I try my best to not geek out over new cameras when they are released.  Honest, I do!  Unfortunately, I just can’t shut up about the Canon 5D Mark II.  In case you haven’t heard, Canon announced the new camera last week, and photo geeks are bouncing off the walls trying to get all the specs, sample images, and yes, even sample HD video.  The “still” camera shoots 1080p HD video better than most video camera do because it records on a 21 megapixel CMOS sensor with ISO 100 – 6400 range.

Vincent LaForet, a New York based commercial and editorial photographer, has been blogging his little heart out about the camera.  He got his hands on one last week (he is a Canon Explorer of Light – one of the photographers who works with Canon on making better cameras)  and produced a video with the camera.  Now, virtually every photographer on the planet is waiting for the video to go live.  Check his blog for details.  For Canon and LaForet, it is a genius guerrilla marketing campaign.

LaForet has called the camera a “game changer,” with the potential to change the photo industry forever.  I would have to agree.  I preordered mine today.

Without regurgitating camera specs and press release info, I want every photographer who reads this site to know that their workflows are about to change in a very big way, if they haven’t already.  We will record scenes in video clips and fire off a photo when “the moment” happens.  The camera can, after all, shoot HD video and photos virtually simultaneously.    Who cares about wasted video; the camera records to a CF media card.  As we download our HD video footage, we will begin editing and captioning our photos.  After transmitting photos, we will begin editing our HD video.  When the video edit is complete, we will send it to a server that encodes the video in all the proper formats for mobile, web, standard and high definition televisions.  I’m a bit of a workflow nazi, and the idea of using one camera for photos and video makes me want to explode!

You can now say goodbye to:

• Carrying around two camera bags and three cameras.
• Pixelated video screen captures.
• Grainy video in low-light situations.
• Importing your footage in real-time.  What a waste of time.

Unfortunately, we will probably see more:

• Shaky video (handled camera without a tripod)
• Poor audio quality (the camera has a stereo audio-in port…so don’t forget to use it!)
• Jump cuts during peak moments.
• Mics on hotshoes.  Yikes!  That’s going to take some time getting used to!

With the fall season comes my favorite holiday: Halloween. Like last year, in which I documented party-goers, I plan to photograph the occasion and present it online using a new multimedia platform. Think of it as a full screen streaming HD flash video player. Warning, boring tech talk to follow below.

In August, Adobe released a beta version of its new flash player, code named MovieStar. The player will now support Quicktime H.264 compression, the latest and greatest way to squeeze really large video files into extremely small file sizes with really amazing quality. First off, if you haven’t done it yet, download the new Flash Player 9 from Adobe. After you have downloaded the new player, click here to watch an example HD video in full screen mode. YouTube, Google Video, and all the major networks will all likely introduce all of their programming with a full screen view option very soon. If an Average Joe like myself can post it to his blog, than so can the heavyweights.

In the future, online readers will expect full screen visuals just like they expect RSS feeds today. Are big media companies implimenting long-term strategies that embrace the emerging trend of big visuals? Companies with workflows that output low-resolution images will need to adapt to presenting big online visuals. Our readers will demand it.

On a side note, if you don’t hear from me much in the upcoming weeks, know that I haven’t kicked the bucket. After my regular 9-5, I’ll be working on a handful of magazine photo projects. If anyone is available to assist on Oct. 20, please let me know via email.

I’m excited to announce that the mining series that I helped direct, photograph, videotape and multimedia-ize won first place for online convergence in the Associate Press Managing Editors contest for newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. It was a huge group effort, with Mike Belt reporting for LJWorld.com, Brian Powell and Greg Hurd producing for our television outlets including River City Weekly and 6News, David Ryan and Nathan Borror leading the design work. They are all top-notch.

The three-part series explores the legacy that the coal, lead, and zinc mining industries have left on parts of southeast Kansas, northeastern Oklahoma and southwestern Missouri. The project focuses on the environmental, socio-economic and health-related problems that still linger in the region caused by the mining industries.

Project Update

“Congressional leaders are developing legislation that could lead to a buyout of residents in a small Kansas town threatened by collapsing abandoned mines. U.S. Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kan., and Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., are working on a bill that, if passed, would provide $6 million to buy out Treece and close the town near the Oklahoma border in southeastern Kansas.” – Source: Lawrence Journal-World. Read article.

One of the coolest new features on Google Maps is the ability to create “My Maps.” I geo-tagged photos and 360-degree panoramas to a Google Map from a project that explores the long-term health, environmental and economic-related effects that mining has had on parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Click the image above to view the interactive Google Mining Map. You can visit the original Google Map here.

As you’ll see as you zoom into the Treece and Picher areas, the towns look like a heavily bombed war-zone, with gray mounds of chat contrasting with the predominantly green agricultural region. Although the Google satellite image of the particular region could be of higher resolution, Google Earth and Google Maps provide a new way to understand and illustrate our planet’s environmental issues.

• Download Mining Map KML to Google Earth

I’m resurrecting this audio slideshow from a few years ago because, well, it’s rattlesnake roundup season. I photographed and reported this story for the Lawrence Journal-World after thumbing through an events calendar for Kansas. Rattlesnake roundups are under increasing scrutiny by wildlife groups and animal rights activists as studies have found the species to be in decline. Currently, there are no federal or international laws that protect the western and eastern diamondbacks or the western or prairie rattlesnake. Additional resources can be found at the Humane Society’s website.

Last week I spent a few days traveling around Kansas shooting video and photos for this story for the Lawrence Journal-World about wind energy. When I arrived back in Lawrence, I had put 1,000 miles on my VW Rabbit, clicked more than 1,200 accuations on my Nikon D200, and logged about 5 hours of HD video on my Canon HV20. The Canon HV20 is an amazing little camera and it affords me the abilty to pull still photographs from the HD video. The image is big enough to run 10 inches wide in our newspaper. Wow! Watch the video below.

Take a peek at three time lapses that I shot a few weeks back for the Lawrence 24 Hour Project.

1. Massachusetts Street. Total time lapse: 24 Hours. Frames per hour: 60. Total frames: 1440.
2. My backyard. Total time lapse: 30 minutes. Frames per minute: 60. Total frames: 1800.
3. Target. Total time lapse: 20 minutes. Frames per minute: 60. Total frames: 1200.

The Massachusetts Street time lapse was the most difficult to produce, since I didn’t have roof access at midnight. This meant I needed to mount the camera ahead of time and start the time lapse camera using a remote from the sidewalk 5 stories below.

I mounted a camera on a tripod atop the Weavers Building and wrapped the contraption in plastic on Wednesday around 3 p.m. I attached the camera to a pocket wizard remote and setup the remote to act as an intervelometer, which would trip the camera every minute, for a total of 1440 frames. I put the camera on program mode, set the white balance to daylight and set the pocket wizard to standby. I gave the camera a quick once-over, then left the camera on the tripod on the roof.

At midnight, I tripped the remote camera using a pocket wizard from the sidewalk below the building and crossed my fingers.  It worked!

Watch the time-lapse on Brightcove.