Before I pull out the gear I should probably tell you a little bit about me. I’ve been making images for about 20 years, from impeachment hearings and Supreme Court inaugurations to annual reports, to the white house, I’ve served as an official photographer to folks like the Rolling Stones and Liz Taylor. I’ve produced commercial and advertising work for the likes of Lockheed Martin to Coca Cola, from XM satellite radio to General Motors.

I’ve probably traveled to every state. Among them Alaska, Arizona, and trips to Cuba and Prague for editorial assignments. Wherever we go, it’s the need for gear that means we’re traveling on business. To that end, we make sure we have the right gear for the right job and that invariably changes. It’s critical too that our gear get into the aircraft, make the connection, and it survives the luggage handlers… and that’s a challenge.

So let’s show you what we use, why we use it, and more importantly, how we keep it organized for the load and go day trip to the air cargo drop off. These video are just as much for our newly minded staff, insights and “how to’s” for our new interns, and a response to other photographers who ask what we use and how we pack it.

Lastly on the occasion that a client asks why it costs so much to produce an image for a specific shoot, because “Its just one portrait” they say, we can share with them this video so they too can understand what it takes to make “Just one picture”.
So here we go. Next up we’ll go over the various lighting tools we use for assignments. From our portable, battery powered Hensel Porty’s, to our Hensel Vela’s and our Hensel Tria kits. To our Rololights and why we use each. One nice thing about being standardized to Hensel is we have one series of speed rings, grid spot connectors, and so forth.

Since every job is different, we want to have our gear segmented out and in their own cases, so we can bring what we need and just what we need. Further, every case is labeled with our contact information in case an absent minded assistant leaves something behind. Also, because gear can break down, every system is labeled with a number so we can know which unit it is. This way when something goes down, you know which one needs to be set aside. Each kit is different and serves a very specific purpose.

So let’s take a look.

This is what we call our light modifier kit. It’s in a Versa Flex case and it’s got everything we’d ever need in it.

We’ve got Road Rags . I’ll tell you a little bit about the Road Rags . Road Rags are items that we can set up to flag the light. We have translucent, we have full black, and we have two degrees of light reduction that would cut down the sun. They are labeled with my name and phone number.

The great things about the Road Rags kit is that they are completely compact and set up into a frame, which is really nice. Then what we can do is slip on a translucent, so we slip on a translucent here, snap this like that. What’s really nice is this will knock the sun down and turn the sun into a light soft box. What you’ll notice and what’s important is the road rags do not have a frame on this edge, so this edge here or this edge would cause a shadow. This edge does not cause a shadow, just a natural fall off from diffused light to hard light onto the subject.

The same holds true with the second one. Each of them is labeled Flag one and Flag two. So the nice thing about this and we use this on shoots a lot when we’re working with our Porty’s when we’re out using a big soft box on our subject we’ll use this to cut down the sun just so its not as harsh on our subjects. Again noticing there is no edge up here providing a natural fall off. Again, the sun will go through but it will cut the light down. The same holds true for a complete blackout and even an additional density.

So that’s actually the small Road Rags kit. And see 18x24, everything on here is labeled and has a tag laminated with the item number so we know what belongs in here, contact information as well. The last thing I want to do is lose a light flag kit.

This is our larger Road Rags Kit. It is identical to the other one, it is just much larger. As you can see here the frames come out and it goes together almost by itself, but it is much wider.  The Road Rags that we showed you, the 18x24 really works well for one person. If you have to use a two person flag where you are cutting the light down or making it translucent, this is the frame to use.

It has the full blackout color as well as the two diffusions. What’s nice about this is they are color coded so if you’re using green on this it’s the same density on this as the other one, and you also have translucent. You also have two wire frames as a full Road Rags kit. They slip on very easily. Again, you’ll notice the red density is much darker and much less translucent then the green.

So it just depends on how much light you are trying to cut of when using one of these. And you’ll notice the difference in size, this one works really well for one person, this one works really well for two people.

Next up is our Plume Strip 100; a strip is a much narrower soft box. Its length is the same; in a Plume 100 the length is 38 inches, however instead of being 28 inches wide it’s just 14 or half the distance. As I said we keep packed in the kit the Chimera quick release speed ring so we know we have the speed rings that we need when we’re out on a shoot.

Also packed in here is the wafer that Plume talks about. This one has been gently used but still works just fine. In addition packed in here is the front diffusion panel. Again notice that it is much narrower but still the same length as a normal soft box. This is the back cowling; the cowling goes over the back of the soft box.

