A View From Above

After hearing an interview with the CEO of Sekonic/PocketWizard on the Lightsphere podcast, I realized my PocketWizards had a lot more potential & uses than what I had earlier known, and got inspired to try some different techniques.

PocketWizards were originally created to trigger lights (studio-flashes) in basketball arenas in the United States, and this was also the limit of my knowledge of the PocketWizards untill I heard this interview. So, the revelation was you can also use the PWs to trigger remote cameras! All you need to do is buy a specific cable which connects the PW to your camera T3 socket.
By doing this you can set off a remote camera through a PW transmitter on top of your manually operated camera. When you click the shutter on the transmitting camera and the other camera will also go off.

So that’s all good, but how is this relevant to anything I do? Well, my inspiration came from Vincent Laforet’s blog who wrote a blog on remote camera use in the Beijing Olympics (I can’t find the post, it might have been on his old Newsweek blog). At the Olympics Vincent, and many of the other photographers, rely heavily on remote cameras to capture shots a manually operated camera cannot. Heinz Kleutmeier of Sports Illustrated put remote cameras in the bottom of the swimmingpool for Michael Phelps’ final gold-medal victory. (read the story here)

Coming up to this year’s Colour Conference and Album recording I thought of shots that would be interesting to get. Shots that had not yet been done. I started talking to the TV and marketing  departments about mounting a remote camera on the 10 meter TV crane.
The goal was actually to test this setup during Colour Conference, to then use it at the album recording. The tests went well, but unfortunately the camera mount came loose towards the end of the album rehearsal, it made the video footage wobbly and we had to pull the plug on it.

It was a shame, but ultimately the video footage was more important, and we con afford to compromise the video footage. BUT, I got a better mount for the camera for the opening night of the Colour Conference the next night and got the results we wanted.

It was a lot of fun and hopefully this has inspired you to use your PWs in different ways.

Lastly, I want to thank Sebastian Heck and Magdalene Phillips for allowing me to “play” with the crane, and also to Dave Hunkeler for being flexible in operating the crane with the extra weight added to the head.

 
Technical info:
Due to the lack of remote controls I set the remote camera (a 5D MkII) to Manual mode and decided on a shutter speed that would handle the sweeing crane movement (I think around 1/100th), a low aperture (f2.8) and about ISO3200. The lens I used was a Canon 15mm fisheye. Thanks to Parrish Shah for trusting me with his lens:)

 
Enjoy some of the setup shots and results below: