One of the suppliers for Noma is Søren Wiuff and he has a farm about an hour's drive away from Copenhagen. This man is a living legend. His knowledge of food, farming and everything in between is second to non and he's a genuine gent. Due to busy schedules and the need for a fairly decent dusting of snow on the ground, I left for Copenhagen with the intention of placing a tripod and shooting the next day.

There are many ways you can leave a fixed rig over the period of a year (or longer). If you want absolute peace of mind, you're going to have to donate something to the cause be it a scaffold pole, tripod or a wooden construction as it will probably never be usable again. Pierre had an old tripod that was out of action and we decided on the option of burying it in concrete in a small forest on Søren's land.

One thing to be aware of is your choice of location. If you place your rig in the summer, do you know if the land is likely to flood in other seasons? One of my first 'buried' rigs was installed during the summer but when I returned three months later, I struggled to line the shot up again and realised that the ground was saturated. There was a lot of support under the tripod but with heavy rain, the whole area had sunk down and the tripod and huge concrete block had moved with it. Luckily we'd managed to re-align the shot in post as it had only tilted slightly but a lesson learnt!

Once you've buried / drilled / attached your rig, it's now very important to measure everything! With fingers crossed that your camera support isn't going to move, you'll need to place your camera, line up your shot and once you're happy, note down everything you can. For example:

Base plate - does your camera plate slide or move? If so, mark it's position

Tripod head - are you leaving it attached to the rig? If not, again, mark positions.

Shooting

So you'll shoot a standard shot as normal but again, you'll need to take a note of every setting on your camera - especially your aperture setting as you don't want the depth of field changing during the shot. During the course of your next visits, the lighting may change but you can compensate for that with ISO changes or shutter changes.

It's best also to make a note of your focus setting. I normally try and find something within my focus range and focus on that using live view then when I return, I can focus on that again.

Subsequent Visits