Woodpeckers, Fire and Acorns Trailer from Rick Brown on Vimeo.
This is a very exciting thing for me. I am publishing the trailer of my first documentary short. This documentary was shot entirely on a 5dMkII and edited in Premiere Pro.
Woodpeckers, Fire and Acorns – the Trailer
February 23rd, 2010Success on the Flathead!!!
February 21st, 2010For those of you who have been reading my blog you know that I was very worried about some possible resource extraction activities harming the Glacier/Waterton International Peace Park and I was closely watching the ILCP and their RAVE on the Flathead Valley to fight this.
Well folks, it worked!!! The Peace Park is a designated UN World Heritage site and the UN sent an investigation team and expressed their displeasure with the proposed plans. Earlier this month, the British Columbian government prohibited industrial development in the valley. I will not talk about this success in much detail here, but refer you to ILCP’s story, a story in the Missoulian, and NPCA’s coverage. However, I want to thank all of you who took action to protect the Flathead and the Waterton/Glacier International Peace Park based on my pleadings here in this blog.
Now on to the meat of this post. My response to this issue illustrates very well an issue that is critical to the field of conservation photography. That is the old cliche “you love what you know, you protect what you love.” Just how my response illustrates this, is that ILCP has done quite a few RAVEs at this point, but the two I got the most enthusiastic with my support were the two locations that I have enjoyed in person; the Flathead and the Borderlands. This issue defines the very reason for the existence of conservation photography. Photos will never be a substitute for intimate knowledge of a landscape, but they are much better than nothing. So one of the primary jobs of the conservation photographer is that first step in the cliche; help your audience get to know the landscape, the critters in it, and the beauty of the symbiosis between the two. Many argue that too much ecotourism, resulting from people knowing just how wonderful a place is can be very destructive. I acknowledge this possibility, and some of our most popular and most fragile places are dealing with a little of the “being loved to death” syndrome. However, ecotourism is almost always better than development. Which do you think would be harder for say a gopher tortoise to deal with, having a bunch of tourists stick cameras in its face or its home and food put under a parking lot and mini-mall?
Video Info
February 11th, 2010If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I am currently very much involved in expanding my business into hd video. The current focus is deciding on a camcorder as I am currently using the 5dII and with the work I do, I think a combination of the two would be the best solution. Use a dedicated camcorder for the bulk of the work and the 5dII for sequences where depth of field control is important, or perhaps shooting in very low light, etc.
Having been a still photographer most of my life though, I had no idea where to look for info. With Canon’s recent announcement that their next camcorder is going to use a 50Mbps 4:2:2 codec, I went wild trying to find more info. Well, recently I came across two very useful sites. DVInfo and MacVideo. Ok, I’m a PC guy, editing on Premiere Pro, but MacVideo is still incredibly useful for information about the cameras. There’s this guy there, Rick Young, who breaks it down exactly the way I think of it; proof is in the pudding and when you’re talking expanding your business into hd video, pudding=picture quality and can you market the footage. So, if you too are looking to do these sorts of things, I suggest you check out these sites.
Expect a big post within a week or so about NANPA. The summit is next week, I’m very excited.
Now to think up what my next conservation oriented documentary will be.
Photograph People
January 31st, 2010Here I’m going to give a tip that is a painful one for many of us conservation photographers; if you want to maximize your impact, photograph people. Yes that’s right, Rick, the guy many think can only photograph ducks, is telling you to photograph people.
Magazines are often looking to engage the reader in the article through the photographs and apparently many think humans can’t feel connected to a member of the species Anas acuta. Personally, I find this both sad and shocking. However, the fact remains that if you want to maximize the impact of your photography for conservation, you should probably also be photographing people doing the conservation work and enjoying the fruits of their labors. The latter are called “lifestyle” or “outdoor lifestyle” images, a genre that I myself am now pushing myself to get into deeper.
Another tip with lifestyle images, if you want to maximize the versatility of the images, make sure your models are wearing modern and stylish clothes. This increases the odds of them being useful for advertising as well as editorial.
You can see some of my work in this field in these galleries; lifestyle and conservation.
Partay!!!
January 17th, 2010Just got back from a party at Van Duzer that the Friends of the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex threw as a membership builder. It was a great deal of fun; the food and of course the wine, were excellent.
We presented small little speeches about the most important projects we’re involved with; our invasive species project, our gift store and a new partnership with Van Duzer about oak savanna restoration on their land. This project is largely intended to provide a corridor for the expansion of the population of the Fender’s Blue Butterfly, a highly endangered species.
Van Duzer went well above and beyond the call of duty to make our evening a success. This combined with the excellent quality of their wines is why I urge you to both agree to help us with the plantings and other conservation work that the Friends will be helping with at Van Duzer and to buy some wine. Please contact me about helping with the conservation work and either visit the winery or their website for the wine. And if you need some excellent catering, I highly recommend Michael Sullivan, our chef for the evening.
Pintails Like Invasives Control
January 2nd, 2010If you’ve been reading this blog, you are well aware that I am involved in invasive weed control through the Friends of the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex. Today I saw some evidence that such programs have real benefits.
