THE DAY AFTER THE BANGKOK RED SHIRT CRACKDOWN 2010

I took these photos on 20 May 2010 in the streets of central Bangkok. I'd pretty much forgotten about them but talk of what might happen after this weekend's Thai general election brought them to mind so I thought I'd post them here.

20 May 2010 was the day after the Red Shirt rally was ended by force by the Thai military. Over five days of fierce fighting on the streets roughly 90 people were killed. The tens of thousands of Red Shirts who'd spent over two months camped out in largely peaceful protest against the government fled.

If anyone is interested they were taken on my Minox ML 35mm camera.

Lower Sukhumvit (the Bangkok equivalent of Oxford Street or 5th Avenue) was silent, no traffic and fume-free for once. 

This soilder was alone guarding nothing but piles of rubbish.

All the equipment from this beauty salon was strewn across the pavement. The beauticians had reported to work dressed in pink uniforms.

With no river taxis the dark boiling waters of the canals were unusually calm and reflective. It seemed to match the mood of the few people who were out trying to make sense of what had just happened.

The remains of Central World - one of the biggest and most modern shopping centers in Bangkok.

Amongst it all there were already signs of normal life returning.

The clean-up had already begun. The day after this 5000 Bangkok residents took to the streets and helped.

ADVENTURES IN 3D

A couple of months ago I did my first 3D shoot. It involved 12 days in Tokyo, 10 days in Singapore and 12 days in Shanghai. These might not be the most remote places on Earth but shooting them in 3D for over a month was an adventure in itself - especially as we were in Tokyo during the earthquake.


Shooting factual TV in 3D is such a new thing - there were many stumbling blocks throughout the shoot but we got through it and came home with 350 decent shots and a good programme. In 2D this is to be expected but based on the horror stories I’ve heard in 3D it seems to be quite an achievement!

There’s no real consensus on the best way shoot 3D documentary TV. New technology is coming out every few weeks and I think that even people who seem to know their stuff are winging it much more than they let on. The one thing that holds true though is that there are certain rules of physics (which I won’t go into now!) to shooting 3D which no technology can circumnavigate. If you’re going to shoot 3D you have to read up, choose the gear that’s best for you and take your time to get it right.

We opted to use a large rig which could be changed to shoot both in mirror alignment and side-by-side (see the rig here - www.pro3D.tv). I’ve heard of a lot of other factual productions using side-by-side only rigs, which is easier and cheaper but very limiting. As we were filming character based stuff we shot in the mirror set up almost exclusively. This slowed us down a lot but meant we were shooting technically good, useable 3D.

We used two 5D’s mounted on a bar to shoot 3D time-lapses to provide dramatic cityscapes for the show. This worked really well as there simply wasn’t time to get the big rig away from the ‘content’ set-ups to shoot GVs.

The news from the edit is that our stuff has ‘muxed’ really easily and there have been very few headaches (literally) to report. Which is great news.

In side-by-side mode shooting Pudong area of Shanghai from a boat.

On The Bund shooting Tai Chi at dawn.

The crew at the end of the Singapore leg of the shoot.

Rig/derig/rig/derig X 350.

The empty aisles of Tokyo's convenience stores for days after the earthquake.

NEW UNDERWATER SHOWREEL

Here's a showreel of all my underwater stuff from the last couple of years.

Most of it was filmed for series 3 of 'Monster Fish with Zeb Hogan' for National Geographic. The shots of Jellyfish are from 'Monster Jellyfish Attack' also on Nat Geo.

WIldlife featured - Saw Fish (Australia), Long Fin Eel (New Zealand), Goonch Catfish (India), Fresh Water Crocodile (Australia), Salt Water Crocodile (Australia), Whip Ray (Australia), Mahseer fish (India), Sockeye Salmon (Russia), Nomura Giant Jellyfish (Japan), Bull Shark (Australia).

Music is by Randy Newman (without permission!) and Protectors (with permission!) www.protectorsband.com their album is brilliant.

Enjoy!

WOOP! PICTURE IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE MARCH 2011

Pretty chuffed at the moment as an underwater photo I took of Zeb Hogan holding a Goonch Catfish in India has been published in National Geographic Magazine.

It's the March issue with the fox on the cover.

I've known this was going to happen for a few months but I didn't believe it until I bought a copy!

I might retire now.




