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? 

• Travel: How We Get All The Stuff Over There
• Trek: What We Carry On The Long Walk
• Kathmandu Production: What We’ll Carry When We Have A Home Base

We’ve got two Pelican 1510 hard plastic, carry-on size roller bags, and a big Kata HB207 backpack, plus a giant SKB case for tripods and lightstands and stuff, that we’re not sure will be accompanying us.

Today we had the major/minor bummer of one of our sponsors bailing. Flolight has a nifty 500 LED light panel, about the size of a thin briefcase. Couple months ago they’d said they would be happy to send a couple along with us. Yay! Unfortunately they have had trouble with supplies, and this morning let me know that they would not be sending any. 

Dang. I’d been planning on taking one of these along on the trek to light tent interviews and people in their homes and all manner of stuff we’d be shooting along the way. Small, light, runs off (a reportedly modest amount of) 12v power, and with a soft light. Right now there’s not much else out there like it.

I think it’s sort of a tipping point time for LED lighting solutions, and I bet by this time next year there will be a bunch more variety and utility and portability to be had for lighting small video projects with LED. I’ve been keeping an eye on Cool Lights, a small seller of low budget and DIY video lighting stuff. They keep an active forum presence at DVXuser.com. Have a look at this thread for an example of the remarkable back and forth Cool Lights has with its client base.

The good people at Zylight have confirmed that they will be sending off a Z90 kit to us this week. This light looks like just about the coolest small/on camera LED light out there. Durable, and with easily adjustable color temperature. Bright and broad. I’m SO eager to see what this light will do.

I’ve never really worked with an on camera light much. I think that, with this one too, that kind of use will likely be limited to nighttime shooting where we need to be mobile. We are planning to have a compact stand with us, and if we’re needing the light, we can put it on the stand, off to the side and up a bit to shine down on our subject. This should create some more pleasant light and avoid the deer-in-the-headlights look folks get when they’re staring down a bright camera light.

I’d hoped to have this equipment sooner, to be testing this out, but beggars oughtn’t to be choosers, and we’re delighted to be getting the loan of this stuff at all.

Another thing I want to try is to have the light on the camera, in a close-up shoot with a person. Only instead of pointing the light straight on, I’ll turn it back around 90-100 degrees to one side, and have someone (or a stand) hold a big reflector there. This should give a nice oblique soft light, with some nice modeling and easy falloff. I think the Zylight is really bright, and this might make its light more usable in close. This may be an old trick, or I might be inventing it. Either way, I’ll try to detail how it works out.

Last night we realized that one very useful way we could use the XH-A1′s and HV20′s still camera capability is to make a habit of snapping a still picture of every setup we do. That way we have a higher res (than just a video framegrab) image of each of our scenes–as much as practical anyway–, and these could be useful in storyboarding, or for publicity stills, or just for critiquing our own work.

So much to think about. Less than a week!