Shoot/Save/Snow
Got back recently from several days spent in Aspen with Hugh Stewart working on another catalog shoot, this time for a British clothing company. This job provided some good challenges and considerations to take into account for dealing with shooting in cold temperatures and the occasional bad weather.
Being out in the middle of snowy nowhere meant a lot of downloading cards to laptop. Some tips for coping with the cold and snow:
- Bring a heavy duty laptop stand.
- You NEED a good laptop shade in order to see anything with the insane amount of snow-glare.
- Speaking of glare, give yourself a liberal coating of sunblock 20 minutes before going out in the snow. One of the PAs on the shoot didn’t heed this advice, and on the next day of shooting it looked like he’d spent all morning with his head stuck in a microwave. He complained that even his eyeballs were burned.
- Bring a portable hard drive that doesn’t require a power adapter to back up to.
- Have an extra fully-charged laptop battery or two.
- Snow boots are your friend.
- Sunglasses are as well!
- Gallon-sized plastic baggies are good for carrying around the camera(s) in if/when it’s snowing.
- The Canon Mark III can get a little wet without any issues.
- Camera batteries don’t last as long if they’re cold; keep the charged extras in your pockets.
- Bring plenty of CF cards in case the shooter goes somewhere you can’t bring the laptop.
One location required piling in to a Snowcat to make it.
On some of the shoot days, all of the locations were outside and it was impossible to bring along the full Magliner/Tower/Monitor rig. On those occasions, I left that set up in the hotel and just brought the laptop. When I’d get back at the end of the day, I’d import that day’s captures in to the main Lightroom catalog over a CAT5 cable. Then, if he wanted, I would just roll the capture cart over to the art director’s room so he could edit on a calibrated 30″ monitor in the comfort of his own hotel room.
The view from the hotel. Can all jobs be like this? Please?
On the third day we shot in Woody Creek, former hometown of Hunter S. Thompson. Every blog needs a little HST, don’t you think?
One notable occasion: the Canon Wireless File Transmitter accessory got a chance to shine. The opportunity arose when it became necessary to shoot several still-life shots. In this scenario, speed and versatility were not as important as layout and cropping. Matt, the art director, wanted to able to quickly get the shots straight in to the design template he’d created on his laptop in order to verify that the layout would work. Enter WFT.
Shooting with the Canon WFT beaming images right to the laptop.
I had the WFT transmitting the RAW files straight to a Lightroom watched folder on my laptop. Roughly 10-15 seconds after taking a shot, the image would pop up in LR. I would then export that frame to a separate folder as a JPEG which Matt would pull on to his laptop via an ad-hoc wireless network I created between our two Macbooks. So, there we were, able to make adjustments to the scene and see the finished result right in the layout in under a minute without any wires. Pretty cool.
Another successful shoot wrapped up! From left to right: Photographer Hugh Stewart, Charlotte (the stylist), Matt (AD), Annabel (the producer), Scotty (1st assistant), and yours truly.
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