We just arrived in London, Heathrow. We are on our way to a big secret trip. We are doing
the launch material for the IQ250. It's gonna be epic. We try to keep it down a bit because
it is still a big secret. We are traveling to Los Angeles to meet up with this awesome
photographer, Tim Kemple. We will travel to San Diego to meet with some bike riders and
then we will go back to Los Angeles to meet with a portrait photographer and travel on
to Sydney to do some wedding photography.
We are three people traveling for the Phase One team.
We are me, Anne, from the marketing department. I'll do practicalities.
Niels, our Image Quality Professor.
And Michael, our producer, will be behind the camera most of the time.
We are very psyched! It's going to be awesome.
We just arrived outside of San Diego. It is a bit cold.
It's 9 o'clock in the morning. We have been here since 8 and left home at 7.
Now we are ready. We met with the two mountain bikers who are setting up the track right now.
The weather is a bit cloudy but it's looking good and we will have a nice day of shooting.
This is our cinematographer, Anson. So we are here with Phase One and Kyle and
So we are here with Phase One and Kyle and
the boys are a world class set of athletes that we have filmed before. Tim is shooting
this fascinating new Phase One camera and I'm shooting RED Epic. The first key shot will
probably be on this huge jump to the south-east a couple of hundred feet over there.
We are talking about better still shot than a motion shot and
we're talking about changing the jumps so that they can interact with the tree.
I always start with a safe shot.
Whether it's a commercial shoot or a personal project, get the safe shot,
get it done, so you know you can go home with something.
When you have the safe shot, you can get creative.
Generally, we try and shoot into the sun or back-lit most of the time outdoors.
Anything where people are catching big air, you always want to see the take-off
or at least where they came from so you don't have
a random guy in the sky and not know where they are landing.
Magazines won't run the pictures unless they can see where the landing is
or where they are coming from.
Oftentimes people just want to see a guy up on the sky and think that's cool
but there is no sense of place.
Are you okay, T-Mac?
That was one of those things, you don't even try to save,
because you know there's nothing you can do. Smallest jump here.
Are you alright?
Yeah, I think so. I just hit my face pretty hard.
Handlebars got stuck on my pocket so it didn't come back. And I died.
Definitely got a little bit of a headache.
We shot some safe stuff this morning and now we are going to
get the camera mounted up on the octocopter.
We got Nick, our RC Heli-pilot. This will be the first time he is mounting
a medium format camera on to the helicopter. We are super psyched!
My setup for this shot is going to be with the 28mm leaf shutter lens.
We have got the Profote Air Syncs all set up.
The combination of the lens and the Air Sync is going to let us sync our flash at 1/1600s.
We are going to put the camera on the helicopter, put the helicopter up in the air,
point it down, somehow time it perfectly so as they ride by,
we hit the shutter on our iPad, the camera fires,
the flashes sync at 1/1600s and we have a perfect shot.
It should be easy, right?
After Tim did a quick test with the octocopter,
we swapped cameras to shoot some movie footage of the landscape.
The team then decided to film a mountain biker in action when this happened.
Unfortunately, as the octocopter was getting fixed, the weather took a turn for the worse.
So sunny California left me completely wet. I'm soaked in water.
But I shouldn't complain, we have the riders still on their bikes in the wind and in shorts.
This is a high-tech lens effect, it is not very consistent, but if you let a little bit of water get on
the lens and you shoot the flash into it, you get some cool effects.
We had some problems with our octocopter so now Tim is on a tree meter high ladder
acting like the octocopter to get some nice aerial shots.
We had a whirlwind of a day. We started off with some snow,
and then some rain, and then sun and now it's the end of the day and there's more rain.
We packing everything up, it is really coming down hard. We had a ton of fun shooting some
high action and big jumps with the new IQ250 system.
We got some great stuff in the bag at the end of the day.
They are really special, we could shoot at a high ISO so that let us continue
shooting well into the evening, even after the sun went down, but we didn't have to worry
about the noise and that was cool for me to see. I've never been able to that before in
a medium format digital camera system. So I'm really excited. I think we got a ton of
great images and now we just need to go home before we get too wet.