Advanced Fly Tying DVD | Power Streamers

This huge brown trout was caught with a Bern's Bad Boy on the Madison River. Tomato Bob insisted on using the streamer after the flies his guide suggested were not working. He knows Bern's flies work when nothing else does.

As you can see, this was a good decision.

Bern and I continued trying to work out the assorted kinks in our filming. We know by experience these streamers work extremely well and we were determined to get the step by step tying process on video.

I started editing the material we had, which mostly meant we would give a horrified gasp and quickly decide to shoot it again.

After enough practice, we started coordinating our movements much better. Adding a fluid head to the tripod helped us take another big step forward. We started getting results worth using, to our immense relief.

Bern built an aquarium we take in the drift boat. We fill the tank with water when we stop and wade. Any particularly excellent trout go in it for photography before we release them back into the river.

Trout are not particularly photogenic in an aquarium if left to their own devices. They promptly stick their nose down in a corner with their tail floating upwards in a most unattractive pose.

It takes two people to photograph the fish properly, one to hold the fish gently at the surface and the other to hold the camera. When the camera is focused and ready, the fish holder lets the fish go and it swims back down to poke its nose in the corner again.

If all goes well, Bern gets a few photos of the fish swimming in attractive poses. If not, well, a lot of photos get discarded in this process.

But this provides Bern lots of reference material for his paintings of trout, which often are extremely large trout heads. Madison Warrior is 54" wide, for example.

These big hooked jaw brown trout males are his favorite fish. This particular brown was caught on a Bern's Sculpin, one of the flies featured in the completed Power Streamers Advanced Fly Tying Dvd.

I was new to video editing, and plunged into Final Cut Pro, aided by a big fat manual.

To my horror, as the video developed, I kept using more and more techniques I had not intended to learn so quickly.

I inserted some of Bern's painting images in the introduction. Bern discussed how he developed the streamers and how to create variations for different rivers and fishing conditions.

We used closeups of the tying methods for single and articulated streamers. I inserted titles and edited out bloopers of all sorts.

Just to be sure I made myself half crazy, I added music to it as well.

When it was finally done, we had one hour and 48 minutes of instructional DVD.

© Lexi Sundell 2008, all rights reserved.