2 days until my trip to Honduras. My bags are packed and I'm ready to go... (take it away John Denver!)
I'm going to Honduras to shoot a documentary on sustainable farming using all digital photography & video gear. Shooting in HiDef onto portable harddrives. Did I mention that there's no electricity where I'll be?
So - this is my one chance to simply geek out on the technical side of this trip. I am a devote gadget geek -- I love new things that work. I'm shooting with a new panasonic video camera - uncompressed HiDef video straight to hard drive & P2 cards, with a terabyte hard drive for offloading daily footage. YES YES YES!
What that means is that absolutely everything I have will be electrical, and there's no physical backup for what I shoot. So, I will have a bunch batteries of so many different flavors (camera batteries, hard drive battereis, mic batteries) and one really big battery to charge the rest of my batteries and run the poratble acrhive hard drive -- and this big battery is solar. Anyone know any good sunshine chants?
One point is that I'm taking some of the newest technology into one of the least technical places on earth. Another intersting point, since no one where we are going has electricity, I'm guessing many of them have not seen TV, or if they have, it is only on a very rare occasion. How do I explain what an interview is? I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that while the people we interview will be very curious - they will not be very self conscious. I think it will make for some extremely natural conversations.
I've also been warned against trying to pull this off using the portable hard drives... it is a rain forest afterall, and the dirt and humidity will be our worst enemies. I've tested the gear quite a bit, but nothing I've done yet will come close to the environment I will be in this Thursday.
The easiest part of this project - getting good shots of the environment (good and bad.) I have never been to Honduras - actually, I've never been out of the country... but I imagine shooting in the rain forest is next to impossible to screw up. Just point the camer and make sure something is in focus.
So - that's my simple tech discussion. It's really the least interesting part of this trip - but for a geek, it's going to be a thrill.