Video Log

The weather has been beautiful lately, certainly great light and USUALLY great sunsets. However, this past month, despite the low altitude snow and great light, the sunsets have been less than impressive. I’ve set up a few times this past week to catch the golden light over the valley and have come away being very disappointed with the lack of stellar beauty I have come to expect with an Ojai Valley sunset. Nonetheless, on one of these outings recently I set up in the parking lot of my alma matter, Nordhoff High School hoping the clouds would part and show me the Topatopa bluffs over the East side of the Valley. No go. However, it wasn’t a total loss, I ended up shooting clouds, the wind and the trees around the stadium. The audio was the happy surprise with this piece. Hope you enjoy.

This one was just for fun. Shot on my Canon SD1000, I wanted to cut a short piece but ended up with this 11 minute version for my mom and our family. Good chance I’ll cut a much smaller version but just not this morning. We’ve been going to the dog park at Soule in Ojai for the past month or so (pending decent weather). I have some ideas on shooting stories up here but this was just for fun.

Last night I went looking for locations to shoot the sunset somewhere in Ventura. My idea was to shoot the setting light falling while the city lights started to come to life. Despite giving myself an hour or so to scout locations, nothing really panned out, so I drove to Surfer’s Point, Seaside Park in Ventura. I set up my D200 for a time lapse (1 frame every 10 seconds for an hour, give you 10 seconds of video) with the composition towards the sun. Well, the batter died on the camera about 5/6 of the way through the shoot so I packed that up, turned around and noticed how beautiful the sky was and then… the Moon! The way the clouds were dancing around the sky in front of the moon was stunning. Dragged out the video camera, shot a quick clip and called it a night.