Air Travel with Brick Batteries

I posted this on REDUSER Forum recently, and since I am collecting my stories in one place I am going to repost it here. For all the times you get frustrated at TSA when travelling with gear in the USA, here is a story where everyone was really professional. The topic was travelling with large Lithium Ion Batteries, the TSA has rules about size and carrying them in the cabin, not checking them in. TSA Battery Page The thread digressed into TSA and their sometimes inconsistent application of "rules". After a while of travelling you realize some TSA agents are either poorly trained or didn't pay attention in training. I will embed the Nicky Hayden Interview so you can see it. We flew in & out of Nashville but the shoot was in Southern Kentucky near Nicky's home.

I was in Nashville in 2010 to shoot an interview with Nicky Hayden for Oakley. When leaving, I went through the screening and one of the RED V-Bricks kept getting flagged as having explosive traces. I guess they have sniffers in the x-ray machine because they got the alert right out of the machine. They swabbed the equipment, narrowed it down to one of my 2 batteries. They re-ran the x-ray again and then the TSA agent said he was going to call the BDE. I asked what that meant, and he said Bomb Disposal Expert! This tall, fit gentleman in a nice suit came over. His manner was one of trained military. He looked at the battery and had TSA x-ray it one more time while he watched. He asked me if I had been around explosives lately and I said no, but the gear belonged to Oakley and several people use it and sometimes there are pyrotechnics involved in shoots. He wanted to know if I knew this battery had been used in that scenario, I said I did not for a fact. He said he knew it was a battery and it had just been exposed to explosives on the outside, so he took my ID and boarding pass photographed them with his phone and let me go to the plane. He was very polite and very smart. That all took about an hour. 

I have been through that airport a few times since and consider it one of the most professional TSA crews, no one was ever freaking out.

When I get back to the Oakley video office I am telling the story and one of the team there says, "Oh yeah they were doing a back country snow board shoot and they split the gear up between several people and one of guys was the one who uses explosives to blast avalanches". I look at him and asked him why he didn't say anything earlier? He just forgot about it till I mentioned it. The next shoot he went on, he took the camera body from that shoot he forgot to tell me about, and he spent about 90 minutes with the TSA. Same traces of explosives. He said that wasn't as bad as what they did to the guy behind him who started touching his belongings to push them through the x-ray machine, because he was impatient. They hauled that guy away to another room. DO NOT ever touch another passengers stuff because if it comes up for review they are wondering why you were messing with other peoples belongings.

 - Brian Ferguson

Duclos 11-16 mm

This is an awesome lens. It is becoming some of my friends favorite for their sports shooting.

Matt Duclos has taken a Tokina still lens and did an awesome job of making a cinema quality barrel housing to hold the elements. For the price, US$3495, it is really hard to beat. Seems like they are really back-ordered as well.

The lens is small and light. Check out the photo of the carry-on Pelican case with 2 Epics and 2 Duclos 11-16 mm lenses a RED Mag SSD Card case, and 3 LCD touch screens. This was for a 3D shoot, which this lens is great for. Another case had the other body and batteries and 2 RED EVF.

Duclos 11-16 mm 

Great tool for your Digital Cinema Camera

I am around a lot of crews that are using digital cinema cameras of different types. Sometimes they are surprised when I pull out a SensorScope. This is the modern day version of "checking the gate" to me. It is a magnifier that lets you look at the sensor, more accurately the OLPF glass in front of the sensor. There are kits available that include swab wands in sterile type bags and a simple hand blower-bulb. They were made for digital still cameras but they work great for cinema style CMOS cameras. It has a built in light to illuminate the body cavity also.

I check the sensor during prep and if I am outdoors in a dusty situation I will check during the shoot day as well. Usually the hand blower-bulb gets most of what I notice. This is the brand I have been using, I know there are others available but this one has worked really well for me. They are pretty reasonably priced I think a kit is under U.S.$100.  It is piece of mind, not having some out of focus crud in your images. It surprises me when I meet people who don't have one of these.