In other news - I've just spent a week prepping for my first 3D shoot. All very interesting. I'll write it up soon!

NEW WEBSITE AND VIDEO CLIPS ARE GO!

Happy new year and all that!

At long last I've updated my hideously out-of-date website. I also have a new web address to match his blog. You can find it at www.adventuresinHD.com.

At the moment it's just one page but hopefully it will expand during the year. There are two brand new video clips up there. One is from National Geographic's 'Monster Jellyfish Attack', a documentary I worked on in Japan last year. It features lots of underwater footage of the two-meter-wide sea monsters!

The other clip is from 'If Food Run's Out'. This programme (or program for you Americans) looks at rising food prices and falling availability. It paints a potentially bleak picture of the future for millions of people. We filmed drama sequences representing the future but the reality is that much of it is happening already.

I'm currently looking at 2011 through a pair of red and green glasses. In February I'm shooting my first doc in 3D, and there's plans on the table for more after that. I'm currently reading like mad, going to see as many 3D films as I can and a doing course with these guys in a few weeks. I'll do a write up of how the shoot goes on here once it's done.

Until then here's a few pics of me in the croc pool in Australia (for the full story see a couple of posts down - Crocs and Dangerous Fish in Northern Australia .)

Happy new year!

UNDERWATER LIGHTING AND LEARNING FROM YOUR MISTAKES

In February I shot a night underwater scene of spear fishermen in Laos. There are two things that have stayed with me from this night’s filming - 1) the fishermen had been on the rice whiskey and found it hilarious to shoot their harpoons as near as they could to me while I garggled ‘noooooooooo’ through my snorkel. And 2) If there was any scene from this year I wish I could go back and shoot again it would be this one.

It’s not awful, it made the cut and it works OK but I have never been happy with it. The old excuses of limited time, difficult location and not enough planning time were all present that night but when it comes down to it my approach was wrong. I knew the theory but there wasn’t the thinking or setup time to execute it properly so I just went with the solve-all camera mounted lamps and I’ve regretted it ever since I viewed the rushes at 4am that night.

It’s now December and I’ve just shot the final episode of ‘Monsterfish series 3’ in New Zealand and the Solomon Islands. For the first time since that dry-season night in Laos we had a night underwater scene to shoot. I wasn’t going to mess it up this time.

Our location was the crystal clear Lake Rotoiti on New Zealand’s South Island - some of the clearest fresh water I’ve ever seen. The giant eels we were there to film live in the shade under a small jetty. They come out at night to feed.

This was a better location than Laos - easier to control, shallow water, above water access on the jetty, full scuba gear, the previous night shooting tests and eels that we found were not skittish in the slightest. I was determined to make up for the disappointment of Laos.

So here’s the theory - it’s pretty simple - the trick to lighting underwater is to not light the water between the camera and the subject. Underwater clarity is everything. If there are sediment particles suspended in the water (which there always will be, especially in fresh water) and you shine a light at them you’re going to see them, if you don’t they remain invisible and the camera effectively sees right through them. This is known as 'backscsatter'.

By blasting a camera mounted light forwards you only succeed in illuminating the sediment. Add to this the fact that light drops off faster in water than in air so the sediment near the camera/lamp burns bright while your subject a few feet away can be under exposed. Not a good look.

Here's a frame from the Laos shoot to illustrate the problem. The blacks have turned to haze with all the light on the particles in the water. It's as if the subject is behind a fog. Also notice the fast drop-off - the fish and face are correctly exposed yet his shoulder is burnt-out - less than a foot closer to the lamp.

There are a few ways to solve this problem. The most common is to angle camera-mounted lights in such away that they hit the subject but not the water directly in front of the lens. It's often the only practical way to illuminate underwater and yet for picture results it’s probably the worst - especially when it's done badly like in Laos. Above water I do anything I can not to use a camera-mounted light so I wanted to try to apply the same idea to underwater.

Given our ideal, controllable location wanted not to use camera-mounted lights at all. This is where the jetty comes in. We mounted a bright and hard L.E.D. torch on the jetty pointing down into the water. This created a shaft of light which the surface ripples refracted and broke up to make a beautiful shaft of ‘cathedral’ light underwater. With a little bit of creative license you could just about believe it was moon light shining down.

