A Hike to Big Laurel Falls

[Mark Williams]

Big Laurel Falls is located near Franklin, NC. It is not a large waterfall but it is picturesque and the hike to it is very enjoyable. The trail starts where Mooney Creek & Big Laurel Branch meet as the two main tributaries that make up the Nantahala River. This is the headwaters area for the river and is well know for its remoteness as well as its wild trout population.

Direct sunlight was very limited and it proved to be very challenging to shoot video. It was probably the darkest area I have ever shot. There was about 1 hour of good lighting and even with that ISO was at 800 and 1600. I definitely need to acquire a low light lens for these situations.

This video was shot with the Panasonic GH4 camera at 1080p, 60fps and 200mbps, standard and Cine-V profile. Lenses used were the Panasonic 14-45mm, 45-175mm and Olympus 60mm macro. On this trip I used my new Ifootage Shark Slider for the first time and found it to be very smooth. Edited with Edius 5.51 and encoded for the web using Windows Media Video 9.

I discovered some fantastic new age music by an artist simply known as XPURM. There is hardly anything about him on the web except that he lives/lived in Egypt. The name of the song is "DWMWD” and is licensed for use under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

A Hike to Big Laurel Falls on Vimeo

[Michael Warren]

Very nice. The music fits well, too.

Did you find carrying the slider around in the bush a bother?

[Bob Safay]

Mark, what a pleasure it is to wake up and watch this fantastically soothing video with my first cup of coffee. I always enjoy your creative works. Bob

[Mark Williams]

Glad you all liked it. Carrying the ifootage shark slider wasn't too bad. I trimmed back all my other gear to lighten the load.