Canon's New HJ18x warms up Top Gear's Polar Special

When popular BBC’s TV programme Top Gear went to the Arctic to test cars, they needed to keep weight down. So they wanted a lens that was adaptable for a range of different shots –and tough enough for the conditions. It had to be the Canon HJ18ex28B

Cameraman Iain May comments:

Like most trips to the Pole, we had to take as little as possible, because the flights from Ottawa were in small planes. In my team, which was the dog team, I only took a wide angle lens and the HJ18x — that’s all I needed. The great thing was that I didn’t have to keep changing over the base plate as you normally have to do with a long lens. What I did was make a flight case up, cutting in foam for all my batteries and lenses, and screwed a high hat on top of the case: so actually instead of taking a tripod, I shot everything from the top of my kit case. And the HJ18x, being the size it was, went into the case perfectly.

We used it predominantly on the long lens stuff from the bob sleigh team. We did some really nice stuff looking up to the moon as well. We got so close onto the moon we had to pan the camera to the right all the time and pre-frame it — the actual moon was going out of the side of the frame! The lens has a 500mm focal length and it just goes on for miles. I loved the lens. I had thought I was going to be sent out with big lens like a 33x, and it just wouldn’t have been used half as many times as the HJ18x — because it’s so hard to put on, with a base plate, and keep changing lenses in these conditions.

The lens is obviously quite fast — but because it was the North Pole we never had any darkness. It was daylight all the time — there wasn’t much difference between day and night. The only thing I would have liked to have had with it was a matt box on the front end; or an enormous polariser would have been useful. We would have probably then used the lens a lot more: but, as my fellow cameramen Ben Joiner confirms, there was no chromatic aberration anyway.

TOUGH GOING
We had no problems with the lens at all. Even when we were down to minus 35˚ it worked beautifully. In fact it also survived the transportation! We were pulling my sledge, with all my kit, behind skiddoos for about 400 miles. And the flight case that the lens was in was just strapped down on to what they call a commy tuck to drag behind the skiddoos. It was bouncing around all over the place! You would have expected some sort of problem – but it was all spot on.