Lessons

Lesson Info

Getting the Shot

(gentle music) Basic technique to save money on it. Doesn't exist. I didn't really start sleeping until three. so you, you just pause, Right, it's a very small hand to save ink. Another said, a friend of my father always stops the clock at night to save wear and tear on it. You and me are all spin thrifts. Said the third, I know a man who won't read paper because he says it wears out his glasses. Yeah. This is probably the worst joke with I've ever looked at (laughing) it's bad. I think that's why it was left here. Yeah. We that's the wrong burner. We have some water out there, but the pump is kind of acting funny. So we're gonna melt some snow. What I do when I melt snow is I go out and I pack it in as much as I can. Not just because then I get more water, but also because it compresses the snow so that the heat travels sort of through it. And it melts a little bit faster, I think. But Graham, you had a tip that putting. Heavily. So water in there, right? It's called...

priming the water source. If you keep some water from your bottle and you use that on the bottom of the pot. This camera Here you go. You're actually creating a more conductive surface for the pot to basically heat the water to then heat the snow. You'll lose, you'll use less gas. So if you're cooking on a camp stove, you're gonna need less overall and you're gonna save more fuel and you don't have to bring as much fuel into the back country in the first place. Which is a bummer bringing fuel in cuz it's heavy. There's also the part that you'll bend the bottom of your jet boil stove. If you just don't put any water, like sometimes it just cups like this. I did that on my jet boil once. Yeah. It just like turns a funny shape. So I started adding water too. Yeah you were ruin your pan. Yeah, well, I mean these ones look pretty sturdy Another little thing that Graham was like, well, add the water first. And I was like, I'll add the snow first, but I just used my hand to push the snow outta the way and then put the water in the bottom. Because if you pour it directly on the snow, it's gonna just absorb all the water. It won't even get to the bottom. Yeah. And now we wait like 20 minutes. Two hours Two hours? Who knows? (group laughing) Long time. Last night we came here and everybody has like, you know you sweat a little bit. It wasn't that gnarly of a mission, but everybody's stuff got just a little damp. So most cabins and huts, you'll see these strings that people have strung up above the heat source. So this is the propane thing and I stuck my boots, boot liners rather I took 'em off, they were a little bit damp. I stuck 'em over the heater last night and they are perfectly dry in there. So when you're, got anything that's even slightly damped like this is Rod's buff. I'm sure it was just like damp from his breath. Here you go Rod. Thank you. It's totally dry now. So yeah, you wanna hang up all your stuff up high cuz the temperature difference, which Tucker and I know from the floor level where you would just drop your gear to even here this level, it's probably 85 degrees right here and down by my feet it's probably 50. So right above the heater here, it's definitely like as hot as a like clothes dryer and it worked, all my gear that I hung up here last night is totally dry. And as an example, I think I threw my T-shirt over here and it's still a little bit clammy. Like this was just at like knee height. It's clammy. So I'm just before we gonna leave, before we leave, I'm just gonna toss this up there and because this is wool it'll dry out pretty quick. Most people just come in and drop their gear and then don't worry about it. But putting it on clammy stuff in the morning, not fun. Just throw it up here. Easy peasy. (melancholy music) (wind blowing) So cool looking. I like your ski's over there, little orange pop. Oh, it's really cool. How white it is. So settings here, super bright out here. I'm at 100 ISO F4 1/640th. And I don't wanna like completely get all the detail of the shadows here cause it's just a blown out scene. So I don't wanna fight it. Like it is what it is. The cabin is even to my eye, it's very bright. So I'm not trying to like bring it down. And then later in editing, I'll have to actually brighten it back up. I want it to look like it looks, which is just very bright and white out here kind of isolated and almost minimalist. So I'm not trying to fight that. So I'm just metering actually like according to my meter, I'm like a third of a stop right. And I'm okay with that. I think I can pull back some photos or some highlights if we need to. But I just, what I'm trying to do is heighten the kind of isolation that this cabin has, which is, if you look through the frame right now, it's isolated. There's literally nothing, but this mountain with some dead trees on it, behind it, just white snow coming. So I'll probably walk around and get a couple angles, but I'm pretty sure that this from my internet scouting and just from being here last night, that this is the angle, the mountain in the background and it looks great with the ski's there. Hey Graham, can you come out here? The cabin windows are so nice. They're so thin you can hear it. Sweet. Yeah, that looks great. Can you step just a little further out? There you go right there. So what I'm trying to do there is he was underneath that Eve. And even though it's very imperceptible, he's actually in a little bit of a shadow. And so if I pull him out here. He kind of pops against the dark background of the cabin. Whereas if he was back in that shadow, he was not, he was part of the darkness. And then can you lean against the pole on your left? Kind of take a shimmy to your left. Yeah, there you go. And then push yourself just a little forward and still