Khmer New Year
Wat Sovannkiri | Snellville, GA | April 9, 2023

Hello everyone, it was a windy Easter Sunday for the first (of many) T/L/C New Year celebrations for our lovely state of Georgia.  Thanks to everyone for posing and thanks to Wat Sovannkiri for being kind and welcoming to all.  I brought along many cameras on this day to get some good practice time.  I actually captured more video than photos (whaah?) on this day.  I thought I would change it up this month and shoot more random gear or styles, of which video is still something I forget about most of the time.  Sorry the photo compositions aren’t the tightest I was mostly shooting video on the Canon Rp, the resulting pictures are one handed side shots while the video was rolling.

Here’s what I brought along today, my main work cameras just have too many clicks on them.

Canon RP + 24-105mm f/4 | Sony A7 + 50mm 1.8 | Nikon V1 + 105mm 2.8 Micro | Ricoh Theta 360 | and two Nikon J1’s

Why this loadout today? Well, I think the Canon RP actually produces better images in 4K video than in raw still files. In typical great Canon fashion it also handles harsh contrast very well and meters for the skin tones outdoors the best out of almost every camera brand I have. You lose Dual Pixel AF in 4K mode on this camera, but all it takes to punch in to 100% (which I have mapped to the up button on the D pad) and the AF is just as quick as the other normal modes.  Plus outside at f/11 almost everything is in focus in videos, with gracious plenty DOF.  In the Canon DPP software you can preview the video and take 8MP (3840×2160) screen grabs of the video which is a pretty nifty feature.

The Nikon V1 (and J1’s) from 2011 still has some nifty features.  It can shoot 1920×1080 60i video AND capture 3840×2160 jpegs, all while not interrupting the video stream.  That’s pretty crazy for such an “old” camera. Plus the EVF is really nice to view video that well, looks like a news broadcast, which for some things just fits.

The Sony A7 and 50mm is so light and brainless that it always has a place in the gear loadout.  The sensor is pretty much the same as the Nikon D600/D800 so it has ultimate editability in post.  Which is needed because unlike Canon’s Nikon and Sony sensor based cameras usually always render dark with harsh contrast in daylight.

The other cameras, well, they’re also small and light and I hadn’t used them in a while.  For some people picture taking with any camera is fun enough, but I’ve always found great delight and curiosity in all the various makes and models.  Someone put a lot of engineering prowess in any camera or imaging device so we can at the very least learn it and use it.  Anyways, enough of my gear talk, here are some of the video clips and photos I shot on Sunday at Khmer New Year.

Nikon V1 1080 60i Clip | Frame Grabs below. Still crazy how the “screen grab” is of a much higher resolution than the video itself! If only they’d marketed the 1 series of cameras better.  With better lens reliability and build quality too, it could have been a more popular system.

Nikon V1 1080 60i Clip | Frame Grabs below

---

If you haven’t already seen it, here’s my list of the various Lao Thai and Cambodian New Year Festivals for 2023:

Lao / Thai / Cambodian New Year Dates 2023 – Atlanta, GA and SE US