Trace of Clouds, aka The Sky Is No Limit

I take pictures on Thanksgiving. It’s one of the things I am thankful for. This is a timelapse of a lacey sky from the backyard at our relatives’ house in northern Arizona. Shot on a GoPro Hero 3+ and processed in GoPro Studio which I like and don’t, because of some quirks and a bit of bugginess, which stall the creative process. Finally I added newly created music by me from Garageband on the iPad using an app called Loops but edited down for time. It was that or gently blowing into a microphone as if it was wind.

Doing an improv and trimming down to the good stuff is not only effective but is a time-honored musical tradition; essentially it’s capturing the creative and writing portion of songwriting in a format that allows some of the sketches and outlines to make it all the way through the final draft to the published product (if I can turn it into a book metaphor here in the closing days of NaNoMo.)

You can do this with performance video as well but it’s a real slog cutting it together in a meaningful way after throwing out the poorer parts. There are so many moving pieces in that it’s better to plan for a better result. I think that is true even if you have many cameras for multiple coverage, and audio and lights and everything you might need, but then you are drowning in options and choices and don’t know what to throw away.

For this timelapse with one camera I got to toss out many minutes to have a snack-size thirty seconds, but I am not telling a deep emotional story, just making a small watercolor….

—–David.

P.S. What I enjoy about this is that because the setup takes almost no time, I got to be creative but also social with the family, and do the editing and publication work on the backend. But all the time I knew I was pushing a project forward; literally multitasking.

P.P.S. Of course I took a bunch of photos of family too, but that’s more interactive if you make it so. I sometimes fall into a pattern of news photography, capturing scenes without trying to intrude. I like that style, but remember that people like to be social, and photos can be both an entryway to that or a barrier to interaction.