Category Archives: On Location with Brian Gilbert

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.)

Yesterday I completed a long day documenting a visit to Chattanooga by Majora Carter for the Benwood Foundation and Mindflow Media. Majora is an activist and environmental justice activist who did phenomenal work in the South Bronx, building the first park to be constructed in that neighborhood in 70 years. We started at about 8:45AM on a bus tour of Chattanooga (which was educational in it’s own right… did you know we have a place in Chattanooga called “residue hill?” Folks are so scared of this site that  disturbing the area is prohibited, since they don’t know what sorts of chemicals have been dumped there. It’s a relic of 70-plus years of manufacturing in Chattanooga.)

Recording audio on a small bus, packed with local dignitaries and careening down residential streets  is a particular challenge. I’m quite sore this morning.

A large luncheon and panel discussion at a local church and afterschool center was next, then a sit-down interview with Ms. Carter back at the Benwood offices. We had a few minutes for some pizza, then it was off to UTC to set up for her evening lecture. (I managed to swing through Starbucks on the way for a quick recharge.) We wrapped up at 9:00PM. A long day, but like all the shoots I’ve done with Dave Porfiri and the Benwood Foundation, it was educational.