Sputneck and I rolled into downtown Raleigh this morning (6 am on a Sunday!) to shoot the implosion of the convention center. The pictures are downloading now and I’ll have them up later. Just so I don’t forget though, here’s a list of things—in no particular order—to remember the next time I shoot an implosion:
- Just because I can shoot 8 frames a second doesn’t mean I should — I was shooting raw and I filled the buffer before the building was done falling. 4fps would have been much better. Which brings me to my next point…
- Suck it up, trust my exposure skills and shoot JPEG — I wouldn’t have filled the buffer if I had been.
- When people start counting down they probably know more than you do — They’d told us there were going to be three horns, at 5 minutes, 2 minutes, and one minute. There were no horns. When I heard a bunch of people counting down I thought they were just having fun. Imagine my surprise when I heard the first charge go at “zero!”
- You don’t have to start shooting at the first charge, it takes a while for the building to start collapsing
- Do your recon the day before — We could have had a fantastic spot two blocks back from where we were, but we didn’t realize that until we were leaving.
- Finally, when a chatty, newly-minted DSLR owner asks what you do with your lens caps, don’t censor yourself. Not at 6:30 in the morning.