The Amazing Rock Climbing Ladies at Smith Rock

After filming in Utah (read about it here), I spent 3 days in beautiful Oregon filming three mothers rock climbing with their young children.  Smith Rock State Park is a famous rock climbing spot and hard to point your camera in the wrong direction.  One of the mothers (Aimee) was even rock climbing while 5 months pregnant.  You can read more about Aimee and her goal of staying active during pregnancy here: Mama Climbs

Joining Aimee were two friends from Wales.  Everyone was such a joy to be around and to film.  I was truly impressed!  I got some incredible footage and the video turned out great!  Filming these amazing rock climbers made me feel guilty for just pushing record while they were giving their all.  It was one of the easiest shoots I have ever done because I was able to stay in the same general area and get different angles with a variety of lenses and cameras.  In fact at one point I was filming a close-up of the shot you see above with one camera in one hand and a wide shot with another camera in the other hand.  I was able to cut between them in the video.  Fun!

The morning I woke up to film the sunrise at Smith Rock it was 27 degrees and very windy!   After capturing the pictures from the time-lapse on my computer later that night, I decided to get up the next morning and try to make it better.   That night, I had sand in every crevice of my camera gear and spent a good while cleaning and getting things set for the early morning.   I was very proud of myself for getting up on time and  racing to the spot to set up in the perfect spot.  I had the perfect settings on my camera and was about to start the 2 hour time-lapse when… I discovered I had left my memory card for my camera back at the hotel.  Ouch!  I don’t make these mistakes often, but my travels and lack of sleep were really starting to get to me.  I had been filming and editing pretty straight for about 3 weeks at this point.   The good news is that the original sunrise that I captured turned out great and it’s the one I used at the beginning of the video.  And my trip was almost complete and I would get a chance to head home and begin editing.  I was looking forward to sleeping as much as one can with an infant and a four year old in the house.

Here’s the final video:

REI: The Amazing Rock Climbing Ladies of Smith Rock from Larry McLaughlin on Vimeo.