Posted in: Travel
In an ongoing series of travel videos of Europe in the fall of 2011, we have our next instalment from Dublin! As a side note, if you ever have the opportunity to visit Dublin, do so for the Guinness brewery alone. Regardless of whether you like or loathe the beer, the brewery itself is a wonder of Wonkanian proportion, and it simply needs to be experienced. The bit of it you see in this video is only a glimpse of its true, dizzying potential.
While visiting the Lake District this October, I shot some video alongside photos and cobbled it together into the following. It's a travel music video, I guess, in the tradition of my original Rishiri Climb one. This whole DSLR video thing is really growing on me: particularly the part where you can accurately document what it looks like to walk through those woods or look over the lip of that waterfall.
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.
