It’s one thing to publish your work online. It opens up your world, gives you exposure and connects you with people you may never have met. It’s entirely another thing to give those same people a glimpse into your unique creative process that created that work. I am a huge fan of taking a look behind the curtain, being able to see the bigger view, the how and what that went into creating that artwork.
Back in April last year, I spent a weekend down in Puerto Penasco at Don Giannatti’s first workshop in Mexico. For me, it was less of a workshop and more of a weekend full of inspiring conversations pushing me to break out of the photography box I had placed myself in. Don was always carrying around a little Flip video camera, talking about all the video he’d been shooting. First thing I did after returning home was to go out and pick up my very own Flip. It was small, shot mediocre video and had a bare essentials interface. Pretty much a red button to start and stop the video recording.
Armed with my new video camera, I slipped the Flip into my camera bag, brought it to all my photo shoots and started putting together behind the scenes footage. As the photographer, you can only be holding the video camera up to that point you need to pick up your still camera. More realistically, if you want to be in any of your videos, you have to hand it to someone else more frequently. The Flip’s simple interface was the one feature I love about it. I could hand it to anyone and they could push the button and record what was happening. That’s about where the love affair stopped. I wanted more.
Shortly after purchasing the Flip, I picked up a Sony HD Handycam. I fell in love with it’s small form, HD video, image stabilization and they even had one that ran off a memory stick instead of a bulky hard drive. I only shoot an hour or two of small snippets, there was no need to record 60+ hours of video at a time. It had everything I wanted, fit in my camera bag, it was perfect. Or so I thought. With higher end gear comes complications. The image stabilization on video cameras like the one I purchased, works great, if you’re standing still. Put in the hands of any non-photographer on the set and you get zoom-crazy video. So essentially I was shooting most of my own video or ended up with zoom-crazy, shaky video with a few usable snippets here and there.
What to do? You have a couple options. If you plan to shoot behind the scenes video, you really need to think it through. Depending on the size of your operation you might have the opportunity to have someone on staff shoot your video. Chase Jarvis puts out great videos. He has a talented videographer with him all the time. Most of us aren’t so lucky. The other option is to bring some help to the shoot. That could be in the form of hired help, a friend without an itchy zoom finger or even a college film student. If you’re interested in creating videos, making friends with someone looking for experience or exposure is a great way to up the video quality.
After a bit of trial in working with HD video, last night I finally edited the video from my birthday photo shoot. It took ten months to get around to doing, but I’m happy with the results.
Vimeo doesn’t allow me to embed HD resolution, so to see the full-res version check it out here.
