I went snow camping with  my buddy Blaine and his pal Kevin near South Lake Tahoe, CA at Mt. Tallac. This was my first adventure going snow camping and it was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

We drove up to the snow at 4:30 in the a.m. on Saturday and caravanned up and arrived at the trail head at about 9:45 and were snowshoeing and hiking by 10:15. Kona was all set with her gear in her pack, but the snow was really crunchy and she was post-holing really bad so i took off her pack and carried her food in my pack, which was already getting a little heavy. Kevin brought port and didn’t want to carry that, so I started to feel like a sherpa. Anyhow, off we went into the mountains and snow. The hike in was about 3 hours i would guess breaking trail a lot of the way. The last 1/8 mile was the steepest and hardest going. We finally found the ridge we were going to camp on. Blaine and Kevin decided to make snow caves so they got busy on their caves. See the photo of kevin with his cave from the inside.

I was the only one who brought a tent up and the guys were giving me a hard time telling me how cold I was going to be at night. I stuck to my guns that my gear would be sufficient and Kona and I would help keep each other warm.

In the tent I was fine. Kona seemed a bit cold and i covered her with a fleece blanket i brought and by the time morning was here, we had survived!

In the morning we packed up and headed out along a slightly different line down, but we were cruising and we made it back to the parking lot by 11. Kevin cruised down and Blaine and I went out to breakfast before beating traffic back down to SF.

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The speedotron 1205cx power pack.

I bought the speedotron 1205cx powerpack and 3 – 102 heads used last thursday  from pro camera rental in S.F. and got to use them yesterday to shoot Kona and Mogo. They worked well. I was really pumped on how the lights plug into the box. They have that “pull-back” slider on the plug like you see on some hose attachments that makes it super easy. Trying to line up some plugs can be so hard, you feel like you’re gonna break the post connectors. This one just pops on and off. Super easy! The reflectors are really nice too that come with the heads and pump out a lot of extra light. I actually had a hard time controlling some of the light because there was so much. Another nice feature was the modeling lights showed how the decrease in power if you cranked down a certain head. Maybe this is normal stuff for a lot of light kits, but on the Dyna lights i’ve used in the pass, these things were not standard.

Here’s a shot of Mogo for the calendar we’re doing. She is so easy to shoot. I am new to Aperture, so my white balance didn’t look perfect on this output, but wanted to post a photo I actually took with the lights. You can see that the photo is actually back lit, which took me a while to figure out how best to control the light that i was using to blow out the background. I actually had to bounce the light off the ceiling because aiming my light at the paper was creating too much light.

First day shooting with the speedotron lights.

So far, i’m super stoked on the light set up. I’ll post some more photos as i edit them.