One of the most important accessories that you can purchase to help you get better results with the video from your Canon 5D MKII is an external LCD monitor (a video assist monitor.)   

The Canon 5D MKII was designed as a still camera first, therefore when you shoot video you will often find that the placement of the LCD screen, not to mention the ergonomics of the camera body itself are not ideally suited to shooting video.  Being able to hold the camera below your eye-line (or any angle for that matter) become quite important when shooting video vs stills.

I’ve had a chance to play with a variety of monitors out there - and for now Marshall Electronics’ V-LCD70P-HDMI is the clear standout both for the quality of the image it displays, as well as all of the extra features it offers.  This is a 7″ lightweight monitor that comes in at just over a pound, and offers an 800X480 resolution image.   I was able to work with a prototype of this monitor in January for 3 weeks of the Jamie O’Brien shoot and it was simply fantastic.  I should also mention that I am also testing out Ikan’s V5600 5.6″ TFT LCD Monitor and will write about that at some point as well - it’s small size may be very attractive to some. (I’ve yet to put it through it’s paces, but I plan to do so in the upcoming weeks.) (more…)

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Need to resize images for your Blog every day?   Need to send 10,000 images out to a client at a certain size - and then a second batch in a different size and format?   If you’re like me - you hate doing repetitive tasks on a computer - after all that’s why you bought the darn thing thing for in the first place! (Oh - and did I mention you didn’t need to buy anything to get this done…) (more…)

One of the most useful utilities I use is a free utility called iStat Menus.  It does a number of things - but the most important to me is to show me what my network activity is.  If I hook onto a WIFI spot - and I only see data going up (and nothing coming back) I know the connection is dead or blocked.  It also helps when you’re on deadline and don’t know if you connection is dead, or just really slow…

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I’m about to leave my son and wife for more than 20 days - so I’m not going to spend too much time behind the keyboard before I leave - will be doing plenty of that in Beijing.     So here is a series of very basic - but incredibly useful - keystrokes that I use daily.   Thanks to my friend at Apple (A.G.) for these little nuggets of geek wisdom he shared with me a little over 2 years ago… (more…)