I was at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge today to photograph. The staff at this refuge has been working hard to control reed canary grass and other invasives in the marsh with the hope that doing so would promote the growth of more plants that provide high quality forage for waterfowl. Well, it appears to be working, at least as far as Northern Pintails are concerned. There are I’d say at least 3000 pintails on the slough. When an eagle or something would scare them off the water the sky was filled with them and the rest of the time the marsh looks like a mirror where someone spilled pepper with all of the pintails resting. Pintail music fills the air and birders clog the road.
Unfortunately, I saw no Dusky Canada Geese today. If you don’t know this is the rare subspecies of Canada Goose that is one of the primary concerns on the refuge.
These photos aren’t from today, but if you want to take a look at the critter you’ve just been reading about, click here.
New Decade = New World?
January 1st, 2010On his blog yesterday (12/31/09), Vincent Laforet made some interesting predictions for the near future and what it means for photography. Chief among these was that the new upcoming tablets would revolutionize the “print” industry. (Print in quotes because this would rapidly move the industry away from print on paper.) I welcome the idea of paperless publications. Wouldn’t it be great to have a conservation publication without all the environmental costs of the paper production? Not to mention this would eliminate one of the largest costs for the publications.
The problem is will this work? Much of the audience has definitely gotten used to getting content for free in this electronic age. Once folks get used to getting stuff for free, will you be able to get them to pay for it again. One thing I have always found frustrating about this is no one seems to consider the logical conclusion of this modality. If pay dries up for all of the content creators, what will happen to the content in the long run? Sure, I and others love photography enough that we’ll continue, pay or not. However, without the prospect of payment, I won’t upgrade my technology very often, if at all, and major travel will be impossible. Furthermore, I only allow use of my photography for free when it aids a cause that I feel strongly about. Thus, I feel the world of no payment for content will lead to the death of serious content built on research and lots of time. In other words, people will not do the research and other non-fun stuff behind the photography for free.
So, the main question I’m writing about is what will this new technology mean for the world of conservation photography? Well, if Vincent’s predictions hold true, it will be a brave new world leading to an exciting, lucrative, and productive new world for us conservation photographers. The only problem will be that we will need to stay very current on what sort of content is needed from us. The tablets will allow for a wide variety of media to be presented and we will need to make sure that we can provide what is wanted from the major content providers.
I am cautiously optimistic, if publications can solve the problem of monetizing content for the tablets, the near future is bright indeed. That however, is a rather large hurdle.
I suppose there’s also the quasi-socialistic solution; public doesn’t pay for the content, but in return supports the lifestyle of the content creators. Do you think America would like that alternative?
Docu
December 26th, 2009The script is now written, and I’ve gone over it with my narrator for timing etc. This will take a little bit of reediting, as some sequences are too short for the narration needed. Of course, I totally expected that.
Anxious to get back to it.
One tool that’s helped me a lot with this step is Adobe Clip Notes. This is a great little tool in Adobe Premiere Pro that allows you to create a PDF with your video in it. Then there is a note pad at the bottom and the people you send the clip to can make notes at any point in the movie and their comments get cataloged at the timecode where they made the comment. Then you can import it back into Premiere and see their comments connected with the timecode. I used this to send it to my narrator to get comments and then the video was already at his house for us to go over with the script. Yes it is at greatly reduced resolution, but that didn’t impact the work that we were doing.
Rick & William Project?
December 25th, 2009Yeah, I know, it’s a chick flick. But hey, some of them are good.
Watched Julie and Julia last night and actually found it inspirational. Great to watch someone be brave about pursuing self-actualization. It was fantastic to see how a blog could be a part of that. I have found that blogging is a great outlet; a place where one can write regularly with at least some hope of others seeing the work, without the worry of if it is publishable in the traditional sense. One can ramble on about the weirdest things on a blog. Reminds me of a quote I heard on an episode of Criminal Minds “better to write for yourself and have no audience, than to write for an audience and have no self.” At this moment I cannot remember the original source for this quote, but find it illuminating.
For Christmas, I received a book about William L. Finley, a pioneer conservation photographer and the man that the headquarters of the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex was named for. He would go out into the field and photograph birds with a large format, view camera. Those who know much about bird photography and view cameras can imagine how difficult this would be. I often stay inside when the weather forces shutter speeds under 1/250 of a second and he was using technology that would have imposed these sorts of working conditiond constantly. He is definitely an inspiration. He was instrumental in the establishment of two Oregon National Wildilfe Refuges; Three Arches Rock and Malheur. I have written and spoken about him many times.
Rough Cut Done
December 16th, 2009Tonight has been a big deal for me. I just completed the first rough cut of my first documentary short. In the next couple of days, I will start writing the script for the voice over narration and adding the subtitles for telling the audience who certain people are. Then it’s on to sweetening the sound, mainly a matter of eliminating recording hiss. The audio system on the 5d MkIIincreases the gain level when there aren’t any loud sounds, this creates a lot of recording hiss. The 5d MkII is not a perfect solution for recording video, but does a very good job and serves its intended roles in video quite well. As I see it, the intended roles in video for the new video dSLRs are to introduce people to video and to allow for recording some clips for posting to the web without the photojournalist carrying additional cameras. I recommend following Vincent Laforet’s blog for cutting edge information about video capable dSLRs.
Hopefully, this project will convince inhabitants of the Willamette Valley to help out with savanna restoration. Some of the invasive weeds project that the Friends of the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex furthers restoration. Just about anyone around here can help us pulling weeds.