I then used a camera mounted underwater lamp dimmed to it’s minimum setting just to bring the tiniest bit of fill light into the eels in the foreground, without lighting too much of the sediment. I extend the lamp on arms forward and outwards from the camera so the lamp was almost a foot forward of the lens. This means the water directly in front of the lens is not illuminated, reducing the glare from the sediment. I also gave our host who was in the water with me a torch, dimmed to it's lowest setting as a practical lamp to use in shot.


The results were awesome. The sediment was not visible at all in some shots so the water just looks like a black hole with eels floating in and out of frame. On the jetty the team threw food into the shaft of light - the eels obliged and formed a feeding ball as if on a mark.

I did various shots but one of my favorites came from lying on the bottom and shooting upwards towards the light creating a silhouette of maybe fifty eels moving in and out of the light. Some eels would wander off to have a closer look at me and the camera light picked them out beautifully as they looked into the lens (the lamp dimmed so low that eels only 6 inches away from it were correctly exposed).

One side effect of this method is the water around myself was in complete blackness and from time to time five foot long eels would appear from nowhere and bump into my head. Quite a shock to start with but after a couple of hours down there we realised they really weren’t interested in eating us - not while there were people throwing sausages and tuna into the water from the pier anyway.

At one point I swam right through the feeding ball. One of the larger eels hit the catch that holds the monitor shut, flicked it open and flooded it! Oooops, well at least it wasn’t my fault for once. A few days drying on the heat of the dashboard and the monitor was back up and running.

I still wish I could go back and shoot the Laos scene again but at least I've now shot a night scene I'm happy with and proved to myself that I have learned something this year!

CROCS AND BIG FISH IN NORTHERN TERRITORY, AUSTRALIA

I’ve just finished a shoot in Northern Territory, Australia. The idea of the show is to investigate how six huge predators manage to co-exist in the rivers here. Saltwater crocs, freshwater crocs, saw fish, barramundi, whip ray, and bull sharks.

We spent three days camping in the bush filming as many off these as we could. The crocs were everywhere. At night you could see their eyes all along the river’s edge and by day they’d disappeared, which was a tad disconcerting especially when my job is to be swimming around in it. We camped at the top of a hill as they’re ‘probably’ too lazy to climb it.

Much of the fishing needed to be done at night so we’re hanging around on the edges of dark croc infested water. On the first night we caught a whip ray and put it in a pool which we’d separated from the main river with a rock barrage to save it till morning light. In the morning we tagged and released it. I swam with it across the shallow river and got some nice footage. The way rays swim is beautiful - floating over the sand and effortlessly sliding through the water with a ripple of their edges.

We’re filming with Dion and Kate who are biologists from Territory Wildlife Park. They’ve brought a 2 metre long sawfish to re-release into the wild as it has out-grown their aquarium. They get it out of the transporter tank and it thrashes it’s toothed-snout around with incredible power. Until then I had only ever seen footage of sawfish being a bit lame with their rostrum (snout) so it was quite a shock and a wake up call as in a few minutes I’m going to be in the water with it.

We put it into a large pool corralled off from open water so it can’t escape. We need to film it and Dion and Kate wanted to observe and tag it before they release it for good.

I watch it’s movements for a while and slowly get in the water at one of the points it keeps passing. The waters is only about 18 inches deep. I fill my pockets with stones so I’m lying on the bottom on my front breathing through a snorkel. The water is very clear for fresh water and the sun is high so the scene looks great but it’s still only about three or four feet visibility. This would be fine if only there wasn’t a seven foot fish with lethal nose in the pool with me.

Every time it passes it comes out of nowhere to be right in my face. I can’t see it with enough notice to get it framed up well. So our AP Shaun stands on the edge of the pool shouting out where the fish is, “11 O’clock, heading straight for you!”. This works a treat.

Unwittingly I’ve got my legs apart for balance when Shaun shouts, “Behind you, heading straight for you, close your legs!”.

This seems a good time to establish the things I know about sawfish -

1) They lash out with their rostrum when they panic.

2) They can’t swim backwards. A dead end will panic them.

Between my legs is currently a sawfish dead end. There’s no way I’m closing my legs around it.

“Rob, it’s between your legs”.

I’m not moving a muscle. Lying on my front means I can’t look down at all so I just lie there imagining what’s happening between my legs. My future ability to have children is floating in the balance.

After what seems like an age I feel the fish brush under my shin.

“She’s gone Rob”.

