7:02 PM Shooting with One Arm Tied In Front of my Back

Back in September I posted briefly about injuring my shoulder and needing surgery. Didn’t give any detail, and followed up with a number of posts since then. The deal was I had a grade five shoulder separation of my right (shooting arm) and didn’t miss a beat. Here’s how I did it:

Three days after the injury I boarded a plane and headed for Interbike. With a bottle of Vicodin and carefully scheduled adult beverages I managed to continue shooting very carefully with my right arm supported by a sling. I had help carrying my gear and dramatically reduced my use of flash for the most part. All my posts from Interbike and KK’s World Hour record below were shot that way.

The day after KK’s World Hour record I had surgery. After one week off I headed for Rhode Island to shoot the Bike Demo and Cross Race, and then follow along with Bicycle Retailer for the Boston Dealer Tour.

My arm was sporting the “ultra sling III,” had a huge slice in my shoulder, some new hardware. The doctor provided strict order s to not use the arm and keep it in the sling. Even if he hadn’t ordered me the pain prevented it anyway. My solution for shooting turned out to be fairly simple to develop but difficult to execute consistently good results.

The first step was a pre-trigger cord from Pocket Wizard and a Pocket Wizard. This allowed me to hold my camera with my good arm (Left) and still have access to a shutter release (this became the pocket wizard.) It was east to hold the camera in both portrait and landscape orientation and easy to press the shutter, but I did run into some problems.

I’m a manual guy. Moving indoors and outdoors, plus constantly changing weather (clouds, sunshine) meant changing ISO was common. On the Pre-trigger cord for pocket wizard you can’t change the ISO when it’s on so I had to add this step to my shot prep.

Changing the focal point required moving my camera to my right arm not viewing through the viewfinder and guessing that I bumped the joystick in the right direction. It worked about 50% of the time first try.

Changing shutter and F-stop was cumbersome but worked out.

For artificial light it was huge to have help from my usual helper. Thanks Tab! For the newbie’s that helped they did an awesome job with my instructions and limited time.

Chimping shots was nearly impossible- when the pre-trigger is on you have three steps to chimp a shot- so when time was limited you had to spend more time with the set-up and trust your gut.

I have about 3-4 more weeks before my arm is back to shooting strength but am enjoying the challenge of doing things different. Enough ranting here’s some of the results from post surgery.