These clips selected from recent films shot in wildly different locations and circumstances show the versatility and capabilities of both cameraman Steve Hills and his choice of cameras.

The Galapagos Islands
The first clip comes from a film we made recently in the Galapagos Islands. I shot it on a Sony FS7 in UltraHD using the XAVC-I codec. I chose 25p as we’re based in the UK and so a PAL based country.

This is a large format camera and as such can produce lovely pictures with very shallow depth of field, even in extremely bright conditions of filming right on the Equator in the middle of the day. Something that would be very difficult to achieve with a more traditional three pickup prism based video camera.

I used REC709 for the gamma setting. Although the hypergamma settings give a much wider dynamic range, I’ve experimented with using these and quite simply, I prefer the final look of REC709. You just have to be totally in control of exposure settings and be aware of the contrast range in the scene you’re going to shoot. However, if you’re in a really high contrast situation, then my next favourite is hypergamma 8 (HG8).

The Bridge Theatre, London
The second clip is from an ongoing project about the building of a new 900-seat theatre in central London. Mostly time-lapse filmed over many months, it has been shot on three cameras set to take a shot once a minute. Cameras used have been Panasonic’s new HC-X1 4K video camera and an Axis 4K time-lapse camera. The great thing about the Axis camera is that we’ve been able to monitor it over the 4G network. So from home I can regularly check the pictures are ok online.

It was very dark inside this building with only the workmen's lights. This created quite a challenge for the cameras, but with an eighth to a half a second exposure times, the problem was solved.

Harapan Rainforest, Sumatra
The third clip was shot in a rainforest in Sumatra and was a commission by the RSPB, one of the UK’s largest charities. This was shot a few years ago on a Sony EX3. Climbing one of the highest trees in the forest in the dark with the camera and a tripod to film the dawn over the forest canopy was an interesting challenge but it was worth it to get the opening shot for this film. The singing gibbons added to the atmosphere.

The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition
Sir Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi discuss the possibility that Shakespeare may not have been the author of some or all of his works. Undoubtedly a very controversial argument.

This was shot using two Sony FS7s and one Canon XF305. The Canon was the camera on the two shot. I set up one FS7 and saved the settings to its SD card. Then I transferred that SD card to the other FS7 and accessed the saved settings. That way I got the two FS7’s to match very closely. Then, with a bit of white balance adjustment I managed to get the Canon XF 305 to match the FS7’s pretty closely.

I had felt that when I first got the Canon XF 305 it tended to look a little pink. This was when set to its factory settings. So, in the past, I had already slightly adjusted the Canon’s matrix to give it a bit more of a Sony look.

Bluefields Bay, Jamaica
This clip is from a film we made in Jamaica about a marine sanctuary that has been created and is protected by the local fisherman. Shot on a Canon XF 305 in extremely harsh light and under sometimes difficult practical conditions, the camera performed extremely well.

The XF 305 is a fantastic “run and gun” camera. It has been around for a while but is still in production simply because it’s such a great camera for this sort of shoot. If I had one in my bag and something happened suddenly that I wanted to film, I could have it out of the bag, on and recording with all the correct settings within a few seconds. The massive zoom range and quality of the L series lens is a huge bonus.

Hihi, New Zealand
We spent a fortnight on a small island off the coast of New Zealand with scientists from the Zoological Society of London (London Zoo’s conservation department).

It was shot mostly on the Sony FS7 with some of the close-ups in inaccessible places being shot on the Canon XF 305.

Short haired bumblebees
These close-up clips came from a film we made about the reintroduction of a very special bumblebee, a commission for the RSPB and also supplied to BBC’s Countryfile series.

Initially, we filmed the bumblebee queen capture in southern Sweden, followed by quarantine in a London university laboratory, then final release at the RSPB reserve at Dungeness in Kent, England.

The story and our footage was taken up by a number of other broadcast news networks across the UK and Europe, including ITV, BBC Breakfast and Sweden’s TV2 and TV4.

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