This week, I was over in Northern Ireland for work – I’d never been to the north before… I went to County Kerry on the west coast of Ireland a couple of times as a kid, but that was about 35 years ago!
We needed to shoot a customer testimonial for a client, and it needed to be done at a showroom in Belfast, so I went over there with Andy Fidler on Thursday.
Because we were flying, we weren’t able to take much kit with us – I needed 2 cameras for the interview, but we didn’t have any economical way of taking a couple of tripods with us, so I had to try and find somewhere to hire from. Obviously, in Manchester it’s pretty easy to find a hire company for pro kit, but I really couldn’t find anywhere in Belfast that we could use! I eventually found I could hire a couple of tripods from Calumet, but they weren’t quite what we were after since they didn’t have proper video heads, but they would have to do! Oh, and annoyingly, the bank decided to cancel my work debit card the day before (fraudulent activity supposedly!), so I had to hire both a car and the kit (along with deposits!) on my own card!
We flew out from Manchester at 8.40am, and were landed less than an hour later! The plane was pretty empty, so it was quite nice to have a bit of room!
Andy on the plane.
We collected our hire car, and then set out to find the store we needed to pick up the tripods from. We were using Google Maps, but had a bit of a mare finding it! We eventually got what we needed, and headed over to the location of the shoot.
Setting up for the interview.
The shoot went well – we got some nice shots of the showroom and office and then set up to do the interview at the front of the store. Luckily it was a quiet time of day, so there weren’t too many customers trying to walk through our shot. But it was really sunny outside, and the big front window acted a bit like a greenhouse, and it was so hot whilst we filmed it!
All done, we dropped the tripods back, but it was still only just three o’clock, and we had 6 hours to kill before our flight home. So we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to head up to the Giant’s Causeway (after working out there was enough time to get there and back!)
It took us about an hour and a half to drive up there, and after paying to park and enter via the visitor’s centre (which I have since discovered we didn’t need to do, and could have gone for free!), walked down to the famous stones.
When you get down to the actual Giant’s Causeway, it really does look pretty special. I’d seen lots of amazing photos of them previously, looking mysterious in hazy light, but what I wasn’t expecting was so many people!
Me on the Giant’s Causeway.
I guess it is a major tourist attraction, so you have to expect that other people will be visiting too, but it just didn’t marry up with images I’d seen before! It was quite difficult to get nice photos that didn’t have random people climbing over them!
Andy waving on the Giant’s Causeway.
They are really weird to look at – the majority are hexagonal in shape, and interlock so perfectly, but are all at different heights, so look like they’ve been pushed up at different times. Apparently there are around 40,000 of these columns, and were caused by ancient volcanic eruptions tens of millions of years ago! I reckon it’d be really cool to be there for a sunrise or sunset, but unfortunately we didn’t have time to hang around for too long, so left after about 90 minutes!
We got back to the airport and checked in with no problems – Belfast airport is really tiny, and there wasn’t much of a choice of where to eat, so we ended up having a Burger King before our flight left just before 9pm!