My Canon 5D Mark II is an outstanding SLR. It also has incredible HD video quality as well. But as many of us have discovered, it’s best used in low light conditions for video to get that shallow depth of field we love. The SLR does NOT provide manual exposure control. But there are workarounds. One of which is to try a neutral density (ND) lens filter.
I took Jordan outside to play on a bright sunny day, but I couldn’t get the lens to open wider then f/5.6. But I was able to do it using a .9 ND filter (neutral density) which brings it down 3 stops. This made the camera aperture open up a little more. Sorry about my focusing, Jordan just won’t sit still lol. And the AF just plain sucks in video mode. It’s not meant to be an out-of-the-box pro video cam, but we all knew that. I’ve read that some people are attaching 10 stop ND 3.0 filters that are doing the trick outside and they can get that aperture wide open in bright conditions. Hmmm… maybe I should get one =)
This was shot with my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L lens…
This was shot with my Canon 85mm f/1.8 indoors, so it was no problem getting to f/2.0, but as you can see, she still won’t sit still and went in & out of the focal plane, lol.
This was shot with my 24-70mm lens. I attached both my circular polarizer and ND filter, I think it brings it down 5 stops total. It was also late in the day about 90 minutes before sunset. These conditions and filters seemed to help open up the aperture wide to 2.8 =)
by Armin
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