SHOOTING VRs LIGHTLY
Virtual Viewpoint, Erik Goetze's FOV
by Erik Goetze
I now have greater appreciation of turtles, having hauled a house on my back for five week-long high-Sierra backpack trips in recent summers. And it is a well-equipped house, complete with what I need to shoot panoramas.
While some first-timers try to carry everything from lawn-chairs to an espresso-maker in their backpack, the time spent simplifying and shaving grams from all that you carry will make every step on the trail more enjoyable. At the same time, it is important not to skimp on the essentials to the point where your safety is endangered.
One of the challenges of shooting VRs while backpacking is the added weight and space required. While most everyone on the trail has to carry a substantial load covering the basics of eating, staying warm, camping, and keeping bears from eating your dinner, the VR photographer has to add their camera, a panhead, tripod or monopod, and tons of film and/or batteries to their pack.
Film or Digital?
For every trip, I considered that it might be a long time if ever that I'd be returning to some of these incredible locations. Hence I didn't want to compromise on image quality or resolution that the best 35mm film offers. From what I can tell, I would need to carry a 56 oz. (1.6 kg), $8,000 digital camera to match or exceed film quality. Few people would want to expose such a camera to the dust, rain, extreme temperature ranges, and jolting from 23,000 strides over granite blocks each day.
Then there's the cost of bringing enough batteries and memory cards. In the backcountry, there's no reasonable way to recharge your batteries or recycle those CompactFlash cards full of images. A nine day trip where I shot from 3 to 10 panoramas a day would require nine 1GB CF cards and a host of battery packs. Every time I calculated the weight (and cost) of a digital system vs. film, film won out.
Finding the lightest VR rig
My second backpack trip shooting VRs was up Mt. Whitney in 1999. I had my standard day-packing photo gear, including 3 pound tripod, multiple lenses, and panhead. My backpack weighed in at over 70 pounds (32 kg), although my daypack for the final ascent of Whitney was a more reasonable 27 pounds (12 kg).
For all subsequent backpack trips, I forced myself to choose one lens that covers most situations, and picked a Nikon 20mm (84 degrees vFOV) that has worked out very well.
For my first John Muir Trail trip (or JMT #1), some friends and I walked 85 miles from Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadows to Mono Pass on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. For this trip I reduced the VR component weight by switching to a dedicated monopod with lightweight folding panhead. Even so, the photo VR component weight was 7 pounds (3 kg), and my overall pack weight was 57 lb. (26 kg). There were times when it seemed like no coincidence that the trip was longer than the famous Philippine death march of WWII.
In the summer of 2001 we continued down the John Muir Trail, going 105 miles from Lake Edison to Kings Canyon. In preparing for this JMT #2 trip, I agonized over every item and every ounce. After extensive reworking of my photographic VR rig, I reduced its weight by half to 3.6 pounds (1.6 kg). With my total pack weight around 37 pounds (17 kg), I enjoyed the scenery more, with no compromise in VR quality.
The following summer, I went on two week-long high Sierra trips: JMT #3 concluded the John Muir Trail series by going from Kearsarge Pass to Mt. Whitney and the Whitney Portal for a mere 50 miles (80 km). The second trek headed north on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) from Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadows to Sonora Pass, for 77 miles (112 km). Every single day of these trips featured from one to five thousand feet (1500m) of elevation gain from ascending and descending passes.
A key element of my system is the one oz. (29g) panhead made of aluminum. François Mercat was kind enough to custom make two variations of aluminum panhead for my camera. Either one fits so snugly that I rarely remove them from the camera, saving setup time as well. Compare with conventional panheads weighing 1-3 lbs.
For some of the best tips in reducing pack weight, talk to the "through hikers" who spend the entire season on the trail. One of the things I learned from them is to consolidate multiple items into a single item that performs two or more functions.
For instance, I saved pounds by finding hiking poles that also function as a monopod. Leki makes lightweight hiking poles (also called trekking poles), which have a tripod-threaded screw under the removable handle. Since I carry hiking poles anyway for crossing deep streams, the weight of a dedicated tripod or monopod dropped off my list.
If you didn't need hiking poles, consider the "Philopod", an invention of Philippe Hurbain . It consists of a plumb-bob (pointed weight on a string) hung from your camera lens's nodal point, to keep it centered over one spot on the ground. This approach may be lighter yet, but has two considerations for backcountry use:
- There is no additional stability from resting the camera on a support; and
- In windy conditions often found in the mountains, it is difficult to keep the plumb-bob from moving off the center of rotation.
But the Philopod is worth knowing about as perhaps the ultimate in VR rig simplicity. Perhaps future iterations will have an accessory that paints a laser beam at a spot on the ground, eliminating half of the wind problem (the other half is keeping a hand-held camera stable as the wind buffets you).
When hiking with friends on a trip with a scheduled exit date, long stops to shoot panoramas either slows everyone down or results in me getting to camp much later than everyone else. When something looks pan-worthy, I unthread the handle from my hiking stick and remove my ~37 pound pack. Grabbing the SLR camera from a lightweight camera bag, I thread the camera with its already- attached-panhead onto the Leki pole and turn on the camera and check exposure. Time to first shot: about 90 seconds. A minute or two later I've completed a full circle and reverse the setup process. The total time to shoot a VR is a very reasonable 5 minutes, and I get a free rest stop.
It would take me substantially longer to shoot cubics at the same pixels/degree quality level, which is the fourth reason I don't shoot them on these trips. The primary reason is it would burn through film much faster. No less importantly, a cubic panhead would weigh a lot more than 1 oz. Lastly, I very rarely lose any interesting scenery off the top or bottom of these cylindrical panoramas.
In the end, even the best panoramas do not do justice to the incredible quality of light in the High Sierra. But if I didn't bring my VR rig, I'd be heartbroken for not trying to capture it.
For daily coverage of news and trends in the VR world, read Erik's VRlog
Email: erik@virtualparks.org
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