Recently the folk at Nikon Professional Services got in touch with me to see if I'd like to help them make a couple of little videos.
Check out what we came up with. It's shot in the fabulous five star Blue Mountains and stars cranksters Vince Day and (the most divine) Monique Forestier:
You can watch it in high definition so for max effect I'd recommend selecting that, let it load and crank up the volume!
The second vid is a longer "Behind the Scenes" where I talk about climbing photography
generally and show the set up I used to get some of the footage and, errr, stills.
It was a really fun job. Hope you all enjoy the vids.
Nice couple of video's The first one is really slick and I was almost certain you must
have had a jib of some sort to get some of the "tracking' shots but after watching the
second video it seems you didn't.
I have to say as well the sound design on the first vid is really nice, in the opening
45 seconds the bolt plates 'chinking" and the ropes and draws all being heard as well
as seen really add impact.
The second video was pretty inspiring as well - keep up the good work
In case anyone is interested the filming was mostly on Wild Wild West (23) at Hanging Rock and Debris (22) at Pierces Pass, and there was a little bit of vid of Monique on Tripe (30) at Boronia.
Just to be clear this was a collaborative effort and credit for the close-ups at the start of the first vid and the cliff-top tracking was the work of others.
Yeah, I love the sound work there myself too.
One thing about both these vids that might be of interest to some, they were both entirely shot on Nikon's top new pro camera which also shoots high-definition video (there are a couple of my older still shots cut into the Behind the Scenes but it shows what they were shot on). Hence the shallow depth of field.
On 16/02/2010 nmonteith wrote:
>I remember the day (not so long ago) when Simon was convinced that film
>would always be king. :-)
So true, well kinda anyway -- did I really say always ;-).
I certainly held out against digital for as long as I could. Finally caved in to the D3 a bit over 20 months ago and only shot about five rolls of film last year...
I've also said I had little interest in shooting vid. Still don't. But my own D3s is on order and should be here next week, so we'll see...
I'm really blown away how fast things have been changing lately. In particular some for the new lenses are amazing. I swore by my prime tele lenses until recently they brought out a new 70-200mm, so that's just replaced three prime lenses in my bag... Soon a new 2x tele-converter will be out so I *expect* soon I'll be able to *easily* pack glass that'll give me up to 400mm and still be super sharp. A few years ago that was a dream.
Wow, who would have thought one of the most interesting climbing vids I've watched in a while wasnt about climbing! After watching all the bumpy boys and girls pull hard for so long its great to see the other side. Thanks for posting (cheers Nikon!)
The behind the scenes video was linked from Rock and Ice Base Camp 02.22.10 email:
SIMON CARTER’S PHOTO TRICKS
We just shipped our annual Photo Issue [No. 185], which includes 26 pages of gobsmacking images sure to inspire you to go climbing. It might even get you psyched to pick up the camera yourself and document this incredibly photogenic sport. If that’s the case (or even if you’re mildly interested in how today’s top dogs snag the images you see in Rock and Ice), check out this video of Simon Carter, arguably the best climbing photographer of all time, demonstrating advanced rigging and talking about the technical aspects of shooting rock climbing.
Finally got to a computer that would let me view the vids, and with the time to do it...
~> Good stuff.
Interesting to see the attitude metamorphism from film to digital.
Good to see Monique out cranking again; though she probably never stopped, but I am not Blueys-local enough to know about that ;-)
Well done.
Thanks for sharing.