Learning something new...

Experiencing new things, and therefore learning new things is pretty much what gets me out of bed in the morning. For the past couple of years that has been super easy, what with a 20 month old in the house and all. I find it harder, though, to keep up with all the things I want to learn about. That is, things that will help me move my work and my career forward, or that I just find interesting (not that my daughter is not!). Slowing down and taking a little time for yourself is important, even if it's hard to do some times.

Growing up I always enjoyed art. I learned to paint and throw clay and all sorts of other things, but pencil drawing was my favorite. I became a perfectionist. Alas, this was my downfall because as I began to work and have less and less free time I grew more and more frustrated with my drawings. I just couldn't put in the time to produce what I envisioned. I didn't abandon pencil drawing, but moved on to something else. Enter photography. Starting something new is always exciting. The learning curve is steep. Every roll of fill was discovery. I was hooked, and have been fortunate to do many different things with my photography.

Now, I don't see putting down my camera any time soon, but I must admit I was very excited when Canon began incorporating video and HD capabilities into their DSLR cameras. Here was an opportunity to learn something entirely new utilizing a tool I already had! Time is still a huge challenge, but I learned quickly that video capture is really just one piece of the pie. Post-production is an art unto itself... and a rather technical one at that. So after a year+ of shooting clips of my daughter and general randomness, I finally decided I needed to try to learn post-production. And boy is it exciting! Daunting, but exciting.

Below is my first ever edited video. It is a compilation of video that I shot one evening training in my climbing gym this past winter, combined with a silly video clip that my friend Mike shot. As far as videos go, this is rather pointless, but like my daughter who is so proud of the blob she just finger painted, I am pretty psyched to be starting to get the hang of it. With wedding season about to kick-off I am not sure when video experiment #2 will happen, but I have a lot of footage from our recent family vacation to Mexico to work with when the time comes!

Video Experiment #1: Training for mixed climbing from Eric McCallister on Vimeo.