Motorcycles in Chennai!

I started 2016 off with an awesome week long shoot in Chennai, India for Royal Enfield & W+K! Working with the New Delhi office of W+K, I was tasked with Directing/DPing the "development" story of the New Royal Enfield Himalayan, a lightweight adventure bike. The final project incorporated footage from a previous motorcycle trip I took through Ladakh (the northern tip of India), archival testing footage from Royal Enfield, and new footage we shot on our week long trip. We spent a good chunk of the trip at the Royal Enfield Factories, which was a dream come true! It was amazing to see the legendary Royal Enfield factory (Which has been functional since the 1940s) and also the new Royal Enfield high tech factory south of Chennai. Even eating in the mess hall was awesome!

After we finished up with interviews and factory footage, we headed up to Andhra Pradesh, to film some riding footage with the new Himalayan. While the shoot was demanding, my awesome camera opt Andy Whitlatch managed to snap a few BTS photos.

One last note, the crews in Chennai are wonderful! The production, while challenging on many levels, went off super smooth thanks to amazing local support!

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And here is one of the final edits:

Xenon Primes

At the end of the last year I decided it was time to invest in a set of lenses. While I love Cooke S4s and Ultra primes, they are a bit out of my budget for an everyday set of lenses. After a ton of research, I pulled the trigger on a set of Schneider Xenon Primes. The Xenons have some great features, such as very little breathing, switchable from PL to EF, uniformed size and they also cover full frame sensors. But the thing I really love about the Xenons is how well the lenses are color matched and also how the lenses render skin tones. The bokeh is also wonderful. The Xenons have a more natural look then Canon, but not as contrasty as the CP2s. So far I have mounted the Xenons on the Amira, Red Epic, FS7 and Canon c300, samples of a few combos below.

VASQUE

Over the summer I headed out to Seattle to direct a mini doc for the hiking boot company Vasque. The short film profiles David Page, a legendary outdoor footwear cobbler. We spent a day in Dave Page's shop and then a day on the trail with some of his loyal customers. Nothing beats getting to hike on a shoot!

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RED WING HERITAGE | ITALY

The very first shoot I got to use my new Xenons on was a profile of Yoji Tokuyoshi for Red Wing Heritage. We shot the project in January of 2015. You can see I hadn't picked up a 114 to 100 step down rig and was instead using a foam donuts, which worked just as well.

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COKE ZERO | BILLBOARD

Another cool project I shot with the Xenons this past year was a doc style spot for Coke Zero & Ogilvy. I don't have any BTS photos from this project, but here is one of the many edits that came out of the project.

THE NEW YORKER | THE MOST RECOGNIZABLE VOICE

And I almost forgot this New Yorker Piece, shot with a combo of the FS7 (for the interviews) and Canon c300 for the b-roll. (except Macro shots, which was with a Canon 100mm macro)

ALASKA!

I spent 20 days up in Alaska this past July/August. The first part of the trip was for a project. I was shooting a doc on traditional fishing for the wonderful site Global Oneness Project We spent 10 days on the Yukon river, shooting in the town of Emmonak. Emmonak is a small village near the mouth of the Bering Sea and is only accessible by air (and river 3 months out of the year). Even after working in some pretty remote parts of the world, Emmonak felt as remote as you could great, it had a real outpost feel. The shoot was extremely fascinating (picture buzzing around the Yukon river on speed boats!), and the finish project should be really really beautiful.

I fly a lot. In fact I had enough frequent flier miles to fly my parents up to Alaska, something they always wanted to do. So after the shoot I travel around the rest of Alaska with my folks (Seward, to Valdez to Denali). I put down my camera for most of this time and just took in all the beauty Alaska has to offer. Alaska is pretty amazing!

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Flying out of Anchorage. Fisherman in Emmonak.

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We barely could fit all the gear on this plane.

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Dorothée (producer).

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Emmanuel (director)

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Elias (AC)

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Baggage claim, Alaska style.

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Emmonak at about midnight. The 22 hours of daylight was amazing.

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Joey, the night guard at the fish processing plant, and Emmonak youth out at 2:30am.

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Lunch break on the Yukon river.

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Herman our boot captain prepping some branches for cooking salmon.

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The freshest and best salmon I will probably ever consume.

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After the shoot my parents join me for some more Alaskan adventures. On the bus in Denali National Wilderness.

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Camping on the Kenai Peninsula.

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Hiking and more hiking (second photo is tundra land in Denali).

F3 and the Cooke Panchos

Over the last few months I've been working on a project with the ad agency Draft FCB. Nothing to crazy, just some doc style interviews but if course with my typical creative flare added in. For this project we decided to go with the Sony F3 with a set of Cooke Pancho lenses (rented from Hello World Comm, great rental house by the way). We also had a set of Canon Tilt/Shift lenses rehoused into a PL mount lens. I have to admit after working mostly with my Canon Primes (mostly 1.2s and 1.4s) and Zeiss Super Speeds, the Cooke's felt slow, but since we had full crews and grip trucks at all locations, it was never a big issue.

The Cooke's did prove to be incredibly sharp. Even the 100mm with a double held up extremely well in sharpness. I felt like the cooke's shined the most in natural light, but then again utilizing natural light is kind of my thing so I'm a little bias.

The other thing I really liked about the F3/Cooke set up was the size and functionally. Most of my other work this year has been either on the 5d or the RED, so the F3/Cooke combo was a perfect middle ground. Something light enough to run around with, but something solid enough it felt like a proper camera package. Oh and running sound into the camera, being able to jam sync and having HDSDI out is also kinda nice!

After shoots in Nashville, Dallas and Baltimore area, the project is all warped up and I'm pretty bummed because it was a lot of fun! I just want to thank my amazing AC Nicholas Lindner (this trip may not have been as crazy as Bolivia but we still had an awesome time!) and all the local crew we worked with, especially Darrell Tawney of Commando Lighting. If you are ever in Dallas, hire him, you won't be let down.

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