Packed in here as well is the egg crate. This egg crate goes over the front of the soft box making sure the light goes only where you want it and not where you don’t. Because we never know what soft boxes we are going to need, these are very compartmentalized, everything is stored all together so we can just grab a full kit and go to where we need to. So that’s our Plume Strip 100. Its 14 inches wide and 38 inches long.

Next we’ll go to the Plume 100, which is 30x39. Again packed in here is the Chimera quick release speed ring. Also packed in here is the wafer, the egg crates for this particular soft box is of course much larger and fabric so you can just get the light going where you want it to go. Also in here is the soft box, the cowling, and the front diffusion panel. Again it all packs nicely and neatly into the kit here.

We also have the Plume Strip 140. Again packed inside are the wafers, the diffusion panel. Also we have the ability to go even narrower on the Plume Strip 140 so that your light is actually a very, very narrow, narrow swath so that you can have a very long swath with a very narrow strip of light that you couldn’t normally get.

Also packed in here are our light tools. Again our light tools, very narrow yet very long. All of this packs very nicely and neatly back in here. So that’s the Plume Strip 140.

Next up is our straight Plume 140. It’s not the strip; it’s of course the wider one. speed ring, diffusion panel, wafers, and the egg crates, the soft box, wands, and the cowling, everything packs very neatly. So that’s the Plume 140.

This is the Plume Strip 200. It’s an extremely large soft box but it’s extremely narrow. The wands actually come in more then one piece because of the way the whole entire soft box goes together.

But in addition in here, the front diffusion panel, the wafer, the back cowling, we actually have to pack the grid separate because it is such a large grid, but it stays in here as well.  This is the Plume Strip 200.

This is the Hexo 180. In the Hexo 180, in addition to the soft box we have the speed ring, front diffusion panel, and the wafer that goes in the center. All of that packs nicely and neatly. We do not have a light tools kit for this soft box because they just don’t make them, it such a big soft box.

Our last soft box is what I like to call the mother of all soft boxes. If Plume made one this big, I would own it. But since they don’t I had to go to the Chimera line. This is the Chimera line 5-7.

It can be in either the 5 foot or the 7 foot configuration and its just massive, packed in here is the soft box itself along with the extra extension that makes the 7 actually a 7, it adds 2 feet to the outside of the soft box.

So you get 2 front diffusion panels, one for the 7, one for the 5, and Chimera also has they’re own brand of an inner baffold, you can see Chimera has put in varying densities of diffusion material so that the light comes out less in the center and more on the outside. It’s a different configuration then the Plume wafer, I prefer the Plume wafer in terms of the diffusion material that they are using inside is just a better solution then this.

But since I can’t get this in a Plume series, I’ve gone with the Chimera, which is a great solution and I use it all the time. Chimera line 5-7 also has 2 completely separate packs that allow us to use the egg crates as well. 

These are massive egg crates if you can imagine a 7 foot egg crate, its just one massive crate here, but its all really compact and its really great to travel with. It gives you such control over your light, even when you have such a large light source.

So we have a 5-foot and a 7-foot egg crate for 2 different sizes depending on how we set the soft box up. So that’s our soft box or our light modifier kit.

In addition to all this we do have some very, very small soft boxes and we have a very large reflector packed in here.

What’s nice about this reflector, its an Amvona reflector, is that its silver, very large, subtracted black on the other side, and what’s really cool is that you can zip off the silver and go to gold, white, or translucent. So it’s a multi functional light modifier that packs up into a really small space.

So the Amvona just tucks into the top of the lid and with a little bit of effort it all packs nice and neatly into this Versa Flex case. We also make sure this case fits in airline specs as far as weight is concerned. 

This case just below 75 pounds falls well within the 100-pound weight limit that most airlines have.  This case also has a set of wheels and wands. A wheel on either side and they screw together and will allow us to roll this case from point A to point B when we don’t have 2 people to carry it.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

Whatever lighting we travel with, we need stands and accessories.  From a floor stand to other stands, to very small stands, super clamps, spring clamps, mini-tripods, Blackwrap.  Everything that we need is here in this case.  In addition to that, we also keep in here when we’re traveling, our remotes kit.  This is full of Pocket Wizards; we’ll talk more about those in a little bit.
One of the nice things about these Bogen stands is that they’re interlocking, which means two stands are much more compact than if they were just stands that were strewed about.  When you’re traveling, making sure that things stay together, stay tight is absolutely critical.  These things pop together, and they connect back together, and they lock together.  So we have the small version, and the large version.
We have another floor stand, this thing allows us to get a light down very near to the ground, springs all the way out and it’s a low stand.  Very similar to this one, this one just has a little bit more stability.  All of it compacts up very nicely and neatly.  This is another small stand that works really well on the backgrounds, behind the subject, if we are trying to put a light there.  Also, our grid spots are right here.
These grid spots fit nicely and neatly into the various reflectors that we have depending on the density.  The key is to make sure that when they’re in the traveling case that they travel very carefully and very securely because it’s really easy to damage the inner honeycomb of the grid. 

