Had most of the morning to play whilst attending the Starmus Festival in Tenerife.  Took the faithful Canon 5D MkII down to the beach for some HD video work using the Canon 100-400mm telephoto lens and a 1.4x teleconverter – hand-held.  I think the results from this DSLR are quite impressive (with a tripod and fluid head it would have been even better of course).

See Neil Armstrong make his first appearance at the amazing Starmus Festival held on Tenerife in June 2011.

And here’s a video of the nesting Blue Tits taken with the Canon 5D MkII the 100-400mm zoom lens and the 2x teleconverter.  Manual focus, ISO 100, program mode.  This video is an MP4 conversion and is only around 20Mb or so in size – the original HD video straight off the camera is around 2Gb and of much higher quality.  Seeing these little guys full screen and in tight focus on the monitor is pretty amazing.

Here are a few seconds at the Blue Tits’ nest box with the Sony video camera and its native 18-200mm lens (which is an exceptional lens!).

I am about to try out the Canon 100-400mm zoom lens with the 2x extender on the same camera – should be interesting 🙂