I made a couple of fun videos of my kids sledding this past weekend. Last year’s video of the kids sledding I totally blew out and clipped the whites in the snow because I was exposing for their skin and their dark jackets, this time I wanted to try exposing for the snow.
Exposing in the snow is hard, as a rule of thumb I usually have to over expose by a full stop.
This time I wanted to protect the snow so I still had detail and then in post use my level adjustments to bring back some of those detail lost in the shadows.
On Saturday I used the lowest contrast in my Canon T2i 550D setting to help me get more latitude in this high contrast situation. But because it was overcast and snowing, this setting was a little too extreme, so on Sunday I put it back where I normally have it at one step below at -3 and it worked much better.
There are so many things to love about Magic Lantern. One of them is the real time video histogram and waveform monitors that display on the screen as you film.
Update: it looks like Alex over at Magic Lantern made an adjustment to the histogram after watching this video:
Also, on the histogram there will be warning dots whenever a color channel will be clipped. This was suggested by Redkite Bart from Scarlet user manual (p.40), and fine-tuned after watching the latest video from Dave Dugdale.
It takes a second or two for the histogram to appear, but once you see it you can move the exposure over to the right just before it clips, as you can see here I am going up and down until I get the snow peak on the right just before it clips. I still don’t own a view finder so having this feature is just plan great because even in bright conditions you can still see the high contrast histogram really well.
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Simple and informative! Thanks for sharing Dave!
Thanks Dave, great to see how you get the most out of such a fine affordable camera! Maybe avoid the shopping mall music next time 🙂
Nice – and… I love the shopping mall music. 😛
Magic lantern updated on 11.11.11
just letting you know.
@Clavin thanks I like to only update every few months.
thanks… even though its raining right now it should be soon:(
(should be snowing soon)
your welcome. they added icons in the menu…
Just as a heads up, I tried to click on the links at the end of the video to see your last two videos and both of them weren’t clickable.
@Josh for some reason YouTube annotations stopped working for me.
The footage looks really good. What were you using to stabalise? Or was it just a combination of hand-held and slow-motion?
@Brendan thanks, all hand held.
As always great stuff Dave. Can I be adopted? Seriously though, are are you really thinking of getting a new camera body?
@Dave O. Yes, if the 5D Mark III comes out with some amazing new features I will get it and use my T2i as my B camera.
Hey dave, sorry this might sound like a stupid question but how were you going from normal speed into slow mo? were you recording in 60fps the entire time?
@James I have a big tutorial coming up on slow motion where I plan to cover this.
Dave I recievec a t3i and t2i gor xmas, should I keep both or srll the t2i?
Hey Curtis,
I would just sell the t2i, since they’re practically the same thing, just that the t3i has a few extra video options and the flippable LCD.
Dave, you mentioned getting a viewfinder to help you see the LCD better in bright conditions. Any solutions to that yet? And for this footage, are you using a steadicam?
Another question… I am definitely learning about all the different settings and wanted to know if you could recommend a site for learning about the Contrast, Saturation settings.