Day 15

Some more of the Santa Fe Railyard. There are so many train tracks around, there must have been a huge rail infrastructure here, but it's curious now there's only one regular train passing through. What happened?

It was a chilly morning. More often i'm wearing jeans then shorts, but today it was a jeans plus my UnderArmour fleece. Today was another clean-up, small task day. One project that's been moving lowly is the intercom antenna project. Our wireless intercom has three antennas: One stage-left, one stage-right, and one high in the catwalks center-stage. The antenna is very far up-stage, by the B-lift, which gives us great coverage on the back deck, but horrible reception in the house. Since better reception in the house is more favorable, we need to move the antenna and re-route it's cable. The antenna cable takes a bit to re-run, since we need to keep it nice and clean as it runs along the conduit. I had to stop about half-way through since rehearsal on stage was beginning.

During this project, one of our spotlight booth conductor monitors stopped working. I metered the power outlets and those still worked, so the TV must have a blown fuse. Luckily there was a spare monitor in the spotlight booth, so I swapped those out and rehearsal proceeded as normal.

My anal rentative task for today was to organize and clean up the cable in the control room. There's a bunch of stuff just hanging out, that could easily get hung up or moved to storage. There were also some cable racks that just had cable thrown on it, with no rhyme or reason. I spent the better part of the morning cleaning and organizing cable so when it came time for one, I would know where they were (and so could others). Now the video cable was together, the XLR cables were together, etc.

Just before lunch, the director tripped over our conductor camera, and broke the camera mount off the camera. When I went to re-attach, it appeared to have been broken several times before, with a T-nut epoxyed onto it. The T-nut came loose from the camera, so I went to the carpentry shop for suggestions for a fix. We eventually re-epoxyed the T-nut, and let it work over lunch to set.

Coming back from lunch (and re-attaching the conductor camera), I continued on my quest for a clean control room by sorting patch cables. We seem to have 200+ patch cables, but the nice thing is they have different color designations, so you can patch and trace patches much easier.

After rehearsal was done, Allan and I rushed out to set up the audio for the tech table. We got that done in record time, and went to test the CD playback for rehearsal. I hooked up my iPhone and looped a Beatles song so we could get sound through the front of house. Three of the four speakers worked, but for some reason the house-left main speaker wasn't working. I put on my Troubleshooting hat and went to work.

I sniffed the signal coming out of the patch bay, so I knew the sound board was working right. I went to the stage right wing and sniffed the cable going up to the speaker, and got no signal. I went back to the control room, into the back of the patch bay, and attempted to sniff out the lost signal. I eventually found it in an un-labeled piece of audio cable on the ground behind the patch bay. I re-attached the cable to the output of the sound console, and all sound was well.

On the way home Allan and I stopped by REI. For this kind of work, REI really has lots of great gear to make a technician's life easier. Having only one, I picked up some more Sporks from Light My Fire. These things are strong, dishwasher safe, and infinitely useful, especially if you bring your own food.

On the walk home, I photographed the trains again, this time shooting for HDR (High Dynamic Range imaging). The idea behind HDR is that a normal picture at proper exposure would have shown the shadows as almost black darkness. At the same time, the sky would have been very bright. Not a very appealing photo. What you do is take two (or more photos) all at different exposures:


As you can see, the photo on the left, the photo is very underexposed. This is great exposure for details in the clouds and the left side of the train. The photo on the right is over-exposed , because the sky is too bright, as well as the left part of the train. However, we can see tremendous detail in the shadow-side of the train that wasn't apparent in the first photograph.

Using a piece of software, you can combine these two photos and the result is the best of both worlds. The photo at the top of the page is an example of that, and actually used five different photos, all of varying exposure levels.

Hope you enjoyed the photo lesson, see you tomorrow!

-Matt