There are separate kits, where we can store spring clamps.  This is a scissor clamp, the great thing about a scissor clamp is it allows you to widen these out, put these up onto a suspended ceiling a drop ceiling in an office building, and then bring it together, bring it taught and spin it tight.  And then it’s not going to separate.  And you can actually hang a light from a drop ceiling in an office building. 

We have mini-clamps; these clamps work really well.  They’re Matthellini clamps.  They clamp onto things and we can clip onto them with our lights.  It’s important on these spring clamps, wherever possible, that you use a safety wire.  This safety wire makes sure that if the head were to drop off this for some reason, it wouldn’t fall onto the subject.
Again, everything is compartmentalized and separated out op that we can grab just what we need, when we need it.  We have a super clamp.  It’s all separated out here.  We have some more spring clamps, some extra power, and some little adapters.  We carry a Hollywood knuckle or Hollywood knuckle, call it knuckles but it’s a Hollywood knuckle.  Again it’s important that we have our name and contact information and the number on it.
In addition, there’s a Bogen arm flex fill holder that lets us hold the Amvona reflector, or a light disk reflector, so that we can make the adjustments to it.  It’s got a nice little pinch here, a little rubber grip that will grip on to the edge of that material and hold it.  This mounts on the top of any of the stands we’re using, and let’s us make a number of adjustments to it. 

It’s important that you take advantage of things like this center clip here, the center strap because the center strap gives that inner case more rigidity.  Because when it’s sealed up, you don’t want the case going anywhere it’s not supposed to be going.  And that’s our stand case.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

This case is one of our primary workhorse cases; it goes practically everywhere we go.  In the case, we have three Velas 1500 watt /second packs.  We have a little bit of gaffer’s tape.  We have five heads.
Each of the heads is individually labeled with a number, and our contact information if God forbid a heads get left somewhere.  Three power cords, several reflectors, and an extension cord.  If we need to go beyond where this extension cord will get us, we actually take separate cord kits that are individually packed sets of power cords and extension cords and power strips. 

This kit is spec’d out so that it weighs one hundred pounds and no more.  One of the nice things about this is what we also do in addition is we label the front of it on a white piece of tape the actual dimensions of it and we’ll write on there what the weight is we are working with.  So that the airline person does not come out after the fact and say to us that this is too big or this weighs too much.
So let’s look at each one of these Vela packs.  One of the things that I really like about the Velas is that you can put three heads in it.  Each one of these heads is plugged into the pack, and then is adjustable in tenth of a stop increments.  From anywhere within the 500 watts/seconds to 125 watt/second range, all the way up to 1500. 

Because these are 3000 watt/second heads, they’re interchangeable at all of those power settings.  So we have three of these, all identical.  If one of our packs was to go down, not a problem, we can actually go and use one of the packs or put more than one head on a pack if we have to.  That’s the value of redundancy in these packs. 
Each one of these heads is an EHT-3000 head, which means it’s a 3000 watt/second head.  We put our contact information on it.  From all sides, when you’re looking at the head, you can tell which head you have.  And you can make individual adjustments, because we’ve labeled it also with this label at the other end of the cord so that when you’re at the pack you know which one you’re adjusting.  So when you’re looking at the head, you know that this is head 7, and this is the power for head 7.  When you make an adjustment on the pack to adjust the power of the head, you know which head you are adjusting. 

One of the nice things about the Versa-Flex cases is they have these handles on the top, to allow you to lift the whole case up yourself.  In addition, they have handles on either end.  These handles allow two people to carry the pack, rather than just one.  You can, of course, carry it from the top as well from these bars.  One of the other really nice things, if you look here on the Hensel is this little pouch right here.  This little pouch carries the wheels and the wheel bar that this pack rolls on. 

