I worked as DP on a music video today which was a great experience as it was my first shoot with a Director, actors and a real storyline.

The music video is for a band called Kuda and the video has one scene which takes places in an underground gambling room, which was the part we shot today. I shot in 1080/25p on the EX1 with the brevis adapter and a combination of 50mm f.14, 20-35mm f2.8 and 135mm f2.8 Nikkor lenses.

The shoot was directed by Peter Naylor, a local film maker who’s also going to be editing the video. We’ll be shooting three more scenes in the coming weeks so I’ll post more news as it happens.

Here’s a few stills from todays shoot, they are straight out of the camera without any alteration other than reducing the size.

I like to look after by gear and now that I’m regularly using a 35mm adapter and taking a selection of lenses, mics and other damageable bits of kit out on jobs I decided to invest in a second Peli case to protect them along with the 1560 I use for my camera.

Unlike my 1560 case I wanted to get one with padded dividers rather than foam inserts this time as the foam really doesn’t work well for holding lots of smaller items, especially if they’re heavy. The pick ‘n’ pluck foam is okay for making a big cutout for a camera, but if you try to create lots of little compartments the foam soon becomes tatty and starts falling apart.

So, after a few days keeping my eyes open on ebay I found the perfect used case in the form of a Peli 1550 with a padded divider set which works a treat. The padded dividers are great for lenses etc as although they are flexible, the velcro is strong enough to hold the weight of lenses etc without any risk of movement.

here’s a couple of pics of the new case and how I have it arranged. You can see that I’ve used odd bits of foam here and there to support shorter items from underneath and at the ends of my batteries to stop them from bouncing around when being transported. The odd shaped part holding my EX1′s matte box is shaped that way so that my Brevis35 and flip unit fits snugly inside it when not fitted to the camera.

Shoot35 have started posting some footage from their new 35mm adapter, the SG Blade, mounted on an EX1 with their flip module. The footage shows quite a lot of porthole vignetting but Shoot35 claim that this is due to the 20mm lens they used and not the adapter. Apparently they are currently editing footage shot with other lenses including my favourite the 50mm f1.4 so I’ll look forward to seeing the results.

I’d love to get my hands on an SG Blade to do a comparison with the Brevis.

Click here to see the footage on vimeo.