“XERO”

So what do you do when one of your good friends and favourite photographers ask you “Hey do you want to do a project together for this festival? Its due soon, but we still got some time, any ideas?” well, as usual i triggers the playfullnes whithin and after my mind churned for a couple of secs it became clear “Well i have this new gizmo that i´ve been waiting for the right opportunity to use, let´s do it!” And so project “xero” was born.

We decided to work with highspeed photography, people and balloons. What a great combination.

Xenia is a true master on getting people in on things so we chucked a bunch of people from the street into the studio and told them to pop these balloons, in almost total darkness. Fun stuff. My contribution was my girlfriend and another friend of ours (easy way out, thanks love).

The technical bits are 3 x 580 ex tethered to the trigger gizmo, two on umbrellas on one grid on the balloon from behind. right umbrella set to 1/64 left umbrella  on 1/128 and shoot through on 1/128, yeah thats right, its just a litle birds fart of flash. When workin highspeed your flash is you shutter speed and to get fast enough shutter speeds you need to lower the flash as much as you can, the camera is actually set to bulb in a dark room and manually triggered right before and after we gave the ok to pop. Working on 1/128 gives you a flash duration/ shutter speed of around 1/30 000 of a sec. Thats fast.

Well, enough technical stuff, after mocking around in Morphage for a while we finally had it done and a few more hours of finding the codec, aspect ratio on all that other video stuff that i still need to learn it was really done. The video was shown on 3 different locations at the “Slottsfjell festival 2008″, projected onto walls inside an old industial building at about 10-15meters wide. Gotta say i get pretty wowed when i see something that i´ve helped create in that big a size.