Louie Psihoyos has been widely regarded as one of the top photographers in the world. He was hired directly out of college to shoot for National Geographic and created images for the yellow-bordered magazine for 18 years. His ability to bring humanity and wit to complicated science stories carries over to his filmmaking. An ardent diver and dive photographer, he feels compelled to show the world the decline of our planet’s crucial resource, water.

He has been on contract for Fortune Magazine and shot hundreds of covers for other magazines including Smithsonian, Discover, GEO, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Rock and Ice. His work has also been seen on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Television and the History Channel. Museums and private collectors around the world have sought Psihoyos' photography.

With Jim Clark, he created The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), in 2005. The non-profit organization provides an exclusive lens for the public and media to observe the beauty as well as the destruction of the oceans, while motivating change. With his first film, The Cove, he has touched many with his unflinching view of a dark subject. The eco-thriller has won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 82nd Academy Awards, Audience Awards at Sundance, Newport Beach and Toronto's HotDocs and sweeped through the festival circuit.

Ok Louie, first of all congratulations for winning the Academy Award® and of course for exposing the dolphin massacre in the secret cove in Taiji. In this talk we will concentrate at the gear you used and how did you managed to film such a difficult subject in such difficult filming locations.

Alexandros Maragos:

• So, what was your production & visual plan? Did you had any digital previsualization before filming, any 3D representations of the difficult sequences to be shot, storyboard?

Louie Psihoyos:

We didn’t do any story boarding until after principle shooting in Taiji was done. Very little was preconceived in terms of story. The story really came together in the edit. We were shooting a making of film about how we acquired the covert footage and we ended up editing that story into the film – so in the end we had a kind of thriller, a real life Oceans Eleven kind of film.

• You used various shooting techniques that we often see from the big Hollywood studios and production companies like LucasFilm. You went from hidden tree-cameras to fake-rock cameras. What type of cameras did you manage to fit in? Who made the custom equipment?

Kerner Optical, used to be owned by Lucas Film’s 3-D prop department. They made the fake rocks that we hid some of the first hard drive cameras ever manufactured. The hard drive cameras allowed us to record about 4 hours of footage. At the time, there were not commercially made batteries to accommodate the run time so we had expedition batteries made for this operation. We used remote controlled cameras for the blimp photography, helicopter shots and the nest camera. We also used button hole cameras on Ric and video camera that shot through the hole in a camera bag for the sequences with police interrogation.

• What hd cameras did you use on and off the water and why?

We needed the thermal camera to detect guards at the cove at night. We also had night vision cameras but heat is a better indicator of isolate living things. We also used Sony HD cams in blinds operated by OPS camera persons but the rock cameras revealed a more intimate view of the cove because we could plant them so close to the action.

• What were your camera settings for the various shooting situations?

The rock cameras were all set on automatic. The lighting conditions in the cove were pretty extreme and varied greatly. The dolphin hunters like to do their work just after sunrise so cameras would have difficulty picking up what they were doing. Automatic was the only way to go in this instance. Some of the Sony HD cameras operated by people we had to push the gain to 12db sometimes because it was so dark.

• What was your frame rate?

We shot everything at 60 and downcoverted to 24. In the future we’re going to start shooting at 24 because the pans can be a bit jaggy when you film straight edges.

• Did you used any particular lenses?

We did side by side tests of Fujinon and Canon and the Fuji lenses won. We had two zooms, one that went very wide and a long telephoto - can’t recall what they were now – We sold them. We didn’t use primes as docs require shooting fast.