Video of the Mesquite shipwreck

[john j]

Video of the Mesquite shipwreck in Lake Superior is now posted at:

[Hydro]

cool wreck thanks for posting the video.... did it take an hour boat ride to get there?

[DetectorGuy]

Very, VERY nice job on the camera work John! Like I told you before, You make us look like guppies and I mean that in the most respectful way. Everytime I think I got my crap together and think I am on top of my game... I am inspired again. Your videos are incredible!
John

[john j]

Thanks very much for the compliment.  I am also inspired by the nice things you said, so thank you.

We left from Copper Harbor in this case, so the boat ride was around 45 minutes.  The lake was reasonably calm,  so we were able to run the boat at planing speed.  If the waves don't allow that, then of course it takes much longer.  I love the ride from Copper Harbor to the Mesquite.  The scenery is beautiful.

For good video, you must have a lot of light.  Good color quality, very uniform, diffuse light over the whole viewing range of the lens.  What sucks is that lights are really expensive (not that cameras are cheap either) and at least in my experience with HID's, they are fragile and unreliable too.  I've got some Titan LED video lights being built right now that I hope will solve the reliability problem.

One secret to good video is slow and smooth motion of the camera.  Hold the camera steady and pan it very very slowly.  As it was first explained to me, you need to move the camera so slowly that you think you are actually going too slow, then that will be just about the right speed.  Constantly remind yourself to be slow and smooth.  As you shoot, watch something in the image as a reference point to judge how steady you are keeping the camera. 

I try to give 100% priority to the camera position when I am shooting.  I move my body however I have to in order to keep the camera steady.  There are places in the Mesquite video (in the tight hallways) where the lights hit parts of the ship, causing jerkiness in the image.  The hallway scene after the galley shot is an example.  It was really tight in there with the camera and there was a lot of banging around.  I had to keep the lights partially retracted, so the bottom of the image is a little underexposed sometimes too. 

A major help is to have the camera well balanced and neutrally buoyant in the water.  Cameras that are too heavy or not stable in the shooting postion are miserable to work with because you are alwyas fighting to keep the camera in position.  The way to get perfect camera buoyancy and stability is to use syntactic foam pieces to adjust the buoyancy.  In an upcoming issue of Wreck Diving Magazine (I believe in the next issue) there will be an article I wrote on how to balance out a camera system with syntactic foam.  I get regular questions about how to do that, so I wrote the article hoping that it will provide some benefit to those who are interested.  I've got my camera system so well balanced that I can hold it with just two fingers if I have to.  It really helps me do a better job.

But the most important trick I use is editing out all the garbage.  I do a lot of that.