hey everyone it's ariel waldman with tested i'm really excited today because i wanted to
talk to you all about a few of the expeditions i've been on and the cameras that have helped
me on those expeditions it's been a little while since we've said hi so as a reminder i've been on
a lot of different scientific expeditions in the last few years i went on an expedition to
antarctica i was going there to film the life under the ice in antarctica it was really
fantastic and i'm actually working on trying to go back hopefully in about a year or so
and some of the other things i've done more recently i actually went on a deep sea expedition
with mbari the monterey bay aquarium research institute i went on a seven-day deep sea
expedition where we were looking for jellyfish and all these really cool creatures under the ocean
in fact that's actually kind of what all of my expeditions are usually about it's trying to find
the invisible life in this world the life that is you know either microscopic or deep under the
ocean things that we don't regularly see all the time so that i can really show you all the amazing
creatures that live in the world i have a lot of really awesome trips and things that i go on
and to really get a sense of what they're like and really share that with all of you
i use a lot of different cameras for that and so i wanted to share some of my favorite cameras
and setups that i've been using to do this type of work so with the dji pocket 2 this
is the first one i only got this recently and i really love it because it's just this
really great uh lightweight camera with a gimbal and the gimbal is what's key for me because when
i was going on this meteor crater hike and i was going into this rough terrain in high
altitude hot weather it was really difficult and usually i have used a much larger iphone gimbal
which actually i've got here so this is the type of iphone gimbal i typically use on my expeditions
prior to a few months ago and i use this on the deepsea expedition i use this in antarctica
it's a really great gimbal but you know it has some drawbacks especially
if you're doing scientific expedition types of work it's really heavy it's really bulky
whenever i go places with it it always impresses people people always want to know how much it
costs these are actually pretty affordable but it's really difficult to work with so for instance
i was on this deep sea expedition a few months ago and i was using this and the ship is moving and
i'm trying to film all these cool jellyfish that we're bringing up from the deep and i'm trying to
do that while also helping out my team carry jars of water everywhere and so i kept trying to stuff
this gimbal into my backpack strap to try and move around so i could film and then help people
film help people and it was just bulky i ran into people i ran into walls it was really not
great so i've actually been hopeful to find something that's a little bit better than using
this but the problem of course has been is there something that competes with the iphone enough
that i can get rid of this so that's why i found with the dji pocket 2. it's lightweight it gets
around the whole iphone gimbal issue and it also is really good and it's really been stepped up
since the dji pocket one i had looked at the pocket one a long time ago and it just
didn't seem like it was going to be as good this has a larger sensor um the i think is it's better
auto tracking and autofocus it actually is able to track faces and then focus on those faces so
it has a lot of features that make it at least a bit better and closer to an iphone and why it was
really great for me going on this meteor crater hike was that i was able to just clip it using a
really simple clip to my backpack and actually then just hike and have this be hands-free
and just recording 4k 60. and it worked really well um i was really impressed with it and i think
the dji pocket too i think just ends up being a little modular thing that is really helpful
one of the things that it comes with is a little case little holster and inside this holster it
has like a wide angle lens adapter it also has a lightning lightning cable adapter and this means
that if you get really frustrated with using this little postage stamp of a monitor on it you can
plug in your iphone and get a much larger monitor so it has a lot of capabilities are kind of built
into it that make it really nice and just easy to use and it also has some really cool things
if you're an explorer so it also has an auto panoramic mode and it also has an auto time lapse
mode so what we actually did my partner and i he set up the dji pocket 2 when we were road tripping
to this meteor crater and he set it up to look at the stars and do some astrophotography both of us
are not really well versed in astrophotography at all but the dji pocket too makes it really
really easy to just set it up and get a time lapse of the sky and it works beautifully you can also
do time lapses in motion so you can get sort of that cool bbc documentary sort of feel where it's
moving across a landscape and getting a time lapse at the same time all right so that's a lot of the
work that i do when i'm out in rough terrain or in a helicopter or on a ship um i've been
in a lot of different situations where things are just bouncy you know ships are you know
constantly moving with the ocean i get so motion sick but you know the dgi helps me stabilize
everything even if i can't stabilize myself but once i'm actually done doing you know the
work out in the field and actually have some cool samples of microbes and want to look at them
this is my go-to microscope this is the nikon e200 microscope it's an led microscope which
is really important because i don't want to have to worry about having different bulbs breaking or
things like that this microscope i got on sale for around fifteen hundred dollars it probably
retailed for around two thousand dollars but if you want a microscope you don't have to spend
that much money to get a good microscope you can get good microscopes anywhere between 100 to 500
