The world is full of naysayers. Full of people who think change won't happen. And full of people who don't embrace change until it's too late. The world of photography feels a bit like that at the moment.

It's been 10years or so since digital made a huge impact in an industry that was beginning to stagnate in technology terms. And now, the new technology is facing just as big a barrier to success as digital did before. That's right, I'm talking about the introduction of full HD Movie shooting. 

There are so many people saying they're not interested, it won't catch on, the technologies not good enough, it's a cheap solution, how can it rival film etc and yet for proof you only need to hear that the season finale of House, due to air on 17th May, was shot entirely on an EOS 5D Mark II. Yes, you read that right. A 5D Mark II for an entire episode of possibly the most popular US drama currently on the air. [Background and more info here.....]

If that's not enough to convince you, how about the fact that Canon USA has just announced 6 new members to the Explorers of Light program in the US. Nothing especially amazing about that though. The news that is amazing is that of these six, five have a primary background in cinematography, including the DOPs for '24', 'Terminator:Salvation', 'The Ghost Whisperer' and 'Saturday Night Live. Now for a program that has always been about photography, the introduction of cinematographers shows just how important this technology actually is. It also suggests that all those who would rather Canon didn't include this technology on the cameras may as well just get over it. It's not going anywhere!

While I'm on that subject incidentally, I'm regularly asked why Canon have included it and why they couldn't have just not included it and charged less for the camera. The simple answer is - do you really think it costs more to put it in the camera? There is no extra hardware needed to make HD video work, it's just lines of code in the firmware - and in the grand scheme of things that's not *that* expensive to introduce compared to sensors and filters for example! 

So, if you've not dabbled with HD video on your DSLR, you might want to start soon or you'll end up playing serious catch up when you decide it is here to stay and you do want to be involved....

So, you've got an EOS 5D Mark II, you have been shooting some movies and you like the idea of the EOS-1D Mark IV which has an instant filming button so you can press that and whatever mode you're in it will start filming?

Well, you can do it on the EOS 5D Mark II as well. Yes, the answer is indeed found in the Custom Functions. You know, those things that most of us never look at and hardly ever make use of? 

Well, the one you're looking for is a real cracker - Custom Function IV-3, and it's called "Assign SET button".

I'm willing to bet that if you take a look at this, it will be set to 0: Normal (disabled).

Try setting it to Option 6 - Record Movie (Live View).

With that done, head out of the menus and in whatever mode you happen to be in, press the SET button.  As long as Movie shooting is enabled in the Live View settings, (Live View Function settings > Stills + Movie > Any of the following three), pressing that SET button will pop up the mirror, put you in Live View mode and automatically start recording. 

If you're a photojournalist, or you just want to be able to react to a situation quickly, this will shave valuable time off accessing the movie shooting functions.Just be careful with it. It's easy to knock the SET button and find yourself in movie mode and filling card space without realising it.

While the north of England is being thoroughly soaked with rain at the moment, I thought it would be a good time to remind you about the EOS 5D Mark II weather sealing and to put it in context of the rain that's currently falling. 

If any of you have been to my presentations about the EOS 5D Mark II, you'll know there is a story I tell about how weather sealed the camera is - namely that it should withstand three minutes full exposure of light rain, where light rain was defined as 10mm rain per hour.

If we take these figures and put them into the figures for rainfall in Cumbria, just today the news is talking about "another deluge" with up to "10cm" of rain expected to fall. This is being seen as pretty heavy rain, even by our temperate climate standards. If we assume the 10cm of rain will fall evenly over 24hours, that's  0.41cm of rain per hour or, converted to mm, 4.1mm/hour - still quite a way off the 10mm rain/hour.

Now, before you all rush out and soak your EOS 5D Mark II cameras, just remember that until you put a lens on a Camera it is simply a bucket. With that in mind, the lens you use is very important as well - if it's an L series lens with the rubber sealing and weatherproofing, then it stops water entering at the lens mount. But if you use a third party lens like Sigma or Tamron, then with no weather sealing, the camera still, in essence, has a big gaping hole in the front so you need to take the weather sealing figures with a pinch of salt. 

So what's the point I'm trying to make? It's that a) your camera is possibly more weather resistant than you imagine it might be and b) that even with this level of weather sealing Canon don't quote the cameras as being anything special in terms weather sealing unlike some other manufacturers who would be signing this from the roof tops. It's the nature of the conservative approach that Canon have to marketing figures - they like to quote figures by the CIPA standard testing methods and the figures are almost a 'worst case' scenario.