This is my assistant Robert with the doorway dolly getting the timing of the move dialed in. I can’t reveal yet what we were shooting, as it has yet to be posted and published by the magazine, however I can tell you this was one of the most personally moving stories I have ever done- but more on that when I can show you the results.

The lens is a 70-200 f4IS lens, set at f8-f16, depending on the color of the subject. I like that lens quite a bit. Sharp, fast focusing in autofocus mode, clearly not the case here, and light weight. We initially had a 2 stop ND on the lens, but decided we wanted the depth of field. The lights, which are out of frame are 1k, 650k and 150k tungsten frensels. There is a bit of fill coming from the light panel mounted on camera. Once we got going, we took the Marshal off the camera cheese plate and mounted it to the dolly. We found that balanced the camera better on the fluid head. One of the very tricky things on this set up, is that because we had very little room to work in, the camera is as close to the back wall as possible. Thus, all the focusing and framing are done in the Marshal, but the camera moves get reversed, which is a bit weird. I had wanted to do a pan plus a dolly move, but there no way I was going to attempt that from a reversed monitor.

When we were actually shooting, I walked with the dolly facing the subject and glanced at the monitor to check composition. We tried having me sit on the dolly and view the monitor, but we found that because I am pretty animated when working, the dolly shook, and thus the image was not stable.

We chose the doorway dolly, rather than lay track purely as a time savings. The floor was reasonably flat, of course the one dip was right in the middle of the dolly move, but rather than deal with track and all that ensues, we went with the simpler method. My feeling was that if I only had 6 hours to get footage, I would rather be spending it on running the camera than messing with dolly track. Whatever bump we hit seems to have been handled by the IS lens.

The subjects we were shooting were a bit twitchy, yea just a bit, so that focusing on the eyes became a real challange. We did some with the focus enhancement in the Marshal, but decided the safest way was with the 5x magnifier in the 5DII.

shutter 1/60
white balance 3300 as read from a hand held color meter
asa 650

Keep checking the blog, I should be able to post footage next week. If anyone has any questions please let me know, I would be happy to share.