On the River

 Yesterday a shoot happened on about 24 hours notice, Chey was passing through the Bay Area so we met halfway, on the upper Russian River. It was my first real opportunity to put the M10 through it's paces in a model shoot.

First, the technical details. The battery was at 95 percent charge at the start. After an hour and a half of near continuous shooting and 474 images, LCD turned off and checked only a few times to verify exposure, at the end it was still at 60 percent charge. Better than I expected. I'll probably eventually get a spare battery just in case, but it's not urgent.

I tested limits on dynamic range. In the image above, the sun is just over the mountains, low near-backlight, the model mostly in the shade of the willows on the opposite bank and with the sun catching her hair and arms. The M10 very nearly held onto all the detail. It's not flawless, but it's impressive. Most anything I've used before, digital or film, this would have been hopeless lighting.

On the creative side, we worked in a riparian space, mostly rocks bounded by trees, not more than 30 feet square. We really couldn't go outside that box, the river was deep and cold despite no recent rain and the overgrown bank and proximity of the highway limited where we could work at a location neither of us had visited before. That wasn't a concern, we found plenty of angles and compositions and Chey did a great job of taking my concept and running with it. If anything there are too many strong images, it's difficult to select just a few. A nice problem to have. I've done post on about 16 of them so far and will live with those for a while and then take a fresh look.

The weather cooperated, a mild 70 degrees at the afternoon start, not bad for this time of year and a nice break from recent coastal fog for me. Overall, a fun shoot.