Mt. Baker

So I ran the test rolls through the Zeiss just a few days before work took me out to the state of Washington. We were filming up on Mt. Baker, which supposedly has some great snowboarding.

The weather was terrible pretty much the entire time we weren’t filming, and most of the time we were filming it was pretty awful, so snow boarding didn’t happen. I kept the Zeiss folded up in my camera bag and if we had a few minutes, I’d just grab a shot from where we were.

Like I said, pretty rough weather. It would snow and sleet at the drop of a hat. Big thick clouds rolled in out of nowhere. And we’re trying to film, so there was a lot of starts and stops. For instance, the weather started coming in here, way off to the south…

And five minutes later…

Normally I’d wander off a little bit while we were on break, but not only did the weather keep us on our toes, but we were actually wearing snow shoes.

So even with snow shoes, wandering too far was pretty hazardous. Our first camera operator, above, fell through the snow up to his hip at one point. It wouldn’t have been so bad except he went through all the way to the lake we were standing on. He spent the next hour or so drying out his boot in the car.

We were honest to God standing above the tree tops at one point. (excuse the phone pics)

I’ve never seen snow that deep and never hope to again. It was just insane.

We knew the weather would be hit or miss while we were there, so my boss planned for a 3 day trip, just to be sure we could get something. We ended up filming the 2nd day and spent the 3rd hiking around where we stayed a bit before heading back to Seattle.

There was a waterfall, so of course I took photos of that.

It was a pretty fun trip, all in all. Except for about 10 minutes when we made it back to the cabin after shooting. I was prepping the cameras for travel and couldn’t find the media cards. I was dead certain all the footage we had was lost in the snow forever up on the mountain. Thankfully, they were indeed in the camera bag. I just gave myself a heart attack for no reason.

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S.P. Crater

Filming the documentary took us back out to Arizona to see S.P. Crater and the rock formations around Sedona. S.P. Crater was first on the docket. That’s “shit pot” crater, for those not in the know. Evidently, who ever owns the property has naming rights, and this particular rancher was pretty colorful, if not down to earth.

It’s a cinder cone volcano of somewhat recent origin with a 6-mile long basalt flow coming out its side. We ended up filming on top of the basalt rather than the cone, which was definitely for the better. I can’t imagine trying to steady myself on a 45 degree slope made of loose scree.

That was probably one of the nicer roads we traveled on this trip.

That’s S.P. Crater in the background.

The basalt flowed out as liquid lava once upon a time. The reason it’s all rubble now is that as the puddle of lava cools, it cools from the outside in, and it’s got the right chemical composition so that instead of creating one big rock, it cracks. And as it cools more and more, it cracks deeper and deeper until it’s cool the whole way through and there’s nothing left but a bunch of rocks. Giant’s Causeway was made the same exact way, but it’s composition allowed for the cracks at the surface to follow the same path all the way through, which is pretty cool.

We spent a day here and got most of what we needed. In documentary work, you really just kind of hope you walk away with what you need, but you never know. We spent the next day in Sedona, which will be in another post.

 

Centralia in June

We went home a couple months ago. Leah’s dad was in pretty bad shape. You scrape your leg and don’t think twice about it, but then suddenly you’re in the ICU with blood poisoning from some necrotizing bacteria. Within hours. Just crazy. Anyway, we got out of the house one evening and shot a roll through the fuji 6×9.

Centralia isn’t big at all, but I was never very familiar with Leah’s neighborhood. It was like exploring somewhere new that I knew already. The Midwest will do that. Leah’s dad is doing well, by the way.