A New Canon 5D Mark II Video

Canon EOS5DmkII, One night in Beijing. from Dan Chung on Vimeo

Here's a video filmed by the UK's The Guardian newspaper photographer Dan Chung entirely on a production Canon EOS5DmkII and adapted Nikon and Zeiss lenses using manual focus. The camera was purchased to use solely as a video camera with existing Nikon kit.

The film was shot an edited in about twelve hours directly after picking the camera up from a Beijing camera store and charging the battery.

What can I say? It's very impressive. It's reported that the Canon 5D Mark II will be shipped to US retailers starting November 25. It'll be interesting to see how well this camera does in this economic environment...will they fly off the shelves at B&H, Adorama, J&R. Amazon and the rest of the stores? There is significant pent-up demand for this model in particular, but the holiday shopping season is predicted to be dismal....time will tell.

via PDNPulse (Link)

Sacramento Bee: The Chhat Festival

Photograph © AP / Bikas Das-All Rights Reserved
The Sacramento Bee website has recently joined the list of large-image blogs with its The Frame. Two of the others are the Boston Globe's The Big Picture and WSJ's Photo Journal.

The Frame has featured photographs of the Chhat festivities in India last week. Hindu devotees worship the sun god and fast all day for the improvement of their family and society during the festival.

Chhat is celebrated twice a year, once in summer (May-July), called the Chaiti Chhat, and once during October-November, six days after Deepawali, called the Kartik Chhat. The first day of Chhat begins with a ritual bathing (preferably in the Ganges River), followed by a period of abstinence by the worshipers. Photographs are by a number of photographers such as Altaf Qadri and Bikas Das among others.

I expect more large-image blogs will be imitated by many newspaper websites across the country. I don't know how these will be monetized other than through accompanying adverts, but they certainly are an excellent platform to show off work by deserving photographers.