Richard Anderson has joined the wave. The wave of still photographers embracing video, that is. We had a long, great conversation today. We discussed nerdy photo stuff and more important ideas about family, friendship and creative satisfaction. Our talk started by touching on all themes at once when Anderson shared his new excitement for video. He’s getting off to a nerdy and creative start by focusing on projects featuring family and friends.
Anderson has devoured From Still to Motion and is learning from online resources. He’s also started to think about how to make money from motion. But he’s not too worried about this “monetizing” issue. For now, Anderson is focused on having fun and learning from doing — as it should be.
The first piece Anderson published to his Vimeo channel highlights his son, Nicholas, showing off his Lego gun, a real monster of creative engineering. (Man are Legos cool! If you haven’t seen Mike Stimpson’s decisive Legos, definitely check them out.) Anderson’s next two videos are both music videos of Daniel Hill, a family friend whom Anderson captured at Chincoteague, Virgina, during a family vacation.
Anderson’s “Nothn’” music video is pretty basic, but required greater video making skills than “Nicholas & the Lego Gun.” He had to deal with recording sound with tricky ambient wind, and now we do not hear his off-camera voice. More polished, more professional.
Thriving By Keeping It Simple and Fun
In his second Hill music video, “What is the soul of a man?”, Anderson takes his video-creating skills up another notch, now editing in B-roll footage. Very nice. More polished, more professional.
An excellent still photographer, Anderson is the author of Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow Handbook and a driving force behind dpBestflow.org. This man is all about professionalism and doing things right. So his openly sharing his video experiments online should be encouraging to all of us newbies to video and multimedia.
There is no way for still photographers to “catch up” with the process of making movies, and so the only sensible way to enter the realm of video and multimedia is to have fun, learning by doing, and publishing without out fear of tarnishing our still-image making reputations. From there, exactly as Anderson is doing, we can just see where it all leads.