Mixing it up in Mongolia

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This is my fourth time through Mongolia, and I’ve yet to be here when the temperature has hovered over freezing. Now, the temp is hovering just about zero….and that’s Farenheit.

I’m a bit behind on posts from this trip (actually, about three stops (jet, not “f”) behind due to either no internet coverage, or, in China, blocked sites up the wazoo.

Shooting DSLR video on a trip that moves this fast is proving to be a major challenge….it’s hard enough to grab good stills on these whistlestop tours, but lining up and shooting moving images is, um, daunting. (And making sure you’ve got your audio setup too? Fuhgeddaboudit!).

The D7000 is performing well, although I have to admit to going back to manual focus a lot of the time because the autofocus in LiveView is still not fast enough for erratically moving targets…it’s darn good, but I’m still faster. This is as much as surprise to me as anything else….I haven’t focused manually much since, well, since the old Nikon 8008 (I’m dating myself).

I caught the little boy and girl with the 16-85mm on a D7000.  Here (I hope, if it uploads) is a short video of a Mongolian throat singer.  

This is about as long a clip as I can upload where I am. I used a long lens on the D7000, and the Sennheiser MKE 400 shotgun plugged into the Olympus LS10 recorder. Then I used Dual Eyes to automatically replace the camera’s inferior audio with the higher quality file from the recorder. Lovin’ Dual Eyes…it’s seamless and easy.
Next stop: Lijiang, China. I’ll keep you posted.

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