Filming at Old St Patrick’s Cathedral
This last Wednesday, David and I drove to New York City to film Episode 7 of The Faithful Traveler, featuring New York’s Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. For the first time ever, we hired a second cameraperson in the person of Sonja Stark, of Pilotgirl Productions. Truth be told, it’s starting to get really difficult to continue our two-man mission, and so to take some of the pressure off of my poor husband, we decided to add a third person to our team. We’re both very glad we did, as not only is Sonja the nicest person, but she’s got a terrific eye, is exceedingly experienced, and just a great person overall. We really enjoyed working with her, and plan on including her in some of our future shoots.
We started the day off shooting outside. For those of you who don’t know—and I only learned this the hard way—if you’re filming outside, direct sunlight is deadly. It’s just too harsh, and creates “blooming”. Basically, when we shot with direct sunlight in my face once, my face was glowing, and there’s no way (that I know of) of fixing this with color correction. Production companies that can employ many people use screens to shield or diffuse the direct light, but since we don’t have that luxury, we do what we can, and shoot during the “Magic Hours” of morning and after 3 pm, when the light isn’t so direct.
So, we did what we could starting around 8:30 until around 11:30, when we moved inside. Old St. Patrick’s is just gorgeous. There is a lot of dark wood inside, which makes for a very rich look, but it’s also very dark, so we needed a lot of extra light.
We had a great time. Sonja and I did all of the on-camera footage, while David shot B-Roll of the Cathedral. We went until around 6:30, and then drove home, exhausted. It was a fabulous day, overall. I am very grateful!