I’ve recently mentioned the difficulties and importance of getting accurate focus on your HD-DSLR in my blog contributions at www.highdef.co.uk so it was great to get my hands on a new toy that’s not only going to make this job easier, but will also give me some additional focus-shifting and control tricks to play with. Enter the Okii FC1 USB Focus Controller.  Click below to the right to read more.

DSLR shooters are all too familiar with the fact that you never know what you want until you’ve got it – and when you do find something that’s really useful you wonder how you ever coped without it. Choosing what to invest your hard-earned on can be quite daunting though as there are lots and lots of cool and snazzy accessories for DSLRs. Some are handy, some are not – and quite a few will fall into the ‘nice but not essential’ category.  Click below to the right to read more.

Things would have probably stayed the same in terms of video shooters and their use of optical filters and matte boxes if DSLRs hadn’t come about. Before their advent, the most you could have expected to find in the average video shooters kit bag would have been a screw-on skylight protection filter to stop the main lens face from getting damaged – and in most cases you wouldn’t even find that! There could have also been the very occasional polarizer filter – but that really is about it.  Click below to the right to read more.

If money is not an object you could of course go out and buy a range of brand spanking new, top of the range lenses for your DSLR camera - and if you want the absolute best images then this is obviously the way to go. However, 35mm film cameras have been around for a long time and fundamentally lens technology has not changed. What made a good lens 25 to 50-years ago is pretty much the same today and with adapters most of these will fit on a DSLR. Click below to the right to read more.

There are three main groups of lens lengths. These consist of ‘Wide-Angle’, ‘Normal’ and ‘Telephoto’ lenses. After a while you’ll have at least one lens from each of these categories which will give you a workable set of story-telling lenses with which you’ll be able to cover most situations and create the right FoV. Click below to the right to read more.

The cost of the main body of your DSLR will be minuscule in comparison to all the other bits and bobs you’ll need in order to make up an everyday shooting kit. Among all the “things” you’ll have in your kit bag the biggest and most important investments are those you’ll make in lenses. But don’t despair, and don’t rush out and spend thousands and thousands on the latest glass until you really understand what you are trying to achieve and what should look for in a lens.  Click below to the right to read more.

One of the features that a video shooter will be accustomed to is having a single zoom lens camera.  It wasn’t too long ago that there were no professional-level video cameras with an interchangeable lens system – so it wasn’t as if you had any choice about this. Unless you added extenders or wide angle adapters/converters, every focal length you ever used was contained within the lens that was irreversibly bolted to the front of your camera.  Click below to the right to read more.

There are some things a DSLR will do for you automatically – but very little. If like me you invest in vintage lenses then it’s pretty much manual mode all the way!

For those coming from a video background that only ever use their cameras in point-n-shoot mode this is going to be very challenging. In fact, I’d say this is going to be a deal breaker for anyone who is expecting a DSLR to be the type of camera you can run-and-gun with and expect reasonable results every time. Getting your subject in focus has always been critical, but it’s even more so now with the resolution offered by high definition video.  Click below to the right to read more.