Copyright Dylan DiMaggio

To all the ships at sea.  If you ever have watched a true craftsman working on a 150 year old piece of oak and converting it to a gorgeous piece of furniture, what you quickly realize is that it’s all about his or her experience and their ability to utilize the tools of the trade.  While producing a 1 minute spot for CBS, I approached it with traditional lighting and after two shoots, I decided to utilize two different Sartek underwater lights.  For a few different reasons: Number one, the quality of light is a consistent 5800 kelvin.  The burn time on the LED light is approximately 20+ hours.  The angle of the beam gives me broad enough light to cover the ice formations from above, and also below.  Obviously not at the same time.  Oops! I forgot, I do have two lights.  Carl Saieva is not only a great cave diver, and a super business person, but a fantastic design engineer.  He has created these lights for use under 300 feet which is great, but when I dive I stay above 120 feet.  95% of all of the footage is 1080I.  There are a few isolated stills.  I’ll follow this blog up in a week with Carls mini-light which I utilize on the Go-Pro to get the camera and the light under the ice. JoeD

http://www.sarind.com/

Copyright Joe DiMaggio

Copyright Andrew Ehrlich

I met Andrew Ehrlich approximately thirty years ago.  Andrew worked not only as my assistant, but as my studio manager.  He loaded my camera on some of the most important shoots of my career.  We became much more than a photographer and an assistant.  I consider him part of my family and vice versa.  Andrew went to NYU film school and went onto a career as a staff photographer with Avis and traveled all over the world.  Andrew now has a beautiful wife and three dynamic kids.  He is an extremely successful business man.  On super major shoots, Andrew comes out of his retirement and works with me even today.  I just received the above photograph in an email and when I looked at it my heart stopped.  It is simple, it is clean, it is elegant, it is dynamic, and it is everything in a photograph that I love to see.  I am totally elated when I see one of my protegés shoot something this magnificent.  Andrew thanks for sending it and well see you Chinese New Year.  JoeD

To all the ships at sea, I think it’s safe to say most Americans believe that bigger is better.  For that matter, maybe everybody on the planet believes bigger is better.  At last count, I believe I have three extremely large Gitzo

(Left Tall: Manfrotto 539Pro base and Manfrotto 503HDV head) (Left Under: Manfrotto 190CXPRO3 base and Manfrotto 701HDV head) (Right: Gitzo Studex tripod)

and Manfrotto tripods.  These are the BIG boys.  The older, larger Gitzo will hold over 200 lb’s.  Please do not ask how I know what for sure.  In addition to the repertoire, we have an extremely large Manfrotto carbon fiber which is awesome for large video work.  In the mid-sized tripods I’ve lost count, but we certainly have four to five.  Each with what I believe to be  special application.  Anybody who knows my works knows I like both Gitzo and Manfrotto standard monopods and more recently I’ve become a great fan of the Manfrotto video monopod (my DP and partners have been screaming for years “This is a good way to go” and of course, being the hard-headed person that I am, didnt pay much attention.  But now I do and it is a great tool).

Now for the purpose of this particular blog.  At the end of my repertoire of tripods is a super-light super-small Manfrotto 190 Pro3 with a 701HD video head.  To be honest, I never paid it a whole lot of attention until I decided to do a 60 second piece for CBS Sunday Morning on ice, and a waterfall & damn covered in the stuff.  Because the areas are extremely small and difficult to get to I decided to break out the 190 Pro3 tripod.  Much to my surprise, it was unbelievably great.  I was able to sneak into little nooks and crannies and got the 1080I footage I was looking for.  My philosophy (and I believe I coined the phrase back in the day) is standardization and simplification are now going to standardize on this tripod for critical location work.  Bigger is NOT necessarily better.  And as we all know, it’s in the hands of the photographer or filmmaker.  Keep your mind open for new ideas, and keep your eye constantly looking for new imagery.  Believe it or not, it’s still there.

What the heck is that Sartek doing in the frame?!