The Canon Digital Learning Center published a video with wedding cinematographer Joe Simon about how to shot an unique wedding film with Canon EOS equipment.

Join wedding cinematographer, Joe Simon, as he shares his views and techniques for shooting a stylistic wedding video using Canon’s Cinema EOS and HDSLR cameras. Joe also discusses his experiences using the new Dual Pixel AF feature upgrade available for the EOS C100, and how it has improved his shots by opening up the potential for more dynamic camera movement and focus effects.

In this video you will also learn:

• One-shot AF improvements with the Dual Pixel AF feature upgrade
• Continuous AF improvements with the Dual Pixel AF feature upgrade
• AF Lock and unlock functionalities, and how to take advantage of them
• Joe’s approach to camera setup for filming the ceremony and first dance
• Which camera support systems Joe uses for weddings, and why

[via CDLC]

The Canon Digital Learning Center published an article about how to take care of your photo gear when it is cold.

If you take a camera into a cold environment, the first thing you might notice is that battery life begins to drop. By 32 ˚F (0 ˚C), you might only lose 10% of the battery’s potential, but if it grows colder then it starts to become more noticeable. The first step to combat this is to keep your spare batteries inside your clothing, as close to your body as possible. In moderately cold conditions, this will be more than enough to keep the batteries within a normal operating range. It might be tempting to keep smaller point-and-shoot cameras inside your layers as well, but even in cold temperatures, we sweat when exerting energy like when you’re walking through deep snow or skiing. This sweating will cause condensation on your lens and potentially inside your camera, so it’s best to keep smaller cameras in a backpack or outer pocket.

You may also be interested in this CDLC article about how to set white balance to photograph snow.

[via CDLC]

The Canon Digital Learning Center posted an article with useful tips on how to set white balance to photograph snow.

An excerpt:

If you’ve ever looked at one of your winter images and thought that things look a little blue, then you’ve discovered one of the challenges of photographing snow: getting the right white balance or color temperature. White balance is a fundamental camera setting that adjusts color rendition to give a neutral appearance, without any obvious overall color tints or shifts. Cameras come with several White Balance presets (Daylight, Tungsten, Flash, etc.), but difficulties can arise when there are mixed light sources all adding their own color cast. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be a direct source either because all reflected light will have a color cast that’s dependent on the color of the object the light just bounced off of. If there are objects in your image (quite likely!) then you’ve got multiple color casts, in some way.

[via CDLC]

Canon’s Digital Learning Center published a long article about auto-focus microadjustement, a useful feature you find on Canon’s higher level DSLRs, and a feature that was thankfully re-introduced to the xxD line-up with the Canon EOS 70D.

From the introduction:

What does AF Microadjustment do?
It allows the user to command the camera to intentionally shift the sharpest focus either in front of or behind where it’s factory-set. The extremely precise AF system in a digital SLR is designed to read contrast at the subject, calculate how to drive the lens to focus sharply on the subject, and confirm sharp focus once the lens has stopped. With AF Microadjustment, the user is changing the data coming from the AF system, and asking it to move the lens farther in one direction or the other whenever it has to read and calculate sharp focus.

The adjustments applied using this control are based on the depth-of-field you’d have at a lens’s maximum aperture. They are not based on the lens’s focal length! When setting the Microadjustment, you’ll see a scale on the camera’s LCD monitor with up to + or – twenty steps. Each step is a very fine increment, equal to 1/8th of the depth-of-field you’d have with the current lens wide-open. And that 1/8th of the depth of field is only moving forward (toward the camera) or back (toward the background) from the sharpest plane of focus. The main thing to remember here is that these are very fine increments. Don’t expect radical shifts in focus with adjustments like plus 3 or minus 5.