in a 2K theatrical environment at three screening locations: Stag Theater at Skywalker Ranch, LucasFilms Ltd., AFI (American Film Institute) Theater in Hollywood and the FilmWorkers Astro Color Timing Theater in Chicago. Hear commentary from the screenings by top ASC, Hollywood, Indie Film and Event & Convergence Photographers.”

I have to say that I generally hate film and digital comparisons. I love them both. I have an admitted bias towards film, but I think digital is very cool. I loved this comparison though. Not so much to see if digital beat film. (So far, it didn’t, but it’s pretty darn close.) I really liked seeing the kinds of tests that top notch people in the industry performed, the observations they made, and the awesome video they shot. I’m looking forward to more episodes of this.

My only regret is that I would have liked to have seen as many Nikon models as Canon, but other than that, this was very good.

Click here to see the Zacuto DSLR Shootout

To see products made by Zacuto, click here
Some examples are the Zacuto Z-Grip and the Zacuto Z-Finder