lean if you can. There you go. That's the jam. And then I'll just go up and shoot some portraits of Graham. A bit higher? All right, look at the camera. So I'm doing is the R5 and some other cameras have a eye auto focus setting and it makes portraits a lot easier, so you don't have to move your focus point around and you always get the eye sharp which is, yeah it's very bright. You can take breaks just let me know. Production or Maestro. Si, Senior, thank you. Si. Cool. See that's kind of like a fun scene. You can shoot some, I'll probably shoot some detail scenes and then we'll grab probably my drone and scout out the area and see where we can go from here. So when you shoot outside and then you go in a warm cabin specifically one where we're melting snow, or there's just a lot of human activity in there clothes drying and it's warm cuz it was cold when we first got here last night. But right now it's very warm in there. What's gonna happen is your camera's gonna fog up. Not just like the lens, the view finder, but it'll actually fog inside here on the sensor, on the back of your lens. So for me, there's two things that I choose to do in this situation. If I know I'm gonna be shooting outside, which I'm going to be here in a minute, I'll just either put my camera in a little bag and just leave it outside. Like the snow is not gonna get it wet. It's pretty cold out here. So I'll just leave it outside. Or you can still put it in that same bag and you just don't take it out. You don't take it outta the bag, you leave it in the bag and it lets it warm up much slower than the shock factor. And it also protects it from the humidity inside the cabin. Like it'll even fog inside your lens in the elements. It'll take hours to unfog. You'll be next to that. And you'll be missing photos that you could have. So I'll just put it in a bag and then bring it onsite. Drone. Tucker's drone time. You know what that means? Play the drone music, enter it right here in the edit, drone music. Like, and I don't think it's like drone photo weather, it might be there might be something cool that I find up there. But I'm actually pulling the drone out to do a little scout. I like to fly it around the mountains, save some energy and time and we can kinda look for some features that might be cool to shoot photos of and get a lay of the land. So that's one of my favorite reasons to carry a drone in the back country. Just make sure it's legal to fly where you're flying and it is here. I think there's like a feature over here that I kind of wanted to see. There was like a shoot that we could ski. We'll take it outside. (drone wizzing) (upbeat music) Running into a bit of a problem where there's not that much snow on the ground over here as compared to the mountains where we are from we're about four hours away. So we're looking for kind of a area where maybe some snow blew into like a little Creek bed or something and kind of stayed there so that it's deeper for the ski's and snowboard than everywhere else. Shot I have in mind is a bunch of dead trees cuz this is like a burn area. So they're kind of gray and stark looking. And then, so the gray trees and then just snow. So no other underbrush or anything. Wow. It is really snowy out there. Okay. I think we can see the zone kind of where we're skiing yesterday. I'm gonna come down and do a little tour of these neighboring cabins here without having to actually go over there, if we don't see anything we like. It's cold out here. Can you hold still? What do we got? Some cabins over there. Oh nice. But I don't know if they're worth.. Checking out. Yeah. Like skiing over there. They just kind of look all dark brown. Okay. Flying back home. We got a good lay of the land. Shes be really quiet. If you look over here, we have Isaac Joston taking a shot. He's getting ready for it. So. Quiet on set. Quiet on set, I'm taking a shot. We headed back to the car, but there's this little ravine here that doesn't have any other brush. Like it doesn't have little trees. It's just these big gray dead trees. And I think there's a little bit more snow in there. So I'm gonna send our stunt skier, Alex Stroll up there and hopefully get a cool line. I've got 100, 400 lens on here. So I'll probably shoot a type as he starts the line. It'll compress the trees and make it look like it's just, he's kinda like in a bit of a tree maze and obviously I'll get a little bit more of a portrait being really far away here. And then as he's coming down, I'm gonna wide widen my shot to about 100 and that'll give the grand scale of what he's skiing through. Working with athletes is obviously two brains, not just one. So it's hard to communicate exactly where you want them to go. So for me, what I always do is I shoot the scene first without him in it. So then I'll have Alex when he's ready, come over here and I'll point at like, okay, so I want you to ski through this line, hit this feature if you can. And that way he's not like skiing way over here. And, and I'm like, oh, that's not the scene that I wanted to shoot him in. So I just communicate ahead of time. It saves a lot of headache. So now we're just waiting for him to throw some skins on. It'll probably take him 15 minutes to skin up to the top of the line and have him ski. Yeah. There's just a lot of stumps everywhere. Had to be wise about you line picking between two stumps and a rock. Sounds like a movie between a rock and a hard place. Yeah. I'm excited to ski though. The results should be good too. Ms. Roman, I tried to pick a line that is, should be relatively clear and you should be able to just guide bounce it. Guide bounce it? Well you don't need to guide bounce it but it's not gonna, I'm trying to like I'm thinking of your skis. Yeah So. Alright. So from where I'm at here, see the log