Bococa Arts Festival

Last night kicked off the start of the Bococa Arts Festival. I was there, camera clad, to start shooting some footage a proposed documentary following the festival. After the experience, a few things came to mind.

Unconventional performance locations are difficult to film in. The lighting sucks, it's crowded, loud, and hard to move around in.

My shoulder mount was a little too big, bulky and heavy last night, a disappointing realization, I must say. Today I'm removing the shoulder pad and fore grip, so I'm going to stick the basic rail system on my monopod and run around like that.

I would love to have a bunch of lenses that were 1.8 or faster. The sigma lens I got performed well, but as the sun went down, it really became too dark in the bar, so I had to bump up to higher ISO speeds, making for a noisy picture. At one point, I swapped lenses for my Canon EF 50mm with the f/1.8, and man it was super sweet. I shot at slower ISOs, got some great shallow depth of field, did some rack focusing, it was a blast. The only down side, is that in a small bar, you'll only get two members of the band in a shot at that focal length. I'll figure it out.

Camera Lens

After yesterday's promotional shoot, I've done some thinking on lenses for my camera. Right now I have a Canon EF 50mm f1.8, a Canon EF 75-300mm f4-5.6, and the Canon EF 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 which came with the camera. I marched around with all three lenses yesterday, but only ended up using the 18-55mm. For that kind of run and gun shoot, it just seemed like too much work to keep switching lenses.

The 18-55mm really worked wonders and accomidated most of my needs, but in hindsight, there were a few shots it might have been nice to use the telephoto lens on. An advertisement from amazon got me thinking a bit. They had a Tamaron AF 18-270mm f 3.5-5.6 lens on sale. It's more then I can afford at the moment, but I think down the line, I may get one of those puppies.

For a run and gun day of shooting, it would be nice to have one lens with the focal lengths of the three I'm currently carrying. Then I could get all different types of shots without ever switching lenses.