Brazil and Mexico Shoot - Day 3

This is what we've been waiting for. . .blue skies and sunshine!

In the filtered pre-dawn light, warning lights flashed brightly on the dash. Luis turned the key in the ingition, the starter motor chugged to life, but refused to start the car. Again and again he tried, but each time the engine just emitted a tortured whirring sound before lapsing into silence. It was 6am and having joked endlessly about worst case scenarios, funnily enough, this one never came up. It’s always the way. . .

After pushing the car down random streets for 15 minutes, unable to even start it by pushing, we gave up. Ready to throw in the towel and miss the Sunrise shoot, which was looking bleak anyway, we parked it in a random car park and were grabbing stuff out of the car ready to walk back to the hotel and call it quits when I thought I might take a look under the bonnet.

Often I wonder why the hell I do this. . .I know NOTHING about cars. . .I look under the hood and it makes about as much sense to me as Norwegian television. . .bugger all! But I opened it up none the less, maybe just to see if the engine had actually been removed, in which case I would have been able to successfully diagnose the fault. I wiggled the Spark plug leads, pulled the accelerator cable and tapped a couple of things with my fingers. Luis turned it over and, Hey Presto! It started first time! We had overcome the first hurdle of the day and felt pretty damn good about it!

A sunrise shoot on the lake yielded less than I would have liked. Cloud cover ruined all but a tiny portion of the sky and the shots were not as good as they could have been. I managed to get some OK ones, but nothing that you would call great, which was diasppointing, as the location really had the potential. It started raining while we were shooting, and the shots that were working stopped doing so because you could see rain drops on the water. . .I’m sure we’ll still get a little out of it though.

We stopped by the main bridge and golf course to see what we could get, but the overcast sky was killing us. The golf course yielded little and concerns over the outcome of the shoot were starting to weigh heavily upon us.

The weather looked terrible and we had pretty much written the day off. Packing things up we headed for the project site to see what it looked like so we could get an idea of what we would be shooting when we booked the helicopter. The site looked good but we ended up having to climb a couple of sizeable mountains to get the shots we needed. Not bringing water was a bad move, jetlag was kicking in and just as things were looking quite ominous, a break in the clouds starting dominating the sky back over Brasilia and we knew that we had to get back there fast.

The sun was shining when we got back into the city and we shot like madmen, running all over town getting everything we could while the sunshine and the blue skies lasted. At last we were getting shots we needed, that we were really happy with and that ticked all the boxes. It was stinking hot and without sunscreen, we didn’t realise how cooked we were until we actually stopped to look at each other. Bright red, haggard and scattered we kept going until we couldn’t go anymore. The 7D was singing though, absolutely loving the 70-200 and just raking it in.

Finally at about 6pm, a full 12 hours after kicking off we called it quits. With more than we’d hoped for in the can, we retired back to the hotel to have a rest wait for the sunset. Unfortunately the rain rolled in and put the kybosh on any hope of a sunset shoot, so we spent the time going through the rushes and dumping the cards.

It was a successful day, very hard work, but worth every second. I’m hoping for a clear sky tomorrow morning so we can really smash a sunrise and have nice weather for the aerial shots. Fingers crossed gang. . .

That’s it from me, it’s late, I’m buggered and with a 5:30am start on the cards again, it’s time for bed. . .

More soon. . .

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