…sort of reminds me of ocean waves. Maybe living by one would be pleasant if it wasn’t for the tailgaters, road ragers, and people who desperately need to be somewhere at 2 AM in the morning.
Hit the old Middlesex Greenway the other day, hoping to get some b-roll on top of the bridge that runs over Rt. 1. I swear, the damn thing sways on windy days. You can tell me it’s structurally sound all you want. I’ll just get my shots and hurry on down to the other side, thanks.
Got a few nice stills while I was up there, too. Little bit of split toning, little bit of darkening, and some ever-generous use of post-crop vignetting, and I can make mid-afternoon light look a lot closer to dark.
That’s one thing I miss about the colder seasons, I guess. You didn’t have to wait nearly as long for that beautiful dusky light to kick in.
I’ve got this professor that’s constantly quoting this one poem by Wislawa Syzmborska – “Nothing Twice”.
The professor’s a brilliant guy, but for some reason the first few lines resonate with me a whole lot more than the things he actually says. What that says about my academic information retention, I don’t know, but here they are –
A nice little one I never posted from the recent warehouse set. I think my girlfriend may be talking to a plant? I’m not sure.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about projects for the YouTube channel – different things to keep us moving along while we’re working on the more ambitious videos we’ve been bouncing around concepts for. We’ve got what we’re tentatively calling “trip” or “day” videos – like Night Ride and The Downtown Lap which are essentially music videos with a bit of a loose narrative that follow us as a group while we’re out and about on our little escapades – which are great, but I definitely don’t want them to be the brunt of what we do.
Then there’s the Tips Appreciated micro-series we’re working on, where every video shoots for somewhere under a minute. But even those are a little tricky to pump out because of the effort that goes into trying to center in on something snappy, quick, and catchy to shoot, cut down, edit, and post on a semi-frequent basis. Not to mention props – you’ll see what I’m talking about once we actually manage to get another one posted.
Vlogs are huge on YouTube right now. I was a big fan of Casey Neistat’s series while it was still on, and there’s no denying that the genre is still carrying a lot of weight on the platform. But while it’s tempting to jump on that wagon, I don’t think the whole deal would really appeal to me. And it’s not the act of putting a life on camera, or having nothing to post that’s really the issue – it’s more that I think that vlogs aren’t really personal enough in some regards.
Course, you also can’t really deny the kind of connection that some of these content creators have with their audiences, but I’ve always sort of felt that you lose…something the moment you step outside of just living your life and turn to the camera to address an unseen audience. There’s something about the physical act of putting what I’m doing on film on halt to talk at a lens that would really take me out of it – cheapen things, almost. It may be an odd opinion to have, but it’s a constant worry I’ve got while I’m working on projects. It’s constantly something I’ll circumvent with voice-overs or superimposed text, just because I don’t really feel as though it resonates with what I do.
But I like the odd sense of voyeur that comes with viewing a vlog – the (hopefully) unfiltered and genuine experience that comes with offering the events of a day up to the world, because you thought it was worth sharing in a certain form. Maybe I’ll find some way to tap into that without the “hosting” aspect of things…only time’ll tell.
…or you’ll come back here in a few months, and I’ll be zipping around Manhattan on an electric skateboard, wearing painted shades and shouting at a DSLR. In which case, feel free to quote this post back to me, yeah?
A big part of getting into photography, I think, is understanding the weight behind a moment. Not just the moments where you’re staring out at something that just demands to be shot, edited, and retained, but the quieter moments where your camera’s sitting on the bedside stand instead of securely around your neck. Where you’re going on your third hour in bed on a lazy evening with your girlfriend, and she’s giggling and getting quietly exasperated at the bottle flip game on your phone she can’t seem to get more than three points on.
You’re not always going to be able to catch that kind of moment of your camera. A photograph’s probably going to be the last thing on your mind in that instant. But if you can sort of grasp the kind of weight behind all time, all space, all memory – from the luckiest moments we burn into an SD card at the push of a button, to the simplest things that we don’t – I think that maybe, just maybe, you’d be good at this.
Yeah, you guessed it – that’s the sound of a new Fernway Films YouTube video dropping! Came away from this one with sore ankles for days and a bruised shin and shoulder from a particular outtake that didn’t make it into the video. 😉
Give it a look! Like, Subscribe, Comment – whatever your heart desires. We’ll take it all the same.
And just to justify the photography tag I’ll be putting on this post, here’s a still that I managed to get while we were shooting –
But enjoy our little edit while we keep you patiently waiting for a larger project we’re currently collecting footage for. 🙂
FernwayPress 