Maybe nowhere on earth that Antarctica tests the old wisdom that there is no bad weather, just bad clothes. For cinematographer Bertie Gregory and National geographic Team embedded around the Ekstrmömisyllan to shoot the document series “The Secrets of Penguin,” Cold weather equipment was as important as cameras and lenses as they distributed to catch any never seen pictures of Emperor penguins clear way More than marching.
Gregory told IndieWire that the packaging list to winter in Antarctica begins with what a camera operator carries his hands. “It is mark or break. The hands are what gets cold first. When we use a traditional camera, you can use large mittens that can be very comfortable in minus-30 degrees Celsius or below. The problem really comes when we use newer technology-when flying drones need a lot of skill to use them that are exact.”
To solve the problem of maintaining fine motor control at freezing temperatures, Gregory returned some heated gloves so that they could run off camera batteries. “My hands were connected to the camera, in principle. When I first heard about heated gloves, I was like,” AW, does that mean I would be a little soft? Then I used them and it was like, “I have no problem being soft. Work smarter, not more difficult.” It was a gaming exchange, “Gregory said.
For the people, anyway. Cameras also do not like extreme cold, but the freezing temperatures were not so much problems that maybe civilians may think they were at this Nat Geo Nature documentary. “What kills cameras are temperature changes. It’s heating cameras compared to keeping them cold,” Gregory said. “Fortunately, in photography, we camped, so we had no warm place. When the cameras were cold they were cold.”
Before shooting, Gregory and his team freezer tested some camera options to make sure that everything they bought with them would withstand the elements – once in place in eastern Antarctica, about 3,000 miles from the McMurdo station and much longer to the nearest B&H, they would have to do with what they had. The National geographic Show eventually chose the red with Ultra-Telephoto Canon CN 20-lens set, which can range from 50-1000mm.
“We cooled (the cameras) straight down and stress tested them, saw what is breaking. And it is really the cables that were snapped first. So we had specially adapted cold -tolerant cables made of a material that becomes less brittle than normal,” Gregory said. “And we only took many spare parts.”
But some of the most important camera equipment as ”Penguin’s secrets“Used was its drone, which not only offers an important sense of scale and place for the viewer but can open environments for the camera team that they could not navigate in any other way. They have been available to nature Documentaries For several years now, but Gregory said that the increased flight time and more powerful lenses on this current generation of drones really open up new opportunities to see things we never have before.
“Droners, if they are wrong incorrectly, are potentially disturbing to wildlife, right? So the fact that they have more powerful lenses on them now means that we can fly further away from the action and still get shots; and the longer battery life means we can hang in the air and wait for things and things to develop. It is not something we can do before,” “” ” “There are so many scenes that were only possible because of the new Drone technology, so it was cool to be able to use it to catch a penguin secret.”
Getting a new picture of penguins is particularly gratifying because so much of the job for a nature document, perhaps unexpectedly, handles people. “The job is 99 percent problem solving and logistics and as one percent hangs with animals,” Gregory said. Penguins are a bit more sociable and consequently and live as they do in colonies, so that the film photographers can get to know their topics better during a shoot.
But how much time a team spends in nature, Gregory told IndieWire that the key to taking successful images from it one percent of animal time is not Patience. “I think much more important are two other PS: passion and endurance. You must constantly be obsessed with the clues that Mother Nature gives you so that you can find and keep up with the animals, predict what they will do next,” Gregory said. “And endurance is the key. You have to be quite stubborn. I will sit here and get really cold and wet, or whatever, and eventually something good will happen.”
“Penguins Secretuins” flows on Disney+.
