When my D60 gave me the camera equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death, and a good friend and talented photographer advised me to bite the bullet and buy a better body, I paid little attention to that new body being capable of video. In fact, I may have even exclaimed aloud "who cares about video? I'm buying this thing to take photos!"
So when I started taking brief, documentary-style video clips on our July 2011 climb of Rishiri-zan in northern Hokkaido, it was a lark. I wasn't really sure if they would be any good or what I would use them for...perhaps a dorky little documentary about our climb?
When we returned from the climb, and my teaching partner at my Japanese high school asked me to prepare something for our students, I figured I had time enough to cobble the short video clips together with some photos to make a brief music-video-sort-of-thing that might entertain the students. It was a hurried thing, and I always intended to return to the footage and make something proper and longer.
What came out of the exercise is, to this day, possibly one of the most rewarding bits of video I've ever strung together. This thing still makes me smile now, nearly two years later, and it inspired a series of travel videos when I headed over to Europe that fall.
But this is where I started: my first crack at video. I hope you like it as much as I do.
