There’s water, hills, lots of sunshine, blue sky with white puffy clouds, and wild life. I won’t try to tell you that it’s picture perfect. It’s not, but at least it is natural. They didn’t bring in fake grass to try to fix the brown grass. Sometimes in life we forget that many things are beautiful but not perfect. Nature has a way of reminding us of this. I think it took me about an hour to get to White Stone from my home in ShaTin. I left about 10 minutes to 7am, as I knew it was going to be a hot day and I wanted to get there before it got too hot.
Getting Setup
The nice thing about getting there early was that there weren’t many other people there. I saw one or two others there when I first arrived. It was high tide and the water level was high so I was glad I wore my sandals. I was carrying 3 bags and a case with me, so it was nice to finally set everything down and just rested for a bit. I used ND filters on both of these videos. ND filters are like sunglasses for the camera. They are especially important for video when the sun is out and you want maintain the 180 degree rule. That’s the rule that says your shutter speed should be double that of your frame rate.
Crane and People Shot
The first video was shot on my GH4. I used the camera’s Cine-D profile with a Panasonic 709 LUT in post. It looks pretty good.
I want to give a shout out to Phil Keaggy for the music. I love his instrumental music.
Natures Path Walk
The second video was shot on my GX85 and reflects my efforts to get smooth footage with my ZhiYun Crane gimbal. I used the GX85 here as it has dual image stabilization. In my opinion, I still have too much up and down motion. It might give you the feeling that I’m marching. In my defense, I was wading through water and walking on uneven rocks. Anyway, at least it is smooth. And yes, I learned my lesson from the Above the School video and followed the “180 degree rule” making the shutter speed 50 (doubling my frame rate which was 24). In order to do that for both of these videos, I used ND filters.
There aren’t too many places close to home that are relatively flat, without high rises, and abounding with such natural beauty. This is one of my favorites. I hope you enjoyed it