This Versa-Flex case is really well thought out, from the handles on the top and on the sides to the wheel bar, which we can actually insert wheels into the bottom.  A wheel on either side and they screw together.  So the wheels will spin on the cases.  What’s great about it is if you’re going through an airport and one person is on this case, it’s not a problem to do because of these wheels.  But the great thing about it is that these wheels will come off, come apart, and they go into the pouch on the front of the pack. So you aren’t breaking these wheels off when you’re traveling.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

The Rololights are a continuous light source that we’re using a great deal.  We really like them, because they don’t have to pop, especially when we’re doing subject portraits, where they’re not used to having their portraits taken. 

Let me show you inside a Rololights kit.  It’s a nice little traveling case, Rololights end unzips.  We have put in here two pouches; a standard pouch and a backup pouch.  In addition, in here are our light tools; we’ll show you that in a second.

The Rololights comes out of this travel tube, and it’s all balled up nice and tight.  These are also for the light tools, we’ll show you that in a second. But the Rololights very easily and very quickly comes together.  Working back and forth, the silver bar goes through the top first, notch locks on one side, work it tight all the way across, again working across , the notches catch on either side. 

All of a sudden you have a very, very thin rigid panel.  The panel is easy and light weight, easy to work with.  You can put it up over your head, down underneath, at a side.  This is a really versatile panel.  What’s really great about this panel, as thin as it is, is that the panel can actually go up above a subject in an office environment, where you only have a seven-foot ceiling.  Meaning that you can only get an overhead hair or rim light on your subject, to separate your subject from the background. 

Now one of the other really cool things about this is that you can put a set of light tools on here.  Take the adapter that you get with light tools, the top adapter goes on. Put it on the other end of the other wand.  Now I have four points, one on each corner for the light tools grid to attach to.  Here’s the light tools grid, designed specifically for this.  It goes over one side.  Now you can see the grid’s on. 

What’s really amazing is still how thin it is.  It’s still extremely thin.  And now what I’m going to do is give you a demonstration when we plug this in, of why I really like these lights, especially with these light tools on.  We have totally directional light, which is really amazing, because you have full control of the light all the way around.  But it goes only where you want it, and nowhere else. 

Now one of the other things to point out about the light tools is that each of these units is individually ballasted.  I can actually take and unplug and jump from one connector to the next specific lights and turn them off.  And now you’ll see that a couple of the tubes aren’t lit, meaning that I can minimize exactly where the light is going and make it do exactly what I want it to do. 

In addition with the Rololights, we go ahead and take off this grid.  What’s great about this grid is that it’s flexible.  It folds right up onto itself, and let’s you store it really easily, so it fits nicely and tightly in the case. 

Now as I take this grid off, you saw earlier that these light tool pieces go on and these silver wands go in.  What’s really amazing is that if I wanted to, and I do want to from time to time, when I take this apart, I could actually split this entire unit up into four pieces.  Right here by taking out this little white strip, and all of the sudden we now have two completely separate light tools, each of them individually powerable. 

Further the kit comes with separate wands, so I can put a wand in here and a wand in here and make each of these much smaller rigid panels.  I can actually go down so far as to actually put one panel in and still power just one panel.  What’s really nice is I could stick this behind a row of books in a bookcase, or as an accent light underneath a chair, or in a desk, a really small place where otherwise I just couldn’t get a light, I all of a sudden now can get daylight balanced, fluorescent is what the technology is but I could get daylight balanced tubes anywhere I want.

In addition, I want you to look around because for the entire shoot, I’ve actually been using fluorescent lights.  To the cameras left, to the cameras right and up, as a fill light, and up above me.  These lights are really versatile lights to be sure. 

Now the Rololights connect to the light stands in a really simple fashion.  On the back of the Rololight, is a silver bar.  This piece connects through this piece, and then simply connects into a Hollywood head, tightens up and fits on top of the light stand.  So let me show you how this actually connects into the back of the Rololight.  This silver bar slides onto the back of the Rololight unit, lines up with this hole or any other hole along the axis.

Once it’s in and it’s rigid, it goes anywhere we want.  Now once the Hollywood head connects onto the back, as I showed you earlier, you are ready to go and connect on the top of any light stand.  So that’s how the Rololight connects to a standard light stand.  So these are the Rololight, which is amazing because they are called Rololight because they roll up, but they are very flexible, so you don’t have to use them in the rigid form, you can use them in a flexible form hanging them longer to make it a longer light source.  They’re all reflective in the middle. 

Let me pack this up for you, so you can see it as we pack it up.  We like to load the Rololight kits right in here, not worrying about putting them up against the fluorescent tube, haven’t had one break yet.  Nicely and neatly packed, just like that.  I’ll unplug it now. 