you really don't have to spend this much to get a good microscope for me i just really like this
nikon because it has a lot of different features that i specifically need one of which is a
trinocular so typically microscopes are either binocular so you can look through the eyepieces or
they're trinocular so that you can actually attach a camera to it and i really like that because
microscopes often come sold with cameras attached but it's kind of like buying a car if you buy a
car then you're kind of stuck with whatever radio music system comes in that car so it
gets outdated pretty quickly whereas if you get trinocular you can always attach either
your dslr or your mirrorless camera or what have you to the microscope and constantly keep
it updated without being stuck to one camera system and one technology from a certain year
so this microscope i really love it's just a really uh basic simple microscope that
um is just i don't know it's my my favorite go-to microscope i actually brought it with me uh to
antarctica so i put in a pelican case it came with me to antarctica five weeks i was using this all
the time to film all sorts of microscopic critters um what i was using while i was in antarctica was
a combination of a canon 5d mark ii which actually adam savage himself loaned to me which was really
useful and i also got a canon 6d mark ii and those have been my go-to cameras i was attaching to this
microscope for a while until my partner got a canon r5 and it blew them out of the water and i
actually can only now use the r5 because getting all these really great details of all these little
microbes and their little claws or their little cilia little hairs and everything that move around
the r5 sensor is just so much better it's able to get a much more dynamic range so i think the 6d
mark ii gets a dynamic range of nine stops maybe this one gets more like 14 stops
and it means that when i'm filming a lot of creatures and there's a lot of uh difference in
the light but i can actually like look at the details of these creatures really well and it
means i can go really really dark and see things under fluorescence or different types of light and
not have a lot of noise so it means i can go into really high isos and not get all of the grading
noise that you would usually see in a camera that r5 means that you can go really high up really
dark picture and you still just don't see any noise and that's been what's really killer for me
one of the downsides of the r5 though is the fact that it overheats very easily when you're filming
for an extended period of time which is a known issue everyone knows the canon r5 fantastic camera
but it has overheating issues so the way a lot of people get around it and the way i get around it
is by actually using the atomos ninja 5. and this is a recording device that a lot of filmmakers
will be familiar with um it acts as both a monitor and a recorder it means that you can
actually record through the ninja 5 instead of the canon r5 and it means it won't overheat so you can
do extended filming a video and for me i'm often looking at tardigrades for hours and i can just
film them for hours look at their behavior and not have to worry because i run it all through
the ninja five and then finally i actually tether it to my laptop using a canon's eos utility uh
software and it means that i can use my laptop as a monitor see all the cool tardigrades see
all the lull critters um and monitor them through my laptop while recording through the ninja 5.
so the canon r5 is really fantastic when i'm with my own microscope and i have my own setup and
i kind of have a controlled situation but a lot of times i'm in different people's labs
or i'm using different types of microscopes a really geeky thing about me is that i'm actually
the president of the san francisco microscopical society really geeky fantastic group of microscope
enthusiasts so i'm always looking at different microscopes but i want to always be recording
cool stuff through them and i don't always have my canon r5 and a trinocular setup it's all very
specific to a specific device so when i'm wanting to move from microscope to microscope i actually
use the lab cam with iphone and this is something i've talked about in my favorite things videos
before but i still use it all the time it's only for iphone which i know a lot of people will be
disappointed about but it's really fantastic and why it's so great is that it actually plugs into
the binoculars of any microscope and it does this through having machined metal and this is why it's
so much better than getting something that's 3d printed a lot of times 3d printed microscope
adapters they do enough but they're not really precision this has machined metal uh which means
that when you slot it into a binocular it just perfectly slots in there's about two different
sizes of microscope binoculars that are pretty standard across almost all brands and this comes
with those two standard eyepieces so it means that i can just go into any lab and instantly have the
confidence knowing that i have an iphone that i can film uh cool critters or all sorts of cool
stuff under the microscope with so that's kind of my go-to thing when i'm going to antarctica
when i'm going on a ship when i'm going kind of anywhere to anyone's lab or anything like that
it's really useful so that's some of the gear that i really enjoy using i've used all sorts
of gear all over the world i hope you've enjoyed a lot of the footage that i've shared i've got
more on my own channel i love coming here untested and sharing all the gear that helps enable all of
that footage to be shot it's just a lot of fun if you haven't already maybe consider getting a
microscope and exploring in your own backyard you don't need an expensive microscope and you don't
need to go to antarctica to look at tardigrades in fact i actually filmed a how to find harder graze
in your own backyard video four tested that you can check out and there's all sorts of fun things
that you can do with all sorts of camera equipment so thanks for watching i'll see you next time