Acts of Balancing

yesterday was an insanely packed day, with an engagement shoot at brooklyn botanic garden in the morning and a six-outfit editorial shoot in the evening. all in all, i was taking photos for about six hours yesterday and in transit for three and a half. my back is killing me because i brought a super full kit to make sure i was ready for anything at both shoots, and i am glad i did but also not glad i did because damn. back pain is real. on the other hand, it was good training for the many weeks of backpack travel ahead this summer. so i guess it’s a win from that perspective.

the photos from both the morning and evening came out awesome and the clients were super happy. but yesterday proved to me that i have a long row to hoe when it comes to building up my ability to manage simultaneous execution of photo and video while i’m out working. in the morning, thankfully i had nigel with me, so he handled a lot of the filming for me. going through that footage will definitely be interesting. in the evening, i intended to shoot a lot more content than o did. actually, let me walk that back a bit. there are a few key segments i didn’t record that i wish i would have. i needed to record us meeting, us talking about the clothes she wanted to shoot. and then a little bit of material of her prepping for b roll.

what i did was set up the gopro on a tripod and recorded the process of shooting a couple of the outfits. there were a couple of time lapses that will definitely look cool and be fun to share individually, but they’re not really inspired or engaging content. i am taking this as a learning experience. my execution was way off, and the reason was that i didn’t go in with a solid plan; i didn’t contemplate in advance what my specific plan of attack would be, and while i had a vague idea of what i’d like to produce, that isn’t good enough. if my entire focus was on video, i might be able to pull that off. but since my primary creative drive needs to be focused on photo, i have to make sure i have a clear vision of exactly what video and audio i will need to bring my video to life.

Ep 002

yesterday i used every spare hour in my day to put together a video for my new youtube channel, and all in all i am mostly happy with the results. i’ll link it to this post.

i wanted to keep it super short, like short enough to post on my insta feed - 60 seconds or less - but i would’ve had to cut out a lot of little details that i thought were fun. so i decided to just slap the whole thing together start to finish and see how long the video ended up being, for science. the good news is that even including everything i wanted to include, it came in under six minutes. i feel like five to ten minutes is a good video length - as long as there is plenty i’d shot variety and interesting dialogue/ story happening.

mom also glad that i shot very little footage that i didn’t use, so i wasn’t wasting time during the photo shoot taking worthless video. that fits into my goal of creating interesting video content to share the experience of being a photographer in nyc without wasting my clients’ time.

from start to finish, i probably spent about four hours editing this video, and a lot of that time was spent fiddling with premiere pro since the program is still new to me and it’s been a while since i did any video work. hopefully the lessons learned yesterday will translate into faster edits going forward. i still have a lot to learn and hone down, though. like for instance, i forgot to include my social media links in the video, and i didn’t show swana’s insta handle when i introduced her. i also want to find some good sound effects to play when i show a photo, when text is displayed on screen, and during transitions. but all of that will come with time.

there were a couple of quirks that i need to work out moving forward. first off, my video doesn’t display correctly on my tv screen. it’s like the tv is slightly zoomed in and the edges of the video are not fitting into the monitor. i’ll have to figure out how to fix that. and then there was this weird animation that happened with some of my text that i didn’t mean to include and don’t like. i’ll have to figure out how to fix that and control it. but even though those two weird quirks made it into the published video, i ain’t mad.

the important thing for me yesterday was to publish a video. it had been a week since my first video and i don’t want to lose momentum. we head to europe for nine days on wednesday evening, and i want to put out one video a week. now is the time to establish best practices, to experiment and adapt, to make mistakes and learn from them. because almost no one is watching, and the only people who are watching will give me honest feedback about my content that will help me grow into a content producer worthy of attention. at least that is my hope.