Working to improve my basic editing skills using royalty-free music, I came up with “Train to Palermo — The Zebras Version” — sharing my ride in Buenos Aires from Villa del Parque (home) to Palermo (tourist haven). To see how Vimeo bests YouTube when it comes to sound quality, watch the first 10 seconds of these two versions and concentrate on listening.
To each site I uploaded the exact same video file and as you can hear, the sound comes out a lot better on the file hosted by Vimeo. (By “better” I mean “not muffled” and “sounds like the original when played on my computer.”) This is something to keep in mind when deciding whether YouTube or Vimeo is better for sharing your video projects.
Not only can you see one of the rooms in my home in Argentina in this video editing test but, gasp!, you can also see that I’ve actually figured out how to edit b-roll on top of one video/audio take. (”A-roll”?) The inability to perform this incredibly basic editing function in iMovie is what made me finally decide to buy Final Cut Express.
The reason I’m sharing this video with you (as I did my FCE compression test) is the same reason I’m posting these down-and-dirty experiments to YouTube: to help me get over my fear of new technologies, specifically in the realm of multimedia editing.
I over think way too much and often get stuck deep in the creative-technology mud. This time around I was about to get stuck with FCE, which looks like Final Cut Pro to me, and which made me want to crawl back to iMovie. I realized I could think and think and even practice and practice, but never make any substantial headway. What was called for was learning by engaging in quick, learn-one-skill projects and publishing them.
Sure, my tendency is to only share polished work, and sharing crappy experiments makes me go “gulp” in a very real way. What if someone actually sees this???
Yeah, what would happen? Nothing, I suppose, but thee real point is that I’ve noticed that photographers who share their experiments in a public manner advance much more quickly than those us who get stuck — over thinking and not creating, publishing, learning and moving forward.
Yesterday I headed over the tango festival going on here in Buenos Aires to photograph a workshop being given by Claudia Bozzo, my tango teacher. She had seen my tango stop-motion movie and asked me if I could document her class and “make something special,” which I heard as, “Here’s a chance to practice your multimedia skills.” This seemed like a good idea given my work for Human Rights Watch. It also seemed like a good time to put my photography skills to work documenting aspects of a culture that daily becomes more my culture.
My girlfriend, Carla, did a great job recording sound, although I didn’t do a great job of instructing her how to do so. I wasn’t clear on what audio I wanted. I also wasn’t clear on how to shoot video segments, which I did frantically with my Canon G9 in between photographing stills.
Frankly, I found the experience overwhelming and confusing. And that wasn’t because there were more than 100 people stuffed into a very tight area, making it very difficult to move around. The real problem was that I was not clear on how I would be using the images and/or video and/or audio to create my piece. However, I wasn’t dismayed.
Thanks to advice from many photographers, I realize that creating multimedia is all about editing. And now I have some raw material to get into Final Cut Express and get editing. As I figure out what I can make, I will undoubtedly learn how I can better balance capturing stills, video and audio to record this kind of event for multimedia.
It’s been a great week — with my work with Human Rights Watch off the ground and getting some news images in print — and, on this Friday the 13th, I can’t help but think about good luck. I really do feel like good luck has come my way recently, and that my life and work are starting to blend in special, unexpected ways — ways that I have wanted, but ways that did not happen when I was more desperate, more anxious, trying harder to make something happen that I was not yet ready to handle.
What the heck am I talking about?
What I’m talking about is that when I moved to Argentina more than four years ago I had big dreams about learning Spanish and traveling all over South America and making great images and telling even greater stories. But that didn’t happen. For one thing, learning Spanish — I mean reallylearning to live with the stuff — has proved far more challenging (and rewarding) than I could have have ever imagined. For another thing, I got focused a lot more on the “simple” aspects of daily living that I had never focused on so well in the United States.
BEFORE: Christmas Eve in Villa 31 -- when being an outsider gave me an in.
In short, you could say I moved to Buenos Aires to escape the more mundane aspects of life that I wasn’t handling too well back in the USA and, very much to my surprise, what has happened is that I have come to cherish the mundane more than anything else. Family. Friends. Living in the moment. Taking care of body and mind.
Then this Human Rights Watch gig seems to fall in my lap, and that’s really exciting. But what’s particularly nice I don’t feel manic excited or super lucky or all revved up, like I’ve won the lottery or something. I just feel mellow lucky and, more than anything, I feel really lucky that it was the circuitous, couldn’t-have-predicted-that route that has brought me here. I did not get here, as so many successful people proclaim, by keeping my eye clearly on the prize. How the hell could I? I didn’t know what the prize was. I was stumbling and I still am, but this week the stumbling feels like it has a bit more grace to it.
I am writing all this by way of sharing that it is not my photography skills nor my desire to work with multimedia nor my great business skills that created this opportunity with Human Rights Watch. What really allowed me to get this job is the fact that I live in Buenos Aires, that I learned the language and that, more than anything, I can see the cultural as both an insider and an outsider. This is not only allows me to get access to Continue reading “Taking Culture, Not Pictures”
• Family matters more than anything. So keep on building, loving and appreciating your “family,” even if these people are not related by blood.
As Mooney says of a young homeless man helped by the Oasis project: “His wants are simple – to love and be loved. How very basic and yet so tragic that being part of a family seems so out of reach for so many.”
• HD-DSLR cameras are not the best tools for recording video for making movies. HD-DSLRs are a major pain for capturing video, so (at least for now) for the best, most hassle free video-only shooting we’re better of with HD video cameras.
As Mooney says: “Yes, the visual [of HD-DSLRs] is stunning but I can’t help but think how many moments I may have missed that I probably would have gotten if I had been shooting with a video camera.”
Let’s go to the video. . .
To honor both family and not capturing video on HD-DSLRs — I used my measly Canon G9 — I share a home movie I made a year-and-a-half ago. Back then these wackos were just the wacky family of my girlfriend. But now, with the wedding set for January, these wackos are my family, too. Yes!
Sure, we all know that any creature with an opposable thumb can take great pictures, thanks to high-tech, digital point-and-shoots. But let’s leave the truly challenging photojournalism to video security cams. I’m mean, check out the first 32 seconds of this baby!
OK, maybe I don’t watch enough “Cops,” and maybe this won’t thrill you, and maybe I clearly can’t even think of a witty introduction, but do check out this video, which kind of feels like a home video for me, and consider this:
• This was filmed near where I live, in Buenos Aires. (Tigre, to be exact, which is like a suburb.)
• Commuter trains in Buenos Aires are huge and crisscross the city — above ground. (Yikes.)
• The picturesque train-crossing safety bars that come down — ding, ding, ding — are often ignored. (See video.)
• Porteños — the people of Buenos Aires — often ride two on a motorcycle, no helmets. (See video)
• Porteño men — even when not drunk — tend to be a little, um, nuts. (See video)
• I first saw the first 32 seconds of this footage twenty times in a row in a television store I had been passing. I was drawn in by the clerks cheering and yelling, like it was a soccer match.
• I was the first one to yell out loud, “Dale, gordo!”, which seemed natural, and is like is kind of like, “You go, Man!”
• By the time I left the store, we were all chanting it. Dale, gordo! Dale!
And, that, my friends, is me sharing a little bit of my life in Buenos Aires, made possible by the photojournalism of a security cam.