Because the Rololight , folks, include a number of accessories, we’ve labeled one of our Eagle Creek pouches, that we got from the Container Store, backup pouch because it’s got all sorts of additional wiring and connections, so that slips in there.  Our primary pouch, which has the wands that you connect the Rololights to the light stands with.  They tuck in there as well, all nicely and neatly packed in.

We have several of them, for the various shoots that we go on. You might be able to see here they’re labeled extra 1, our backlight.  This is our kicker light, it separates the subject from the background.  Here is our extra 2 light, our main light source, and one more as a backup.  So we have six Rololight  packs, more than enough for any shoot that we’re working on, including backups, including this one.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

Along with the Rololight lights, we also have a dedicated Rololight stand kit. The Rololight stand kit consists of a number of stands that we have set aside just to work with the Rololight. We have it in a Kata bag; it’s a Hex Bag 3. We’ve just chosen it really for the Rololight. Inside, we have our background stands here.

It’s a Photek background stand. We recently bought a brand new Photek stand after 15 years on the job. We felt it was time to retire them; they had just got to the end of their useful lives. But, boy those Photek background stands… top notch.

This is a knuckle already on the stand; these stands and knuckles work together to hold the Rololight. We have other stands in here, various sizes. This stand, the Bogen Mini Avenger will hold the background light. In addition in here we’ve got something to hold our Amvona 1, it’s a Flex Fill holder, the flexible tips here will hold the Flex Fill light.

All of this packs neatly together, all in this Kata Hex Bag 3. One of the other nice things about this Hex Bag 3 is that it’s on wheels.  Further, in addition to being on wheels, one of the other nice things about this Hex Bag is that it carries almost like a golf bag would. So when you’re going through a lobby in a building that doesn’t want to you to take your equipment in be cause its on a cart, simply shouldering it allows you to get into that building without a problem. So that is the Rololight Stand kit.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

First things first, its obvious that every shoot requires a camera.  Back in the day we used to use Hasselblad for a lot of the assignments that we do. But with digital the way it is right now, we haven’t shot a roll of film in three years.  This is our Canon kit, we’ll take a look at the Canon kit first and Nikon kit second.

In our Canon kit, we definitely keep of our software right in case we need to do a reinstall when we’re on the road. We have a 1 DS Mark 3, 1 DS Mark 2, 17-40mm, 24-105mm which we use a lot when we’re going out and just need an all purpose lens.  We have 85mm, 135mm/F2, and 35mm/F1.4. This is an 85mm/1.8 and a 50mm/1.4. 

One of the things we like to do is stack lenses together with a stacking cap.  By stacking it up, it just allows us to store them easier in the bag and they’re not bouncing around as much. The reason we have an 85mm/1.8 and an 85mm/1.2 is the 85mm/1.8 is the lens we have to use when we’re using the blimp, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. We also have a 70-200mm. 

We have three strobes 580-EX, another 580-EX; we have the new 580-EX2.  We have a jackrabbit cord so we can plug it into an external battery pack for the flashes.  We have an off camera cord so we can take the strobe off axis.  And we have a 24-70mm/F2.8. We also obviously carry some business cards in case we need to.  This is just an extra pouch if we need to put some extra accessories in.  So that’s the Canon kit.
And I want to tell you one thing about the equipment that we’re using here in the ThinkTank.  We don’t always need to keep it in the ThinkTank case, instead what we might do is transfer to some of these smaller Domke bags that we have. 

So let me show you, which lenses go where, and how we work with the Domkes and the smaller bags.  All of our fast glass that would be all of our prime lenses are going to go in one bag.  The 135mm F2, our 50mm/1.4, and our 85mm/1.8, and our 35mm/1.4 all go in the bag.  We then take the camera and we may mount that camera with another fast glass like the 85mm/1.8. 

That’s when we’re working in a really low light situation, a lot of time we’re doing this with concert performances, rock’n’roll, other things where we need to be down at F2 and F1.8. 

These other bags are our more travel light standard bags.  In that bag is going to go the 17-40mm, the 24-105mm, and over here is going to be the 24-70mm.  We’ll drop one of the strobes into this one, a backup strobe into here.  We’ll also take an extra battery and drop that in, our extra travel cords, our off camera cord and our jackrabbit.  We’ll take the other body and mount one of the lenses on there.  And we’re ready to go. 

One of the other points I want to make about these flashes is a lot of times we will put a CTO or a green gel in front of that so we can use the strobe and match the strobe to the color temperature of the environment we’re in, whether it’s in a tungsten color temperature or a fluorescent environment. 