that goes across. Yeah. I want you to skin up and start your line either just behind it so that you can kind of blast off of the very, of lookers right of that log. So see, like the log goes across and right where it ends on our right. We're looking up. All right. So it'll be skiers left. Okay. I want you to, if you can ski so you can come off of that, like off that little hump like just pop off of it. Yeah. I can show you on the screen here. Yeah. You think the other side is more clear the left side. I don't, I think this makes a nice little alley here, I'll show you. So like I want you, if possible to start here. So like the blast off of this part. Yeah. The Bushman there. Yeah. So like, well to see how the log goes in here, not over the log. If you can, over the log, that's cool. Like right over here, but just over here. Yeah. And then you'll come out and then see this guy here. You'll come straight down this way. Kind of skim by this log here by this tree here in between that little tree and this, and then you can kind of go around to the left side or like, if you can hop this log, cool. Like if you can go just to the left of the bush, it'll be skiers right. Hop that log. Okay. And then let's go forward a bit and then you can kind of come through here, however you want. And then to the, just to the left of this one here. So I'm gonna shoot you as you come further down, I'm gonna shoot at 100. And as you're up there, I'll shoot at 400. Yeah. Do you want me to take a break between each section? Nope you just ski the line. Like you'd ski it as fast as you're comfortable and then you can stop down here somewhere in this gully or just come right to us and then we'll decide if we want to do it again. Or if you want me to send it and you can shoot it. Or whatever. Well, I like it. But yeah. Gogolinos are here, no back. We'll be here waiting for you to skin. Yeah. Yeah. I like this whole scenery. Everything's white. The red just really pops and we got a nice background of the brick trees. So we're just gonna capture photo in movement So go ahead and start it up. No, you're good. Do whatever you want. Oh actually. Yeah. Can you do that again real quick? Like pull it. There you go. Nice. Scoot back a little bit, get some more compression. Shoot out 70. Now pretend you're going like 60 miles per hour. (melancholy music) That's a shot. Top of red. I think what I want to do is I wanna take another shot of running and I'm gonna be in the back of the snowmobile shooting you. So I wanna get some motion blur for this. It's just kind of like it's just there. I might even just post the one of him Shredding it cuz it's kind of cool. And I tell the story, so it's a nice scenery. That's good up. I like this. It's not common of me to shoot white. So looks good. Yeah. It's a fresh new perspective. It's gonna be fun to edit. It's not at all. I'm actually using this for my theme. So another thing that I like to do when it's really cold out and it's not super necessary right now. Like it's not negatives, but I have these they're hand warmers, but they're actually called body warmers and they have this sticky part on the back. And we talked about 'em in the other episode in my studio. But another use for them is sometimes your camera battery just won't last, when it's really cold out. I think right now it's probably 20 degrees, but if it gets below 10, the camera battery won't last. So I'll take this and the sticky side, the battery compartment is right here. I'll just wrap it, just like that around my camera. And then you could hold onto it, bonus. You get to hold onto it and get your hand warm, but it also will keep your camera warm and it's super essential, cuz he's gonna drop this and he's gonna be going fast. This is action. And it's taking him 15, 20 minutes to get up there. I don't want my camera to like be so cold that it's slow on the moment when I need it to work the fastest. So getting it set up, getting it nice and warm. Even if it doesn't feel like it needs it. It's kind of a best way to make sure that I get the shot on the first try. So a couple of settings that I'm gonna have on this is I want a really fast shutter speed. Not just because he's gonna be moving fast, but also because I'm gonna be painting with the camera to follow him at a very long. I think I'm at like 300, 350 millimeters. So that's gonna cause a lot of camera shake and blur. So I'm actually, even though it's super bright out here, I'm at 800 ISO and I'm gonna go one over 2, in my shutter speed. I know that I can sometimes fog up the view finder by putting my eye there, but that's actually gonna help me track a little better and be a little bit more stable. If I have three points of contact, two arms, one forehead. So I'm gonna put my eye on here and then I will just be tracking him as he goes down the fall line. And another thing I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna auto focus on a spot I want, here. And then I'm gonna manually take this lens, put it on a manual focus so that it doesn't try and hunt at the moment that I'm trying to shoot him that way it's kinda locked in. Double check my settings. Yeah. Then we're good. How's he dropping? Can you send it or is it more like a rollover? I can send it after. Okay. No worries. Just gimme a ten second warning so I can get ready. You're talking about that one. That's just there, like by the bush? Yeah. Midway. Yeah. Midway through. Yeah. Camera ready. Okay. (bang) 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Drop it. (camera clicking) You can bail out if you want. Yeah massive drop. I mean it looks the same from down here. Hold on. Just trying to get a, if you come down this line here you go that way and then come down this way towards me. Would that be something you could do? Yeah. Really? Ready? Yeah