Over the Queen’s Birthday long weekend end, I decided to drive to Blayney in western NSW to photograph some wind farms at night. It was going to be cold and the weather forecast said showers. It turned out much worse than that! The wind farms are at 1000m and were totally covered in low cloud. I got nothing, but cold and wet.
Everything worked well; my plans and location scouting on GoogleEarth were good, gear was good…..everything but the weather was on my side. Oh well….better luck next time.
Some time ago I changed my beam cross trigger to 9 Volt to make batteries easier to get. However, I had no idea how long the system would work on such a small battery. The 12 Volt system would run for days, but it’s not so easy to get 12 V batteries when you travel.
The test in the video was to see how many switches you would get from a 9 Volt battery. I had tested “static” life at 5 1/2 hours, but I didn’t know if triggering would have a bearing on the battery life…….seems not. Check the Video.
I had a great week last week with Duane, Lucas and Matt from Sporting Images.Duane has a great attitude towards trying remotes and he let me give some shots a go.
The first shot we tried was from the under-pool port holes. I’d never been down under the Sydney Olympic Aquatic Center, so this was a great thrill.
This shot was not without it’s problems. My camera (1DMK2N) worked ok, but had to shoot at a challenging ISO3200. Duane’s amazing 5DMK2 was shooting at ISO6400 and the shots were amazingly clear, however, I couldn’t stop that set-up from falling asleep after a few minutes. My remote cables are home made and I hadn’t tried them on a 5D MK2, so they were likely the problem.
The second shot was a high shot of the starting blocks. It was a 1DMK2N at ISO3200 in TV Mode at 1/400th Second. The shot is part of an image montage product that Sporting Imagessell. This shot worked well……when I had it focussed correctly (I’ll get to that issue in a later post).
