Bee-ing grounded

Since I have so many posts stacked up in the queue I haven’t been able to publish one mixing multiple media types until now. Lately a lot more of my work behind the camera has been with video. Being a Panasonic shooter, it’s kind of a no-brainer to take advantage of the great video functionality I have to hand. But stills will continue to make up the majority of what I do. At least as of right now.

As you know, I’m all about telling the Story of the Place with my photography and adding video will definitely help. One of my challenges with that is the time it takes to edit, even when I have a clear idea of how to tell the story with film (which, let me tell you, isn’t always the case!). The bigger challenge is wrapping my brain around how to organize a video project to tell the story. I have to think differently in terms of what kinds of clips to shoot, in what order to present them, managing camera angles and panning directions, close, wide, establishing, static – it’s all in the mix and can be intimidating. Plus there’s the possibility of adding stills to the video, which I haven’t done here, but have with other films. I especially would like to put together highlight reels, so to speak, of my various outings and locations that I love. Maybe the Best of the Year post will be video as well as stills. So many options and possibilities.

And of course macro video has its own technical demands over and above more traditional filming. That shallow depth of field is the biggest – keeping things in focus is a lot harder at this small scale, especially as subjects are moving, too. Mostly I rely on autofocus, but because I can manually adjust during filming, I can basically pull focus this way while still keeping an eye on the subject and the framing/composition. Thank the technology gods for focus peaking! Right now I’m using the camera screen itself, but may add a monitor in future.

For this film, I mainly used a tripod and an LED panel on an articulating arm attached to the hot shoe because the light was low. So low that I didn’t need to use an ND filter or polarizer, something I usually do need for most all other video work in order to maintain proper exposure.

So…here’s what I came up with after several sessions of on-and-off work –

During the process, I had the presence of mind to change camera positions every time I had a session with her. In my short time doing macro I’ve learned that’s critical so things don’t look too much the same and get boring. I’m sure there are lots of other lessons awaiting me, so stay tuned.

I wasn’t able to shoot video from under the flower where I found her on the 3rd morning, but I did manage a still –

Isn’t she cute?

I’d love to hear your reaction to this kind of post and whether it works for you. Do you want only words and stills or video and audio, too? I’m also thinking about doing whole posts in video format with me talking over video with stills included.

I have a YouTube channel now, but not sure what the future of that is going to be. Right now it’s just a hosting platform since everything I shoot is in 4K and I can put them up without shelling out more $$. So if you want to follow me there, that’s cool, too. Next Sunday’s post will be a video one as well!