just few rocks. It's not bad. Not very much speed. You know? Yeah. Look good though. Well. I thought that was a cool shot. You can see the rock from here. I didn't see it. So that's it, I was hoping you go straight down over that log just below that. So it's straight down the gully instead of off to the side. You would've needed to stop from me there. That from the top you just, or you could see air under the log. Oh geez. Yeah. Yeah. So like it kinda looks cool. Yeah. Using the forest to your advantage. That's pretty clever. The red jacket pops. Yeah. Cool shot right there. Sweet. Just behind. Is this far superior. I say we just discover the resort, we'll find much more better stuff. I think you're right. Cause this is just gonna be hit or miss, right? Yeah. He's not very confidence inspiring when you just go over things that are like. There's and there's dead trees on the resort like this. Yeah, no. No. It's forest. We saw that one. One of those lines we saw when we were driving. There. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's probably it, I've never been there. Just like I just slightly outta bounds or something. Gotta be yeah. Okay. Well let's get suit up Can you do a core shot Jack? Sure. This one was particularly loud. Got a slice, but no core shot. Very, very minor. Oh. that's good. It's just loud here, but. Looks good. I think we got what we got a cool shot out of it. How do you feel Rod? Yeah. Yeah. (upbeat music) So we made it to Teton Pass ski resort. And the reason we came here is it's just three miles away from the cabin we were staying at. But the snow level here is so low that it was difficult to do back country skiing without hitting logs and stumps and all that. We did a little bit, but we wanted to get a little more. So we came to the ski resort, which is closed Monday through Thursday. I think so it's fresh powder, which is great. And it also is a controlled environment. There's no risk of avalanche here. So it's nice and safe. You can drive right to the parking lot. You can access it super easy. So I would recommend that if anybody is just starting to do what we're showing you to do here, that you implement some of these techniques on a ski resort where you can go for an hour and get back to your car and it's comfortable. There's other people around and there's no risk of avalanche in most cases. So this is a great place to start. And we're gonna take full advantage of this. This resort, I dunno if you can see, but over there, there's this beautiful Ridge that goes through kind of a burned out forest. And then behind it is just these massive peaks. So it's going to look like we're in the middle of nowhere, cuz it, the ski resort really is in the middle of nowhere, but it's much easier to access than skinning for miles and then skinning up a hill and it's a lot safer. So that means that we can focus more on the photography, more on the fun and more on the adventure. And this was a great plan B. So we're gonna rock. Good. Little tired. But yeah. (upbeat music) No storm will pass. God Ray of blue light. Oh and Stroll will do his most stylish slash he's ever done. Then we'll have that perfect photo. But for now we'll just wait. You can still see the piece of plastic hanging. Oh that's bummer that doesn't look too deep. That literally could yeah. Thing that I would've done different. Always learning when you're in the mountains obviously, but I would have got some walkie-talkies so I wouldn't have to shout to Alex cuz it's quite hard to express nuance and what exactly you want him to do and where you want him to be. And when you want 'em to go, when you have to shout across a gully, luckily it's not super windy, but when it's windy, you're just outta luck when it comes to trying to communicate with people. So in most cases I would've brought walkie talkies, but just forgot 'em, have 'em at home. They're in the car. Oh they're in the car. You have a set in the car, classic. Yeah. (laughing) Even better. So we've got a little bit of mountain back there. Just a little bit. We're gonna shoot it. If it gets better, when we get down to the parking lot, we might skin back up here. Shoot it again. That's kind of how things work in the mountains that as soon as you leave, they get better. For settings on this one, I am going to bump my ISO to 400. I'm going to take my shutter speed to one over 2000 and then, just probably keep my aperture wide open on this lens at four, five, F4.5. And I'm just zoomed in a little bit, past 100 here. I'm actually gonna shoot it portrait because I like the foreground more in the foreground than in the background rather than the wide doesn't really do it for me. And I do a couple of test shots and I think that's it. So then now I'll just shout across the abyss to Stroll and have him send it. Strollman, ready when you are, give me count. (upbeat music) (camera shooting) We're back at the car. We're having some dehydrated meals for lunch. And I think that's a wrap for this ski outing. We basically went to the top, tried to find some trees, found a lot of rocks and then found this really epic Ridge line that we saw on the way up. It's a beautiful view of the mountains in the back. Alex came down, to this sweeping turn and I'm really happy with how that photo turned out. We talked about earlier when we were shooting that photo, maybe going up there, if the weather improved, it has not. And that's part of being in the mountains is that when things don't go the way you expect them to go, you have to make different plans. And for now I think that that shot we got is as good as we're gonna get today, but also just beautiful shot. We're gonna eat some food start heading back and then we'll meet up in the studio and show you how I edit these and kind of my workflow process for that.