This saturday Jenny and I met up with our friends Jeff and Wendy for a little weekend getaway in Palm Springs. Most of the day was spent perusing the retro furniture stores on the main drag in downtown Palm Springs. Pretty much just looking because most of them are exorbitantly over-priced.
I actually picked up a couple of interesting items though. One of which being a wooden box meant as a CD holder. The interesting thing about it is that above each slot is a wooden lever which, if pressed, pushes your CD case out. With something like 16 CD slots each with their own lever I thought it might be a perfect object for a musical instrument conversion of some kind.
It had been my aim to go out and film some desert landscapes as my creative thing for the day. We didn’t get really settled into our hotel room until around 5-5:30 so the light was leaving pretty fast. I gathered up my tripod and camera and rushed out across the street where there was a large open space of sand and brush.
The sun had already ducked behind the mountains but I still had about an hour before dark. My goal for the shoot transformed into an exercise in composition. I decided to capture mostly static shots with minimal to no camera movements.
I cut most of it together Saturday night as well. The music choice was a hard decision because I didn’t want anything too electronic sounding. I ended up choosing a section from a song from the Monome Community Remix Project V2 by an artist named Visinin. The song is called “Goodbye Leopard” and it has a beautiful distortion at the end. I took that ending and extended it a little for this montage.
I went into this shoot with very little inspiration but by the time I had collected a few shots I started to feel pretty good about what I was capturing.
I hope you enjoy!
Craig,
Brilliant job of using ‘rack’ focus ( I think that’s what it is called.) I especially liked the images with the moon in the wires, almost like a note on the staff. May I ask what camera you are using?
I also enjoyed the wonky moving camera scenes followed by the return to the traffic.
Very beautiful.
TB
Thanks Todd! The camera’s a Canon 7D and the lens I used was a Contax Zeiss 35-70 3.4. I love that lens. It has a beautiful macro as well. Although, the extreme macros in this was my MP-E65mm. Of course an insane macro lens. It was tough to keep steady during those racks. I feel like those shots would’ve been amazing if there wasn’t those little micro-vibrations there.
Thanks for the comment. I wonder what camera and lenses you work with for your 365 day project?
Craig,
I swear I posted another comment, but at the risk of not saying what I wanted, I will post again; please delete if the other shows up. I use Nikon; so I have not made the jump into 35mm SLR Video just yet. Nikon has a way to go in that regard in my opinion. Particularly with focus. I also used my beloved Canon g9 until it froze on me a few months ago. I’m hoping to bring it back to life if it isn’t too expensive to do so.
I am wondering if you would be willing to e-mail me at todd@toddburleson.com I would like to discuss a collaboration project with you if you would be at all interested. It would benefit both of our projects, should we decide to do it.
Nonetheless, I will continue to enjoy your magical work.
TB
Excellent Charlie, I’m all relaxed now from watching your vid!