In and amongst the craziness that is Christmas and New Year, We found a bit of time to head out to a forest 10 minutes drive from our house. We’d not yet explored the walk near Hurn Airport in Bournemouth and after all the mince pies and booze we felt we needed to get out and have a little bit of an explore.
It was also the perfect opportunity to do a few more tests with the Canon C200. The weather was beautiful and we managed to catch the one evening where it wasn’t pouring it down with rain.
In order to test the camera in this environment I just wanted to film as we walked as much as possible and just shoot what we saw. For these types of shoots, recording in XAVC 4.2.0 8bit is perfect. It’s lightweight, small file sizes mean over-shooting is never really a problem. I was also really keen to test Canon log3 gamma to see how it held up in scenes where a ton of dynamic range was required.
From this little test my conclusions were that the C200 handles tricky lighting conditions very well, rolling off clipped highlights nicely and keeping things very controlled in backlit scenes. Clog 3 offers plenty (13 stops) of DR to be able to bring challenging shots like sunsets back to something pleasing and shadows can be recovered without much noise if required. Colours are honest and rich, greens seem to be very vivid and I actually found myself taking back the saturation a bit in the grade to avoid things looking unrealistic. The colour science offers a fantastic starting point however for stylising the shots exactly how you’d like. Canon has done an incredible job getting this much colour information into an image that is captured in 4.2.0 8bit!
