On location with SpeedTV’s “Wrecked”

I managed to get a last-minute call for a shoot this week in Chattanooga for a segment of SpeedTV’s “Wrecked.” One of the show’s principals was receiving an industry award here, and they wanted to put it into the show. Eric Weatherington, freelance producer from North South Productions drove down from Knoxville. Local photographer Jeff Hannah was on primary camera, and Eric shot on the secondary, a pair of Sony Z1U. Equipment difficulties made the money shot a little questionable (the camera switched into high-gain mode right before the presentation, and Jeff couldn’t navigate the layers of menus fast enough to get it back. The shot ended up really grainy. The problem turned out to be a user-assignable button on the side of the camera that wasn’t cleared by the last photographer. The button was bumped, and Jeff was baffled.) The Z1s were really touchy about input level, and would clip hard if pushed over 0Db, but it sounded reasonably good in the end. (The metering on the Z1 is digital full scale, and zero is absolutely zero… meaning no more digital bits to record on. Anything  pushed over zero dBFS sounds absolutely awful.)