Ice diving with the Canon T1i

This weekend was spent ice diving with my new camera.  I think I have a pretty cool understanding of the camera when it comes to what I needed to know on the still camera side.  I wanted to spend the weekend on a couple of dives working out the kinks on the video side of the camera.  I am at the very heart a videographer and when I bought the Canon I wanted to be able to do stellar photography and at least as good as what I had done with my sony.   I still have my sony system (its for sale if you are intereste) and I really like what it does.  It is what I am used to.  I am trying to get to the point where I am just as comfortable with my new camera.    I really enjoy the still photos my new camera produces but in the words of Peter Greenburg from the travel channel, "Send me a three minute video segment and I will try to broadcast it... send me a slide show and I will discard it for you."   Video is the way of the future, and so I am struggling... to make my camera do both.

Back to my ice dives.

I took a bit of video on day one... the conditions were amazing  it was sunny, warm  good ice and good visibility.  My dive was uneventful and I got about five minutes of video to see what I could make of it.  When I got home I uploaded it to my computer and it was good.... well ok... well at least as good as what I was shooting with my sony.  I wanted to see an amazing difference between the HD and DVD quality. There was a difference when I compared it to my older camera, the picture was sharper but there wasn't a big difference... frustrating to say the least.

So I did something out of character for me.... I picked up the manual and instead of just looking through it a and looking at the headers... I READ IT... I know, wow! You don't know how dissapointed I would be if it didn't work.

The day was another awesome one.  I did a dive with Randy and I took a few more videos doing my best to remember a bunch of the tricks that I learned in the manual.  The little viewscreen was showing me some pretty cool stuff and great images... hoping that it translates to my tv... when I got out of the water I was really excited to get home and check out what the camera captured.

All I can tell you was that I was really pleased about the results.  The video was boring since it was more for technical results instead of the actual story line and the music was a randomly picked royalty free song.   The colors were fantastic, the sharpness amazing and I am really happy with the results.

I was hoping that I could upload my video to this blog... no such luck  so here is a link to the youtube page.

I am now more excited about getting out and diving with my camera.  Come on Summer!