Strapless kitesurfing in Wellington, New Zealand from Mark Gee on Vimeo.

Every now & then I have the chance to get in front of the camera instead of the one standing behind it shooting the action. This time round I was being filmed by Simo from Stikman Films for a short kitesurfing video for my sponsors – Takoon Kiteboarding Company. But getting out there & kitesurfing is not the only fun thing I get to do on this little project. I’m doing all the editing myself, which is actually not that easy when you are the subject…you tend to become your own worst critic.

The video above is just a few shots from a to be finished edit. It’s all a work in progress with a lot more footage to be shot & edited, but the end running time will probably come in at 3-4 minutes once the final cut is done.

The footage was shot on a Canon 7d all in slow motion at 50fps. I wanted to go for more of a laid back theme rather than the fast paced action you see in a lot of sport videos these days, so we shot slow motion at 720p (1280×720 pixels of resolution) with the option of speeding up to normal 25fps speed by just doubling the speed. We used a Canon EF 100-400mm f4-5.6 L series lens just so we had the versatility of zooming in & out between the focal lengths, & the editing & colour grading was done in Final Cut Pro. Stay tuned for the final cut…

Strapless kitesurfing - A frame from the video

Canon 7D surfing footage test from Mark Gee on Vimeo.

I recently shot some surfing footage at Lyall Bay in Wellington, New Zealand to test out the video capabilities of the canon 7D. I was shooting stills all day & I just switched it over to video mode & shot some video. All manual focus – you can see my trying to focus towards the end of the shot. Seeing I was trying to focus on a small lcd screen in glaring daylight, I thought it turned out ok.

Next time I’ll also shoot at a much lower shutter speed too as the footage is strobing quite a bit, but I do intend to shoot a lot more of this kind of stuff & maybe put something together when I have enough footage.

The Lyall Sessions from Mark Gee on Vimeo.

The Lyall Sessions was a bit of an experiment using the video mode of a consumer grade still camera set up on a rig attached to the kite-surfing kite. The result, while not broadcast quality, was quite nice considering what it was shot with. I spent a lot of time trying to give it a film like look through color grading the footage

The rig I used to attach the camera to the kite is from camrig.com. The camera was a Pentax Optio W30 which is part of the waterproof range of the Pentax Optio digital cameras. I shot the entire film with this camera, including the time laspe shots.

If you want to download a better quality Quicktime version of the movie you can view it & download it here.

For photos & links to my kitesurfing sponsors please feel free to visit this link here.