Using these different gels allows us to match the strobe to the room color temperature.  So that’s how we work when we are not using the ThinkTanks airport security equipment, and instead we want to travel light.  We’ll take and get rid of this.  So this is how we travel light and this is how we shoulder the equipment. 

Our strobes and zoom and extra battery go on one shoulder.  The other zooms, the other strobe closes up goes on the other shoulder.  We don’t always take the fast glass with us.  So now that we got the bags on, on go the cameras, one on either side.  And we’re ready to go.  This, believe it or not, is traveling light.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

This kit is our Nikon kit.  It houses our D3, a D2X; a primary and a backup.  We use a 12mm-24mm DX lens, 70-200 2.8, 24-70mm 2.8, 17-55 DX 2.8, 2X teleconverter.  We’ve got a Speedlight SB-800; it’s got the tungsten gel on the front.  The reason we use the tungsten gel or a fluorescent gel is to mask the color temperature in the room we’re working in.  These are obviously interchangeable, so we can use them depending on the situation we’re in. We use a tungsten or a fluorescent gel. 

We have extra double A batteries.  We have three think tank cardholders.  We really like these think tank cardholders because we can hold a large number of cards; and we can put our unused cards at the top and our used cards reversed on the bottom.  What we do with our cards when we’re done shooting them is instead of having them in upwards; we have them in upside down.  That’s an indicator to us that we’ve shot on the card and this card needs to be downloaded.
Underneath, we have 17-35 2.8, and we have a 300 2.8.  In addition on the 300 2.8, we have a 1.4 teleconverter as well.  So between the 2X teleconverter and the 1.4 teleconverter, along with the 300 2.8, we can get a long distance shot and get in real tight if we need to.
We have an off camera sync cord for the strobes, several extra batteries, battery charger, more double A’s, and of course business cards in this kit as well.  So that’s our Nikon kit unpacked.  We really like the ThinkTanks Airport Security Bag, which is the name of the bag.  We think it works really well; it really does a good job of protecting the equipment.
So that’s our Nikon kit as we pack it in the ThinkTanks Airport Security Traveling Case.  One of the things that we do is travel light quite often.  We travel light with our Canons; we travel light with our Nikons.  When we’re traveling in a motorcade following the President, you can’t be burdened with a big rolling case.  You have to travel light, and travel fast. 

So this equipment gets turned into two smaller cases, and we shoulder the equipment.  The D3 will come out, the lens mounted on it.  The D2X will come out with another lens on it.  Our 70-200 2.8, our wide 12mm-24mm DX, our teleconverters, our off camera, batteries will slip into a side pouch, and extra batteries will slip into the other side pouch.  Both of these bags are small Domke bags. 

The think tank cardholders will go in there.  The strobes will either go on the cameras or in the bags.  So one on one shoulder, one on the other.  The 300 2.8 will not travel with us, unless we need to and then we shoulder it separately.  One camera on one side, one camera on the other side.  And this is traveling light with a pair of Nikons.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

One of the things we use a lot is our Jacobson Blimp.  The camera is often too loud for us to shoot on a soundstage, movie set, or in other areas where silence is critical. These cameras as you probably know by now are awfully loud.

We pack it in a Versa-Flex case, which is a semi soft case but you can still stand on it. The blimp is actually a hard case, and inside the case is a cut out for the camera with a remote.  The camera actually fits in with the remote connecting to the camera. The camera slides in nicely, neatly inside the case. We use mostly our prime lenses for this.

In this case we’ve got a 35 1.4. The 35 1.4 goes on with the lens tube. These lens tubes are fitted to each lens.  Now when you fire it, now the camera is much quieter, much less likely for the noise to be picked up from a sound stage microphone. Each tube is in here; each lens has a different tube.

There’s the 24-70 tube, this tube also works for the 135. One of the nice things about the tube when you are using a zoom is the outer ring. The outer zoom ring is actually slightly larger on the camera. When you put the lens in the tube, the foam inside the tube actually grabs the zoom ring and lets you zoom the lens, so it does actually work very well with the zoom lens.

Other tubes fit on the blimp as well.  This tube is for an 80 – 200.  So this case just holds the blimp and the tubes, no cameras typically are stored in here. So we have the long tube, the mid tube, and the small tube, all that store in here. We tuck our finger in, and pull the lenses off.  It’s pretty easy to switch lenses.

Now the lens is on, stick your finger in there and take the lens out.  Camera unpacks same way, simply disconnect there.  And that’s the Jacobson Blimp.

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We love the California Sunbounce Kits we use.  We used to have some plastic frames, but they just didn’t do the trick. We have in here the Sunbounce, the Sunbounce Pro, and the SunSwatter. All of them fit nicely and neatly into this one unit.