Bloody hell. I can breath and I can close my legs.

For the next hour or so she circles the pool and I get some great shots. It’s a privilege to be so close to such rare and incredible animal in the wild. I think the sawfish might have jumped to the top of my favorite fish table.

When we’ve got what we need we catch her, tag her and let her go into the main river. She swims off quite happy. She will be tracked for the next week to make sure she adapts back into the wild.

The next day is spent filming three 3 ft long bull sharks and a barramundi fish who plays the game and hangs out under a snag (a fallen tree in the river) for hours while we film him.

A few days later we go out with some national park rangers to catch a saltwater crocodile. In Australia’s national parks there’s an uneasy relationship between people and ‘salties’. As an indigenous species the salties are looked after however the parks other role is to encourage people to use the waterways. Salties are often aggressive and territorial which leads to occasional problems with them eating people.

One solution the rangers practice here is the catching of crocs that look to be getting too cocky. They truss them up for a couple of hours and then release them. The theory being that the saltie learns who’s boss.

So we’re filming just that. We get a fairly large 11ft saltie croc. After filming with it we set up  to release it on a boat ramp. Our presenter Zeb and some of the rangers are sitting on the croc to hold it down. Producer Tuktaa and I are filming from the head end of the croc. We’re waiting for the signal for us to get out of the way - being as we are right between the croc and the river. Zeb and the rangers are given the instruction to jump off the croc and retreat. We’re aren’t given our signal. . . the croc is lose and we’re right in it’s path.

It starts to move towards the river (and us) and it doesn’t take us or the ranger long to realise we shouldn’t be where we are. He shouts to us and we leap up a 5 foot high wall to our right. I don’t know how I got up it with the camera and I don’t know how Tuktaa got up it all as it’s pretty much the same height as her. I just get the camera back to my eye in time to shoot the croc hitting the water. Near miss number 1.

A few days later we have a day of underwater shooting in a facility where they have controlled pools for the filming of crocs. The way it works is the croc wranglers tie the croc’s mouth shut with fishing line - enough to keep it shut but little enough that the line can’t be seen by the camera. I’ve never done this sort of filming before and I’m not really that keen on tying up animals just to film them. It doesn’t seem to be as bad as it sounds for the crocs though. They don’t need to open their mouths to breath and they’re incredibly tough animals - the treatment of them when the we were catching them in the national park was quite brutal.

First up is a smallish (7 ft) freshwater croc. ‘Freshies’ are not as aggressive or big as salties, that said they can still do you a lot of damage if they want to. I’m in the small natural looking pool and the croc is put in. It’s cool. The water is clear and the croc is quite lively, swimming about underwater. I get some good stuff.

A fallen tree has been put across the pool to make it look like a snag in a natural river. I lock my ankles to the branches and hang, holding my breath, upside down in the water filming the croc swimming round me. This works well to give me some grounding and stops me kicking up the sediment on the bottom. After about an hour we’ve got some great stuff. Time for the saltie.

The saltie is much bigger - 13ft. And it’s a much chunkier animal too - the largest reptile species in the world and basically a living dinosaur. By now the sediment in the water has been unavoidably kicked up and so the visibility is down to little more than 18 inches.

This means I have to get really close to the croc before I can even see it. I’m swimming around the bottom of the pool literally bumping into one of the fiercest predators in the world. I get a few shots but it’s less keen to swim around than the freshie was. I call for the wrangler to move it for me.

He reaches down and manages to pick it up - only because in water it’s almost neutrally buoyant - on land it had taken four of us to carry it to the pool. He takes it to the shallows and sits on it’s back so I can get close ups of it’s head in the clearer shallow water.

I’m 3 or 4 feet away when the croc has a bit of wriggle and suddenly his jaws are wide open! The fishing line has snapped! I back off and struggle out of the water with the heavy underwater housing at about an 8th of the speed I’d have liked to have been out of there. The wrangler is still sitting on the crocs back and the croc is writhing about. I grab a rope, and copying what we’d filmed when catching crocs a few nights earlier, I make a noose and drop it over the crocs nose and pull it tight. The noose tightens and locks between it’s teeth, the wrangler then reaches forwards and closes it’s mouth. Shaun then holds the jaws of the 13ft croc shut while the wrangler tapes them closed!

It starts to rain and gets dark so that’s it for the day. Probably for the best.