Editing begins on the Eiger Safety film

With only two shooting days left on the Eiger Safety film schedule (one of which isn’t until mid August) I’ve started on the editing process.  I’m glad I did as this highlighted a couple of “nice-to-have” shots that I haven’t got.  Nothing vital, but it would have been great to have an establishing shot of the Science Museum and a street-view shot of Trinity House.  It also gave me the chance to test out my 5D MkII.

Trinity House being filmed for Eiger Safety
Ahoy there! Trinity House, Tower Hill, London

Trinity House was (if you’ll excuse the nautical pun) my first port of call.  This is the official General Lighthouse Authority for England, Wales and other British territorial waters and is located just behind Tower Hill tube station. Eiger install and maintain all the roof safety systems here and also a roof walkway system to protect the lead work and make it easier for their general maintenance guys to carry out inspections.  Anyhow, when we filmed there in May (see blog here) I had got plenty of shots of the stuff atop of Trinity House but nothing from the street.

My weapon of choice here was the L-series Canon 24-105mm f4 lens.  Not a particularly fast lens but still capable of producing nice shots – and with its built-in image stabilisation it’s a popular choice for shooting video.  When using this on the 550D I’d lose a lot off the wide end of the lens because of the 1.6 crop factor (giving me about 40mm at the widest end – so not really a wide at all) so it was great to be able to get the full width on the 5D.

With that one in the bag it was then back on the District Line and off to Kensington High Street and the Science Museum in Exhibition Road. I used the Canon lens here too but also tried out my Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 aspherical lens – which was made specifically for cropped sensor cameras.

Tokina 16mm
Shooting with the Tokina at 16mm on the Canon 5D

The above shot was taken using the Tokina set to 16mm.  Apart from the obvious aspherical distortion you can also see the lens barrel edges in the four corners.  Though not ideal, I think this is still a very useful “FX shot” lens on a full-frame camera camera.  You can obviously crop into the picture slightly for stills purposes – and on video it naturally crops slightly anyway so you can get away with it.

Zooming out to the 11mm end of the lens is a different story…

Lens barrel distortion at 11mm on a Tokina Lens
A proper “barrel” effect when set to 11mm

It was a useful day for testing out my 5D with its Magic Lantern hack.  It also proved once again how easy it is for me to go shooting in London with a DSLR, backpack and Oyster Card. It only took me about 30-minutes to get to Trinity House from my Loughton studio, and about 20-mins from there on to the Science Museum.

So, if you need some general shots of London and don’t want the hassle and limitations of buying in stock footage – I’m your man!!