In going back through last year I wanted to show a little commercial I helped with last year.

Through a reference from my friend Artem Mishin, Jesse Tarnoff from SandBox Love contacted me to help shoot aerial footage for a commercial for a new startup:  WeVideo (website). A company that allows for video editing in the cloud.

The final product:

Thanks to the whole team and Bay Area Skydiving for making this happen!

More info on the video production can be found on Jesse Tarnoff’s blog

First of all a very happy new year to all of you.

My wife has been reading books on Feng Shui, and the latest one is on “Clear your clutter with Feng Shui”, here is the link to the kindle version ( so you don’t clutter your house / office with another book ).

We decided to take it to heart for the business as well, and started off organizing the massive photo library that I’ve accumulated over the last 13+ years of doing photography.

The benefits of this for us is:

- less harddrive space occupied with shots that are not really necessary to keep around

- we know EXACTLY what we have

The benefits for all of you:

more photos on the blog and website, as I have already run into some beauties that were “hidden in the clutter”

Looking forward to another exciting year, and hope to see you all at the different events around the country.

What are your new year’s resolutions for your business?

Jacco enjoying freefall with Bavo

Two weeks ago I had the great pleasure of jumping with my cousin Jacco!
We jumped together a couple of years ago, and this time his fiance gave him another tandem jump for his birthday.
September 17th, it was time to jump again.
Last time we jumped together I flew with him, this time he asked me to shoot it for him so he had some nice large photos to hang on his wall, instead of a video to watch. Video is great, but it is not something you have playing all the time. A photo on the wall is more memorable (in my personal opinion)

Two thumbs up after a beautiful tandem

I uploaded the photos to my SmugMug galleries.

To Jacco: you can only do 2 tandems buddy.. next one, you’re going on your own!!

A big thank you to my friend Bavo for taking such good care of my cousin, and a big thank you to Paraclub Hoevenen for just all around being awesome. An amazing feeling to walk back onto the dropzone after many years, and instantly feel back at home again.

Enjoy!

The Lodi Sequentials continues it’s reputation as a skydiving event that pushes the limits of freefly skydiving.

For the last 5 years I have been very lucky to be part of this event, and this year was again a big hit. The weather did not cooperate for most of the event. Friday and Saturday got winded out. The winds were too high and too unpredictable to be able to hold a safe event and Bill Dause, owner of the Parachute Center in Lodi, together with organizers Mike Knight and TJ Landgren made the call not to jump that day.

The group went out and did some other activities in the area, and gathered back at the dropzone on Sunday morning with hopes to turn that day into a big one. Which the team did!

4 rounds of 8 way VRW competition were flown, with 5 teams competing against each other, then a quick break for lunch and on to 4 formation loads to fly 40 way sequential freefly skydives.

A long day, but a satisfying one for sure.

The photos from the event can be found in my SmugMug galleries

With the beginning of the season kicking off, and people coming back out to the dropzone loaded up with new toys they got for Christmas (GoPro’s, Digital SLRs, etc) I was asked to hold a short seminar on flying the camera.

Please join us on Saturday April 23rd, after sunset (be there around 5pm or so) at Bay Area Skydiving for a seminar on flying the camera.

We’ll be talking about:

- Safety

- Helmet setup

- Cameras

- Having a story

- Safety

- Settings

- and last but not least, we’ll go over safety a bit.

If you are planning on attending, please “accept the invite” on Facebook or shoot me an email at:  iwanvdschoor@gmail.com

If there are specific topics and or questions you would like to hear about, please send me a heads up, I’ll make sure it makes it onto the agenda for the night.

This is a BYOCB (bring your own cold beverages) and food event, let’s make it a nice get together to talk about all the fun that can be had when we fly camera in a safe manner.

We’ll be showing some videos on the big screen at the end.

See you out there, and be safe!

For the last year or so we have seen teaser videos of the Red Bull movie “Human Flight 3D”.

An impressive production if you think about it, since the camera flyers had to skydive with 2 35mm cinema cameras, which made for very interesting skydiving helmet configurations.

Here are two images from the movie that show the different setups look that were used for the movie.

Copyright Red Bull Airforce / Miles Daisher

Image courtesy of Red Bull Airforce

Neither one of these solutions are very affordable for smaller productions, but it looks like Sony has now come up with an answer for this!

Sony HDR-TD10 Full HD 3D camcorder

This camera looks like a baby in comparison to the setups the Red Bull team was using:

weight: approx 740g with the provided NP-FV70 battery

dimensions : 2 1/4inch x 2 5/8 inch x 5 1/8 inch (74mm x 86.5mm x 148.5mm)

source: sonystyle.com

I can’t wait to get my hands on this beauty and test it out for skydiving. Not all cameras are fit for skydiving due to the different image stabilization systems used in them. The Sony HDR-TD10 is using the optical stabilization system, which has not always proven to be so good for skydiving. The only way to really find out, is to “throw it out of a plane”  so be on the lookout for test footage of this camera!

More information on the new camera: Sony HDR-TD10 on Sonystyle.com

More information on the Human Flight 3D movie, and to watch a trailer for it: http://redbullairforce.com/human-3d

Blue skies and happy filming!

“You’ve got mail!”

I opened the mailbox this week to find a skydiving magazine that I could not read, even if I wanted to… but what made me very happy was, to see that they chose one of my photos to publish!

Last November I participated in the California State Record as one of the photographers / videographers to try to set the record for the largest head down skydiving formation in California (58 people). Part of that team were five people from Sweden that helped us accomplish the record.

They told the publicist of their national skydiving magazine “SVENSK FALLSKÄRMS SPORT” and they reached out to me for some shots.
They picked “the record shot”, here’s a copy of the page where it is published (page 23 in issue number 4, 2010):

Published in Sweden

As a pretty fanatic Twitter user I spend some time every day reading what different websites, photographers, friends have to say. I love reading the educational pieces that the different websites post.

One of my personal favorites is PetaPixel, which posted a great article on “Shooting a 300ft redwood tree”
Trees is not something I am personally passionate about, but the “how they did it” part of the video was very interesting to me, and the why.

I love the last advice at the end from the photographer Michael Nichols.

The article with the videos is here:
Shooting a 300-foot-tall Redwood Tree

A movie from skydiving cinematography pioneer Carl Boenish.
Shot on 16mm!

I wanted to share a short hilarious video with all of you that I filmed at the American Boogie 2010 at Skydance Skydiving in Davis, CA

My friend Michael “Butch” Horn brought an inflatable “toy” to the event that he wanted to make a skydive with. We got together with a group of friends who all wanted to be part of this fun, and did this jump!

Enjoy the visuals. I did not put music on the video or anything, so it is “noisy”.. the sound of fun at 120mph!