Real People | Real Stories

First big task of the packing-packing (the part where I’m actually moving stuff into containers, rather than just thinking about it):

Assembling and labeling all the various power devices. We’ve got a solar panel, about six different kinds of batteries, about nine different kinds of chargers/adapters, and an alarmingly wide variety of cables that either attach chargers to a power source, devices to adapters, or adapters to other parts of adapters.

It’s like the whole concept of modularity vomited in our studio. Lots of things that might work together. I was surprised to learn the battery for our Canon G9 point and shoot has the same base as the batteries for our HV20 camcorder. Of course the P&S batteries are smaller, but they do power up the video cam, and charge up on the same chargers. Nice to know. 

A fair amount of our energy going into this project has been expended in planning how to deal with shooting in situations we don’t know that much about, but can only guess at.

Example? We imagine we’ll be shooting in darkish, unelectrified homes in rural or village settings.

• What will we light it with? How will we get sound?
• Will there be room enough to have both a camera and an interviewer, along with a translator?
• Will there be trouble figuring out where to stand, or for that matter, difficulty in the always-important transition between getting there, getting introduced, and actually setting up and shooting?
• Can we hope somebody will be around whom we can ask to hold a reflector by the door to bounce some light inside? 

Or, We’re going to be walking for three weeks straight. We’ve got about six hours worth of batteries for our little video recorder, and a solar charger and battery pack to charge things up with. We’ll also be using still cameras, an ipod, a digital sound recorder, a light when needed, possibly a Macbook…

• Will the power packs be sufficient to recharge all our tools?
• Will the sun be out enough to provide as much power via our solar charger panel?
• Will the Zylight Z90 we just got in the mail today (thanks Zylight guys!) bring enough zap to provide fill shooting in broad daylight? (And how much will we use the killer switchable color temperature feature?)?
• Will we regret leaving the XH-A1 behind in Kathmandu in favor of traveling light on the trek, bringing the HV20 only?