Happy Friday!

Today I finish up my Fire Training Shoot.  It’s been fun showing you the progress of the fire and the training.  Like most times I pick up a camera I learn new things.  I learned a lot on this particular shoot and hopefully I will improve from what I learned.

This medical helicopter came flying directly over the fire scene and I was fortunate enough to be able to capture it in flight.

Above Brandon hand catches his Phantom.  The grass was pretty thick in the area we were flying and if you tried to land in it there was the risk of the copter tipping one way or the other and breaking some props.  In that situation it is better to catch it in mid-air than to try to land it.

So what were the things I learned.  First lesson don’t be so stationary with my photography.  It is a bad habit of mine to shoot from one location and not seek other angles.  I was restricted somewhat in where I could go but there were still many different angles that I didn’t capture and I’m disappointed by that.

I learned that I should either take video with my Phantom or still shots with my camera.  When I try to do both I don’t do either one justice.

Although I did some I didn’t do nearly enough pre-planning.  I could have taken a page from the firemen’s preparation and scouted out things much better.

Take this shot for example.  I should have moved further left to get all the fire in the frame instead of some of the firemen with no fire in the background.

Final lesson (although I’m sure there are more that I’m not thinking of) is that I really suck at video editing. A few years ago I was shooting predominately video and doing a lot of training videos for our organization, so I got pretty good at editing.  Fast forward a few years and all the software has evolved and my skills have deteriorated.

So I have to put some more work in on learning how to work with my current software.  Having said all that there is a 6 minute video below that you may watch if you like.  You’ll see what I’m talking about.  🙂

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  I hope you enjoyed the week of this event.  Back to normal (whatever that is) next week.  Enjoy your Friday and be careful.