Finding an original photo is one of the challenges in covering annual meetings each year.
Photographer Michael Raine was at the annual Saskatchewan Wheat Pool meeting last week in Regina, where he decided to shoot the delegates from above.
The pool and the Ramada hotel granted him permission to mount a camera on the ceiling of the ballroom, 7.5 metres up.
He used a device made by welding C-clamps together with a 2.54-centimetre steel tube. He included safety cable loops and clamping points, as well as a plate to mount the camera ball head and control arms.
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The unit was mounted to an aluminum track used for a large room divider. The camera was controlled with a coaxial cable strung through the track and down a wall 10.5 metres away.
He also mounted 1200 watt seconds of battery-powered strobe lighting to the unit.
Raine ran into some trouble. The carpeted ballroom was covered with hundreds of cables taped to the floor, needed to operate the delegates’ voting system.
“While testing the flash units, a large static charge passed through the ladder and myself to the aluminum track just above my head (I was on the ladder),” said Raine.
“The charge was so large that an audible snap could be heard, but worse than that, I was holding the leads to the three battery and power transformer packs. The static had tripped the relay. I felt my arm go numb as the capacitors in the packs drained into my hand through a finger tip….”
Raine changed his lighting to three smaller 200-watt units.
“I had been up the ladder more than 100 times, my finger was a lovely color of red and purple… and I was at least five pounds lighter,” Raine said later. He added: “My biggest fear was that it wouldn’t work.”
