London Confection Expo 2011

Managed to secure some work on filming and editing the global Confection Expo in London this week. It was a 2-day shoot in Kensington, London and was an exhibition for confectionary companies around the world to showcase their products and present ground breaking information on major factors such as the future of the cocoa bean.



Once again, my equipment came in handy as I was the sole camera operator on the projector, so the 550 made another appearance. This was the first time I've struggled a little bit using the 550 for a video project, mostly due to the SD cards and battery. I've been shooting on 16GB cards which can record around 45 minutes of footage each, I then usually transfer the footage and wipe the card which is a pretty quick turnaround, but as I had to film several presentations in a row - upto around 2 and a half hours at a time, a simple bit of math shows that it doesn't add up.

Fortunately for me, not all of the presentations needed to be filmed so this time I was ok, but next week I'll be ordering a 32GB card which should be more than capable for future projects. I'll also be getting another battery as the charging time with 2 batteries made me struggle a little at times. Other than that, the 550 worked perfectly for the event. It was all inside and due to the presentations, it was very low light.

I ended up using the f/1.8 50mm lens which compensated for the low light and as I was a distance away, didn't suffer from a shallow depth of field. In fact, the focal length was nearly perfect, but I would like to invest in a telephoto zoom of upto around 100mm soon, but the problem is most aren't particuarly fast unless you're paying around £1,000 which isn't going to happen for me any time soon. However, if I did get a telephoto zoom, I would go for one with a constant aperture so that I would be able to use zooms when filming. The kit lens that comes with the 5D looks pretty ideal (I keep visualising about getting a 5D, and I would like to think I will end up getting one in the future!)

Overall, the shoot was good, the first day ended up being around 11 hours which was long with the travel to and from London but I think it was an interesting project.

Was comissioned to shoot 3 more introductory videos for ET4U this week which we did on Monday, and pretty much finished the edit on those too, so the hope is that the total of all 9 videos can be signed off tomorrow so expect some new content on the main site soon!