Domski, of Afterparty and Radio 1 fame asked me to shoot a promotional video for him to use to promote his work in Australia.

Seeing as I’ve recently acquired the Canon 5D Mark II I am essentially equipped to be able to shoot cinema-quality HD film through some gorgeous lenses, but this assignment was one of the first video jobs I was going to shoot with it so it took a lot of concentration and nimble fingers to achieve the results above, which I am super pleased with by the way.

Video is a logical extension to photography and as a photographer it’s great to suddenly have a new parameter to work with – time.

With a tool like the Canon 5D Mark II at my disposal I can go from photographer to cinematographer in seconds – all the techniques are the same, with a few additional ones thrown in to mix things up a bit.

Shooting video in manual mode is pretty similar to shooting photographs in manual mode, which I know inside out. No problems there. The interesting bit comes when you start looking at shifting focus during filming. The 5D Mark II is predominantly a stills camera with a video mode, not the other way around, and because of the way it’s autofocus system works it’s difficult to use autofocus to shift focus while filming.

As a result of this the only reliable way to go with focussing while filming is to use manual focus. Using a FTM (Full Time Manual) lens will help a lot here as you won’t have to flick a switch to disengage the autofocus motor. Canon’s L series lenses come highly recommended.

The key to keeping subjects in focus is practice – the more you get to know your lenses, the more you get a feel for how much you have to turn the focus ring by to ensure your subject remains in focus when moving in closer or farther away from them.

Pulling focus is also tricky as you simply don’t have enough hands to operate the thing, and if you want to pull focus and zoom you have to do some crazy finger acrobatics. Thankfully I have huge hands so that helps a bit, both with the weight of holding a few kilograms of camera and trying to operate eight different things at once.

Soundtrack is Meet Me @ The Afterparty by (surprise, surprise) Domski himself.