I first moved into a van when I was twenty. Twelve years later, I regard it as the best decision of my life. It’s allowed me to see the world, meet new people, escape college debt, and save money for a down payment on some farm land. My life is one long road trip that meanders between long stretches of exploring North America, two weeks abroad and staying around Southern California for business.
Recently my girlfriend and I have been living in my van and using its mobility to get work done while exploring new places together. She is a professional surfer and has a surfboard bag and travel essentials company (www.sagebrushbags.com) which she can run from the road. I am a professional surfer as well and have a small commercial agency. Our typical program is to pull into a city and use wifi and 24 Fitness locations to get work done and take care of personal hygiene. We research places to explore and hike online and talk to locals about their favorite spots. Sometimes we get a call from a magazine or one of the companies we work for to fly to somewhere in the world and surf. In this case, we put the road trip on hold and fly from whichever airport we are closest to and park the van in long term parking while we are gone.
This past July we didn’t have anywhere we needed to be so we traveled across the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico for a month. We stopped to camp and backpack in some really nice spots. I took my Sony A7s with an Atmos Shogun 4k monitor and recorder as well as my GoPro HERO 4 Black and DJI Phantom 3 Drone to document some of our travels. I’ve been a longtime Sony fan, their electronics have always seemed to last forever, but I’ve been using Canon gear the past few years because of their early DSLR video dominance in the mid 2000’s. It’s great to see that Sony’s have gotten to be so much better in terms of image quality. I’m going to be looking a lot more closely at Sony cameras in the future based on what I experienced so far with the A7s.
Despite the small size of A7s, it offers a lot of professional features including the S-log2 codec which works great for capturing stark desert landscapes. The only issue with the S-log codec is that its lowest setting is at 3200 ISO which makes it extremely sensitive to light. I solved the challenge with a SLR Magic Variable ND filter which allowed me to ratchet down the exposure in full sun and keep my iris open and shutter speed down. When it got dark, I removed the ND filter and was able to take great night shots. The A7s is hands down the best low light camera I’ve ever used. Aside from the low light capabilities, the A7s has the ability to record 4k with the Atmos Shogun recorder and monitor. With the Shogun you get an easily editable ProRes 422 file in 4k resolution and the HD monitor really helps for focusing. I was able to shoot wide open on my 1.4 Zeiss 35mm lens and get exactly what I wanted in focus.
The highlight of the trip was hiking down to the waterfalls at Havasupai, AZ. At the bottom of red marbled cliffs, the waterfalls roar and spit turquoise water into pools hundreds of feet below.The water gets its turquoise hue from a high concentration of lime which is responsible for the coral-like features in the river. Branches and other plant matter calcify and become entombed creating pools lined by white limestone borders.The water was a pleasing mid 60’s Fahrenheit which balanced the dry 90 something heat. After we set up our hammock tents next to the stream we ate some lunch and filled up our water bottles in a rock spring. We spent the afternoon taking turns diving in the pools next to the waterfall. I shot with my GoPro at 60fps 2.7k resolution in ProTune color mode to slow the water down a bit and handle the contrast between the shadows and highlights. We hiked around for the next couple days and found more waterfalls. The fisheye on the GoPro captured the expansive 180 degree views nicely. On our way out I misstepped and twisted my ankle on a rock. What was going to be a leisurely nine mile walk up the canyon, immediately turned into a stressful situation. Luckily, my girlfriend Anna grew up around horses and convinced a local Native American man to lend her his horse. I hopped on the horse and we rode back to the van.
When we got back to the van we drove back to town and I ordered a new battery solution for the A7s. The stock batteries in the a7s where a real problem. They didn’t operate the camera for more than an hour and took a long time to recharge. After some research I bought a Varavon a7s Battery Package which kept the camera powered all day.
The remainder of our trip was spent soaking in hot springs and letting my ankle heal in a small remote desert town. In the heart of that town was a community library with free wifi. I downloaded the time-lapse app for my Sony which allowed me to take a sequence of RAW images and string them together in Adobe’s After Effects. I played with the time-lapse program to give me the number and duration of the exposures to give me the best movement for the day and night. During the day a storm passed overhead and I used a frame interval between 2 and 4 seconds depending on the focal length of my lens to show the clouds undulating and feeding the barren landscape below. At night when the storm cleared I kept my exposures above 2 seconds long and often up to 30 seconds. Because of this, I brought the interval between exposures down to one second so I could get a decent length time lapse in a reasonable timeframe. For more information about timelapse photography check out this cool video.
After spending a few nights in the desert soaking and time lapsing, we headed back to Southern California to regroup. We organized the van, cleaned the camera gear and tended to neglected emails before planning our next adventure.
