Louis Sheldon goes to Palos Verdes

Rachel and I followed Louis to Palos Verdes for our first experience to watch him dive for shells. Despite getting stuck watching kids in baseball uniforms riding in the back of Ford F250's for 20 minutes, and Rachel locking her car keys in the camera case located in the trunk of her car, the day was exceptionally gorgeous and we hopefully got good footage.

Louis dove with his friend Alex who is a biology major at CSULB - they know each other because they share the same fraternity. Louis is still involved with the fraternity as an alumni. The hike was strenuous for me with the camera (I'm not going to lie, I was really nervous I was going to do some harm to the camera), but it was even worse for Louis and Alex with their 60-70 lbs. of extra weight from their dive gear.

Rachel and I mostly captured action shots and what will hopefully turn into good cutaways - hooking up a lav mic to a wet suit for an interview walking down a steep trail with the final destination being the ocean would prove too difficult. I am interested to hear the sound captured from Saturday - it sounded normal in the headphones.

While Louis and Alex were diving, that gave Rachel and I about an hour to film our surroundings. I asked Rachel to get a wide range of seascape shots - close ups of craggy rocks, long shots of the distant cliffs, shells in the tide pools, etc. Two highlights for me while we were waiting for Louis:

1. I was sitting on a rock enjoying the view and looked to my right only to find a colorful crab peaking out of a rock crevice...I quickly asked Rachel for the camera and filmed the little guy for 5-8 minutes.

2. There were 4 fishermen on the rocks we were filming from so I struck up conversation with them - one fishermen explained to me that he considers himself a hunter more than a fisherman because it is only in the off season that he fishes. His largest game he has hunted was a 600 lb. bear! If only we could make another documentary.

When the boys popped up out of the water, I got exciting footage of Louis almost being pounded into the rocks as he was coming ashore. It helped that on the climb back up the trail the boys needed resting points - that allowed me to run up farther and set up impromptu camera "stations" to capture their ascent on film. Once they reached the top of the cliff, Louis and Alex talked about the different world that only exists under water, how life is vibrant and all over, what they fear most when under water. Alex has an underwater camera and will be sending us photos and videos of their underwater dives together. All in all, a successful and beautiful filming experience.