Canon cameras have always been a part of my life
and they've been pretty formative to the
way that I've shot as a filmmaker.
They're cameras that I know that I've been able to rely on
for the whole of my career.
BEN SHERLOCK
DOP AND DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER
My name is Ben Sherlock, I'm a director of photography.
I, generally speaking, work on projects overseas,
documentaries, anything that has an adventurous and cinematic edge.
So I've been working in the woods for a little while on a
survival and bushcraft project.
I've been shooting that on a C500 Mark II and a C300 Mark III.
It's a project where we're dealing with some very, very high contrast scenes
and some very, very low light conditions
so shooting at nighttime as fires are being built
and shooting in the daytime with
very high contrast backgrounds.
I know we're not going to have to worry about noise
because, in any condition that I put these cameras in
it always comes out with the goods.
You point these cameras at a person, you point them at
a natural environment, they just come alive.
The skin tones and the colours that you get from
the Canon colour science, for me, is just absolutely mind-blowing.
The C500 Mark II is a camera that is
clearly geared towards the top end of filmmaking.
The full-frame sensor gives you, well, for a start,
just physical width of image.
It also just gives you even more depth of field than
you may have been used to, which is lovely.
When you take the best lens
you want to put it on a camera that it is going to utilise
every single inch of that sensor,
and that's what the C500 Mark II does.
I get asked to use the C500 Mark II for various reasons.
I think the fact that you've got 15+ stops of latitude.
You've got that magic Canon colour science
which just can't be beaten.
But then you take it all and you put it into the extraordinarily
well built housing that has a 5.9K sensor on it
that is also full-frame, which means you can take advantage of the
very best lenses that are out there on the market.
But it also means that the flexibility that you have in post-production
you know if you do want to slightly crunch in
on the frame a little bit
then you have that flexibility.
It also means that you have the ability to shoot anamorphic
with a full width of the sensor.
That's something that is very, very attractive to me.
When we've been shooting very high contrast scenes
there’s also been people in the scenes as well.
So we've got a fire in the foreground,
we've got pitch black darkness all around us
but then we've also got human beings to film as well.
We want to get every element of that exposed correctly
but we also want the skin tones to look organic and natural.
When you point the C500 Mark II at these scenes
the skin tones and the environment looks more beautiful
than when I'm looking at it with my naked eye.
When I'm shooting very high contrast scenes, that is a moment
when I generally speaking will go for the C300 Mark III.
It is a camera that I know has that extra
few stops of dynamic range
and that means that I know I can push it to the limit.
It's also a camera that, if I need to start
slowing things down more
if I need to take it to 120 frames per second
but I don't want to take it out of 4K
then the C300 Mark III is the camera that I go to.
The elements are always going to be against you when you're
working in documentary filmmaking, so when you've got
those 16 stops of latitude
it gives you the best possible chance to capture
whatever is thrown at you, in any environment.
It's a camera that, for me, as a documentary filmmaker
is the obvious choice.
It's a camera that has everything you need right out of the box.
And then you've also got the expansion modules.
You put that expansion module on the back and you've got even more
XLR inputs. You've got V-lock right there.
I wasn't expecting the C300 Mark III to be such a dramatic leap
up from the C300 Mark II. You're just mesmerised by how
clear it looks, how organic it all feels,
how noise-free everything is.
When you start pushing the levels in things in post-production
with high contrast scenes, it just takes it.
It takes everything you can throw at it.
There seems to be no loss of information there whatsoever.
The DGO sensor is the only place I can attribute
the lack of noise to and that organic new, fresh-looking image.
It has to be down to the science that is in there, that has
enabled us to push the latitude so much, that has enabled it to
just completely erase all the noise in the shadows
when shooting in high contrast scenes.
So when I take this camera into the toughest conditions
it might be out into blistering heat in the deserts in China
or it might be into subzero conditions
to capture the aurora in Norway
I want to know that camera is going to show up and is going to work
no matter what happens.
This is a camera that I know I can take into the most extreme of environments
and I have done, and it always delivers at the very highest level.
The synchronicity between these two cameras on location
is just game-changing.
The fact that the batteries are the same
and the fact that the memory cards are the same
and the fact the design of the cameras is the same is huge.
It means that anybody can come along and jump from one camera
to the other without having to constantly
rewire their brain to move onto a different system.
So it just speeds things up.
The world that I work in, a few seconds can make the difference
between capturing the moment and missing it.
And that synchronicity that you get between the
C300 Mark III and C500 Mark II
just means that you're never at risk of missing the moment.