On the sides are individual pouches, which hold gold reflectors on one side and white on the other. We have various translucents.  One translucent here, is a little thinner than this translucent over here. This translucent here, as we’ve labeled it ourselves, knocks it off 1/3 of a stop, this translucent over here knocks it off 2/3 of a stop, so you can see the difference in density between these which just cuts off more light or a little less light.

In addition, in this kit, is an arm, nicely accompanied by a ball, so that when you have it braced upon your waist here, you’re actually not digging into your hip with the metal on the end it’s got a ball and it came with it that way which is really nice. It’s actually a Bogen avenger that California Sunbounce has modified. 

Also in here is a boom arm with a Hollywood Head on the end. It’s a Bogen avenger. You can attach another boom arm onto the top of this stand The boom arm slips in and will attach to the SunSwatter or Sunbounce Pro, any one of the units, all here. You can get this up above your subject if you need to.

Okay, so in this pack is the Sunbounce Pro, the straight Sunbounce, an extra Sunbounce, and the SunSwatter all of this allows us to work really effectively when we’re not using any flash whatsoever.

We used this once on an assignment in Chicago out in the middle of nowhere where we had no power and trekking all the way to the location where we needed to be was just not going to work with the Porties. So that’s the California Sunbounce kit.

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One of the things that we use to adjust the color, whether it’s a color gel or color correction, for the shoots that we do, especially in boring office buildings is we will add color to the background with the background strobe.

Some situations we find ourselves in we need to actually convert a tungsten bulb to a daylight bulb. So that’s what we use here with this gelly roll. This gelly roll actually contains all of the various daylight to tungsten conversions. So if we have daylight lights we are going to go from a daylight light to a tungsten color temperature. Let’s go through each one of these and talk a little about each one.

In this gelly roll, we have a wide variety of well-used gels. In addition, we have gone through and pulled out from each one of the gels a Velcro with a color in it so if we are trying to hold the color up to the light we can see what color the light is going to look like. So we go from yellows to dark greens.

In a situation in where we have what’s called a true blue, or the blue of the RGB spectrum. We actually put the spectrum in down here.  So each of the gels have their own number. The gels actually come with a very small number typed on it with a little label. We have actually gone through and put in the gel number so we know when to reorder. We have various grays, reds, blues, and greens.

It’s all these colors that allow us really to take an office environment that may be really boring and add these gels over the strobes to make the office environment look that much better. So that’s our color gel kit. The gel kit stores nicely and neatly inside the gelly roll. They make them in several different colors.  Gray is another color that we have had in the past. Currently, we are using red to indicate that theses are the color gels as opposed to color correcting or color temperature gels.

Our next gelly roll is our CTB and our Plus Green. The CTB allows us to take a tungsten light source and convert it into daylight. Using a variety of different blue gels. Often times we need to convert daylight strobes into fluorescent color temperature lights so that the lights we are putting into a scene match the lights that we are using in the scene itself that are ambient lights. So to do that we use the green or what’s called Plus Green.  There are varying shades of Plus Green.  There’s Plus Green, half Plus Green, quarter Plus Green, and even eighth Plus Green.

We have gone through and labeled each one of the gels so we know exactly what they are.  In addition, we have a color conversion filter which lets us know all of the color temperature specs in the gelly roll. This is something that we did, this is not something that comes with the gelly roll, because you can pretty much put any gel or any color you want into these gelly roll.  We have chosen to use blue to signify all the blue CTBs and all the varying shades of Plus Green. So that is our CTB and Plus Green gelly roll.

Our next gelly roll is our CTO and minus green gelly roll. Let’s have a look at that. It is signified by the orange, which is typically used as we refer to our CTO gelly roll. Our CTO gelly roll, most people will be using those to put a tungsten gel in front of their strobe in order to convert daylight into tungsten. We have gone in again and marked CTO, half CTO, eighth CTO, so that we know which gel is which.

When we have a situation in where we want to convert fluorescent into daylight, that’s when we use what’s called minus green. minus green is the pinkish color that when you put it over a fluorescent tube, will cause that fluorescent to actually emit daylight.  Again we’ve gone in and labeled it with our full CTO, three-quarter, half, quarter, and even eighth CTO.  In addition, we have our minus green over here full minus green, half minus green, quarter, etcetera.  Then we have a special fluora filter, which is really for those really odd lights that you just can’t correct any other way. So this is our CTO and our minus green gelly roll.

