THE NEW THING - 6 January 2013

Sandhill Cranes at Sunset - Crane Ponds, Bosque Del Apache, New Mexico

Welcome to the new year. Of course, I could’ve started the new year with a revision of what I did the previous year. I think I did that last year. For many reasons I haven’t. This year I decided to do something new and different and talk about something new and different, shooting movies.

Some of you might be thinking shooting movies is not so new and different for me. That’s true. I have several multi-media videos on this site. Most of those where shot with my GoPro camera. I used them to document rides on my motorcycle. I made those by first recording lots of videos on a ride. Then, I combined them with the background of an awesome musical track. The whole effort took forever. Of course, shooting videos is an entirely different and new process from simply editing pictures. Telling stories with videos with sound is not an easy task. Honestly, I’ve been overwhelmed.

This doesn’t mean I don’t want to make videos. I just haven’t developed the chops to really get good at it. So, I haven’t been doing it much.

Well, now it’s the new year and with a new year there’s always a push to try new things. This year I decided to re-attack this video thing taking a totally different strategy. The strategy is simply collect small snippets of experiences. Instead of making a single coherent and highly edited final production, just collect the snippets and present them like I would with pictures.

Here are my thoughts on this. I am a STILL image nature photographer. I capture small snippets of time in ways that capture a a vision, my vision. I hope my work is good enough for you to get a sense of my “experience” of the scene which is more than the simple view of what my camera is pointed at. It is my goal every time I present an image here you might feel a little of what I felt when I made the picture.

I thought about video and the difficulties of making coherent productions and realized I was in over my head and needed more skills than I had or was really to develop in short order. Still, I had plenty of skills to captures scenes. I thought I could capture scenes with video using visualization techniques I already had. With many captures, I would eventually have a story of the location, just like I would after shooting many still images.

That’s what I’m trying. That’s the new thing. The new thing is making short captures of scenes using video as if I was shooting stills. The objectives aren’t too different than when I shoot still’s. Videos are simply moving pictures aren’t they.

This first video at the top of the blog was made using my D800 attached to my most wonderful 300mm f/2.8 AF-S. The full resolution video is awesome. Make sure you select the right resolution when you start the video. You'll be impressed. I’m surprised the sound is as good as it is since I’m not using a separate microphone. In a sense, this video is simply a still image with moving parts, which has it’s own appeal. It certainly adds a new dimension to showing this location for you, the viewer.

We’ll see what happens down the road to see how much I might use this format in my art. I hope I do. It is another format to express myself artistically using tools available today and skills I already have.

Cheers

Tom