A Walk in the Woods

There’s vulnerability that comes with stepping outside your comfort zone, but that is often where growth and discovery happen. It doesn’t have to be a life changing event that makes you feel vulnerable, sometimes it can be sharing something you’ve never done before. I’ve been a professional still photographer for 16 years. It’s always been more than just work for me, because still photography is also my life’s passion. I’ve far surpassed Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour mark of expertise. However, video is a visual medium I’ve enjoyed consuming, but haven’t tried executing. Here is where my vulnerability comes in.

This month I wanted to shoot a video short to support my still photography work and further showcase my approach to the landscape. It was a humbling project. I reached out to some photo mates who have gotten into motion work to ask for their advice on starting points. I sketched out the basic idea (well, ideas, because I was full of them), but as I dived deeper into the process, I could see that storytelling in motion is very different from still. Movement, sound, timing, loops, story arcs all need to be taken into account. As I wandered this last month photographing landscape, I also took short video sequences to build up a library I could pull from and edit together. At first I was going to tell a literal story of the process of capturing a single landscape black and white image. I had video of shooting, mixing chemicals, processing film, all of it. But it was very rough and the video capture was amateur at best. So I scrapped that literal idea. 

One morning, a cold spring snowstorm blew in and beautifully frosted the trees. I grabbed my film camera (and iPhone which had become my primary video camera) and headed out. During this outing I came up with the idea of simplifying everything and presenting a more poetic, rather than literal, representation of the way I work and see. This did two things: one, it made the video work easier because essentially I shot video the way I shoot stills, using small lock down shots, and two, the final editing became less about a story arc and more about creatively sequencing these lock down shots. 

My landscape work has always tended toward the quiet and meditative and away from the flashy. I started to see video in the same way. I was drawn to a 4 second sequence of snow blowing or walking along a trail. The use of these clips to enhance a feeling is great, but done too much denies the strength of video: motion. It has been an eye opening project. I learned a great deal, and at first I was not going to share it because it’s not perfect and because it’s a new medium for me. But part of my ethos is pulling back the curtain and showing you more of what I’m about, the good and the almost good.

So here is my video short titled “A Walk in the Woods"