I set out again to shoot a diving video. I picked a new location where I hoped I could set up the camera to get the dives from the right angle, and clean up between dives. The shoot took more than an hour, with the setup and 5 dives, cleaning up between dives. I only got 3 dives from the right angle, and there was only one dive that I really nailed, but the real story is all the setup and back-and-forth I went through to record everything.
I had to hack 2 trails; one to where the camera would be, and one to the opposite side, from which I would be diving, so that my backside would be towards the camera when I was head-first in the mud. As I was setting up the camera I realized I wouldn’t be able to reach the camera to start and stop the recording. I could have let the camera run, but the battery wouldn’t have lasted through the entire shoot and it would have used up most of the space on my SD card for most of nothing. So, I turned on the WiFi on the camera and used my smart-phone to start/stop the camera from across the mud. That worked okay, but the phone lost the WiFi connection once and I had to walk around to reset it. All-in-all, it was a lot of trouble for what will probably be a 3-5 minute video; even shorter if I just include the dives.
By the time I finished shooting the dive video, the tide was coming in so I decided to do something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. In a nutshell, the scene involves being tied down in the mud as the tide comes in. I sort of wish I had shot a time-lapse video of the scene, but I didn’t set up any cameras because I knew it was going to be a very slowly developing situation. I might try to describe the scene better in another blog post.
The entire adventure took about 5 hours, so I had quite a day. I’ll leave it at that, for now.