I am first and foremost a landscape photographer. It is the modality I have worked in for longer and deeper than any other subject. So, it stands to reason that I would first turn my attention with this new camera toward the landscape. I also happen to be on vacation in a particularly gorgeous spot, the Oregon coast, so what else am I going to aim the thing at?
I am doing that thing that still photographers always do when they first pick up a video camera. They make still pictures. I feel my way through where I am, set a frame around something that interests me, and fire away. Except there's no discrete moment that is an abstracted image to be removed from the event. I am capturing something related to the experience of being in the place—the movement, the texture, the sound, the light, but most of all, a duration.
With still images we know that the final experience of the image often has very little to do with the source moment. Photography is a hugely abstracting way of snatching an instant from the stream, and looking upon it as something removed and very different. We often admire images precisely because they show us something we cannot see any other way.
I'm having a tougher time understanding how video works this magic. It's probably a wholly different order of abstraction that I have no understanding about yet, and so my initial forays are going to look naive and unstudied. They're going to look like what happens when a still photographer picks up a video camera.
It would be nice to be able to show what I did today to you. But that piece of the puzzle I haven't figured out yet. It's a 6 minute video. I tried compressing it to post here, but it looks like total hell, and even then the server times out. I haven't even figured out the YouTube thing--anything I've tried to upload there plays for 2 seconds then quits. Like I said before, I'm at the bottom of a very steep learning curve. I'm daunted by the most basic of basics.
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