All three of these gelly rolls travel with us on assignment.  If we really know we are not going to need a gelly roll, we won’t take it. We will just not pack it.  However, almost always we are taking the color gelly roll and the CTO gelly roll because you almost never know what you are going to run into.

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One of the things we find ourselves using a lot when shooting video also when we need to have some hot lights where the color temperature is going to match a room or we just need to accent a room that we know has all tungsten lighting in it we’ll use one of our hot light kits.

This hotlight kit is our Lowel DP hot light kit. We’ve got 3 DP’s and you can see actually one of them is missing, that’s because we’re using it on the set here.

So in the case we have extra Lowel DP lamps in case one goes out, we have wire scrims, half wire scrims, another half wire different color scrim with a different density, full scrims, and then scrims that kind of graduate off so that it’s a little denser on the top, medium dense, and then nothing on the bottom.

So that’s our Lowel DP hot light kit.

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In addition to the Lowel DP’s that we use, we also use Omni’s and Tota’s, just different versions of a hot light.

The Omni is really nice because you can spot it and it’s a smaller and lower power light then the DP’s are. So we carry 3 of these Omni’s, we have extra bulbs for these Omni’s, there and there.

We also have 4 of the Lowel Tota’s, 2 there and 2 beneath. The nice thing about the Tota’s, it’s a long floodlight essentially that you can nominally focus. In addition to the Tota’s we have these cords as well for each of the Tota’s and Omni’s.

So that’s the Omni and Tota’s box.

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One other thing that goes with us everywhere we go is our laptop.  It’s in an Incase Satchel, a really nice slim satchel for everything that we have in here.  We have an 80 GB portable drive, that’s a USB drive.  Also in here are firewire cords. 

One of the nice things is when we’re at a hotel, we can plug the Airport express into our hotel and we don’t have to be tethered to the desk at the hotel.  For the airline that’s considerate, we can plug this right into the power at our seats, or we can put the cigarette lighter adapter on and use it with a cigarette lighter.
Here’s one of our two firewire card readers.  Here’s a second firewire card reader.  This is the new Lexar Card Reader; this is a SanDisk reader; two different brands, two different technologies, similar functions.  This however is the newest one that lets us read the UDMA high-speed cards, which really takes advantage of the firewire 800 throughput.
A power adapter for the laptop of course, a secondary battery. Here’s our Firewire 800, we use a g-tech drive.  That’s really great because it doesn’t require an external power source, although you can use one if you need to.  This is our mother of all batteries; it’s a MaxPower 90 from SPS.  This lets us run the laptop for many more hours than this battery, or the battery in here would let us run it for.  Laptop, MacBook Pro, with a Cingular wireless card in there. 

We also carry a VGA adapter so that we can plug our laptop straight into a standard VGA connector for an LCD projector or an external monitor that the client might have.

A lot of other knick-knacks that we have in here are an extra iPod, some triple A batteries for the headset, and we have the new iPhone iPod headset that’s got the microphone built into it.  This is the SD card reader.  One of the nice things is a little accessory is our ability to split our headphones into two.  So if our client sitting next to us, and they want to watch the movie with us, or we have someone who just wants to watch a movie with us whose sitting next to us.  This allows us to share our headphones. 

This is a standard firewire to mini-firewire converter, and a backup Bluetooth headset for our phone.  A backup pair of headphones for the client who wants to watch the movie with us, but actually doesn’t have a headphone set. 

We have a handheld remote so that we can control our laptop remotely, when we’re doing a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation.  We have a backup, alternate version of a handheld remote.  We have our primary Jawbone Bluetooth Wireless headset and our power connector.  What’s nice about this is it plugs into the laptop and can be recharged via USB.  We have a backup connector, so that we can connect the laptop to a regular VGA monitor.  We have the ability to charge the iPhone.

We have a USB JumpDrive that allows us to store critical documents and critical files and applications.  In addition, if you are working up in your hotel room and need to actually print out a document that you’ve got there; you can actually put the document onto the USB JumpDrive. Take it down to the hotel’s printer in the lobby or in their business room and print from the USB JumpDrive.  And last, but not least, a CF card that’s a backup.  We always have one extra card sitting in the laptop bag just in case.
Because we rely so critically on our laptops, we also travel with a secondary laptop.  This laptop is in a Pelican 1490 Case.  It’s got our charger, again our ability to connect into a VGA monitor, a separate airline adapter.  The adapter also connects so that we can plug into the airline that way.  Laptop, external extra battery, and two USB drives so that we can store our files that way.  So that’s our laptop system, also referred to as our digital workstation.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!