Micro Blog: 3rd February 2011 (Travel)
Permit, you have permit? Sensing that message was directed at me, I turned in the direction of the voice with a distinct Indian accent. 2 burly uniformed policemen greeted my gaze. I nodded and whipped out the stapled permit and was quietly confident that I would be allowed to carry on with my shoot.
10 minutes later, my bags were packed and with a slight sense of relief, my assistant (WeeHow) and I headed back to the car. The permit proved to be void of any divine power that I had hopes for as the Russian President was in town and serious photography at many locations was not permitted. Looking very different from the average local in Mumbai, India did not help things. Add to the fact that we were seated with 5 cameras and an equal nunber of tripods, we simply stuck out like 2 sore thumbs. Why a sense of relief then? Isn't it every shooter's wish to carry on shooting without any interference? Sure it was for us as well but in our case, we have already been shooting for 2 hours and the timelapses were looking great. It was past magic hour and pushing the cameras further was not very necessary. Add to our growling stomachs and our packing speed was doubled.
Now before conclusions are made about the locals being uptight about photography, I will need to say that that is far from the honest truth. Never have I in my travels seen people so spontaneous to cameras pointed at them. Sticking our lenses through the windows of our spacious Toyota, we were always greeted with waves and smiles. Motorists winding down their windows and motorcyclists removing their helmets to have their smiles captured at its best was becoming a normal sight. There was only one instance where a hawker glared at us but it was not the threatening kind of stare that will drop my knees to the ground and beg for mercy. Only ONCE in 18 days....amazing!
The daily ritual for the 18 day shoot starts with an early rise from our comfy beds and depending on the schedule for the day, timelapses of the sunrise may be setup and left alone while we had our fill at the hotel's cafe. Shooting from hotel rooms posed 2 problems. One, the windows themselves should hopefully be as free from dust as possible. Any dust present while shooting towards the sun will just simply result in mediocre images with low contrast. Thankfully, the windows were clean enough for the time we were there. Second, reflections from the room's interior was going to show up if we were no careful. Getting the lens as close as possible to the window was the way to go about this and of course, minimizing the number of lights in the room is clearly needed. In fact, I was shifting a little of the furniture around as the light-toned pieces were a risk. Lens hoods at this point of time are useless and they are removed since you want the lenses to be smacked right up against the windows.
After getting our stomachs filled and bowels emptied, the gear lugging starts and the filling of the compactflash cards will start till we call it a day. A car inverter (Belkin) was brought along in case there was a need to charge any batteries while on the road. But that never saw any action as the twenty odd batteries proved to be more than sufficient for even the most intensive days. Compactflash cards were plentiful but we did head back to the hotel in Delhi once as the timelapse angles we had at Delhi International Airport were just too many. We shot close to 500gb that day and the 400gb worth of cards had to be offloaded at some point. As mentioned in the previous entry, Transcend 32gb cards and Sandisk 16gb cards were our choice and there was never an image lost from any card from both brands.
Post dinner was still not yet a time to let our hair down (alright, mine's too short to let down but Weehow has got some funky looking strands). There was the task of transferring the images from the cards to the 2 backup drives we had set up. All the cards have been labelled from 1 to 10 and they were loaded sequentially. It's important to have a system here as one can get mixed up with the number of cards. What I had planned for was to have unloaded cards with their labels facing upwards thus I could see the numbered labels and know that they have not been loaded. Cards that have been loaded will be reversed and placed on the right of the laptop. This worked well for the entire trip. After downloading the cards and before switching to the next card, I will counter check by cross referencing the images in the drives and images on the card. Checking the amount o f space used on the card and the amount transferred to the drives was also essential. The cards are then returned to the Lowepro CF card pouches. Formatting of the cards (in the camera) takes place before the shooting starts the next day, in case we had missed out on any of it.
The data goes into a Datatale Raid 1 Casing that has 2 drive bays and was a RAID 1 which means that the data was mirrored from one drive to the next automatically. That gave me 2 copies of the data and the cards will then be readied for the next day's shoot. 2 of this enclosures were packed in a HPRC casing and hand carried whenever we were on flights. The bright colour of the case threw some attention from the wary guards and opening the case at the gate was something we got used to and explaining to them what the 2 blocks of metal were was never a problem.
So was all the gear we brought really essential? To be honest, this was one trip where I concluded that we used every single piece of gear that we lugged and squeezed into the bags. From the Joby Gorrillapod to the multitude of lenses to the Transcend 400X 32GB Compactflash cards, all were put into action. The 2 Mac laptops were also put to good use when we had compile a chunk of sample files for the client.
Post-productions was accomplished with:
1) Photo Mechanic: A really speedy file browser that allowd me to sort all the RAW files. Way faster than Adobe Bridge and Aperture.
2) Aperture 3: Bulk of the processing and RAW conversion was done through Aperture. Workflow was intuitive and the system was allowed to batch export tens of thousands of images before I headed to bed each night.
3) Adobe Camera Raw: While Aperture was exporting the Tiffs or Jpegs, Adobe Camera Raw was also brought in to export a second batch of files.
4) Photoshop CS4: Resizing and cloning of dust spots. Save-for-web function still useful for getting files over to client for fast previews.
5) Quicktime Pro: Previews of the 100 over timelapse angles were achieved with QT Pro. If only it had a batch function that could be allowed to run free overnight.