Guy Thatcher - Hire A Camera - IOV Area Meeting

It was great to meet other Institute of Videographer (IOV) members yesterday evening at our Studio in Steyning for their area meeting.

The guest speaker was Guy Thatcher from Hire A Camera.

Guy rents out all sorts of video cameras, stills cameras, lenses and accessories to a wide range of individuals and organisations. Guy bought a whole range of cameras and accessories with him for people to "play" with as well as speaking about the developments within the industry, especially the differences that the new range of large sensor cameras are bringing. I think it is going to be a very interesting few years ahead as far as the technological changes are concerned.

One particularly interesting camera as far as I was concerned was the Sony Alpha77, the first SLT camera with a translucent mirror, this enables the camera to use all the metering and focus functions of the camera in video mode with the mirror down. Apparently it works a bit like an autocue system in that from one side the mirror is see through but from the other side it is reflective. The "see through side" lets about 70% of the light through making about 1 stop of difference to the light level. Because it is not moving the mirror out of the way when it takes a photograph (or starts recording) it makes it very quiet... something that would be great in church ! I don't know how the image quality compares to the Canon 5dMk2 that I have been using but it does all of a sudden make Sony a very interesting company to watch for their stills cameras, it is also worth remembering that they took over minolta so lots of the old minolta lens will work on these cameras.

Guy will also be at the SWPP convention in January and I look forward to catching up with him again then.