Gearing Up to Shoot!

Richard Van Der Male generously gifted the project a Manfrotto tripod head he wasn't using in 2008. He shipped it to me from New Zealand in a mind-numbing act of extreme kindness to a stranger. I am now even more grateful to him as Dick Kaneshiro (another 1/2L Hero) has found me a $10 shoe for it that fits my new shooting camera Panasonic S5, but also franken-fitted it to the clamp end from a too-small Manfrotto arm I had bought when using the FZ50.

Once all the pieces were here and ready to rock, I disassembled everything and gave it all a nasty detail cleaning. It had been sitting attached to Yuji-designed camera smoothmover in the hallway here for 16 years (!) and needed a lot of dusting and cleaning. Dick helped me reassemble it correctly, and now...

The rig is clamped to a sturdy ladder in the limited floor-space set room to capture the Cottage-in-landscape wide shot. We made many test shots to see how I could connect devices to the camera's wifi network to get a larger live view while shooting. 

A HUGE SURPRISE was that while the room is so occupied with an entire landscape (being built in progress on the right above), there's next-to-no real estate for C-stands or large tripods, etc., Dick figured out that my iPad pro tablet could control the camera in real-time remotely.

This meant I could stand with the camera-connected tablet way back at the Cottage and set my lights, compose my shot, and release the shutter to pre-view each setup. I was blown away by being able to do that, and it makes all the difference when shooting alone. It's like having a small monitor in my hand while directing and photographing.

More adventures in building Halfland with Dick Kaneshiro in the next post... more great stuff happening!