Category: Technology

Lighting

My primary choice for lighting was to go with LitePanels LED lights (and of course flexible reflectors). The LitePanels Micro, Mini Pro and Croma were the perfect choice. All the reasons you’d go for LED in the first place – low power consumption, low heat and small size – worked for us, plus the ability to vary the output down to “just enough” to fill in facial shadows, made them perfect. We particularly loved the Croma’s ability to dial in just the right color temperature. Also important for our journey was that they ran on standard, rechargeable AA batteries. To be disposing of hundreds of batteries would not have sat well with Solar Odyssey’s “green” message.

Cameras

My choice of cameras were from Sony: a single NEX FS100 and three NEX7 DSLRs. (One DSLR was destined for the helicopter platform that never eventuated leaving it spare.) I totally love these cameras, even with their kit lenses. The NEX7s are a great camera and I’ll be keeping at least one for future personal use – for both still and video use. Audio quality is good enough to use to sync with second system audio, or with a directional microphone, good enough for field voice recording.

Now that Solar Odyssey is over for me, I thought it was a good time to look back at the equipment choices and whether or not I’d make the same choices again. As it turned out, I ended up producing a different show than the one that I was preparing for, which was largely based on a solar powered boat. As it turned out, we never tested the workflow on the boat (as we never actually got on the boat).