FINALLY Made a Video During the COVID-19 Pandemic!

Well, the day finally came. After shooting dozens of videos for the videos I was originally going to create, I scrapped the whole idea and decided to start much, much simpler. The following video is essentially a slideshow of my favorite photos I’ve taken the last few years, with a little video of me at the beginning to describe what you’re about to see.

Once I’ve shot a few more rolls of film through my newly acquired Leica M3, I’ll post a video review of the camera in general and some of the photos I’ve taken with it!

In the meantime, please feel free to leave some advice about what I could do better or videos you’d like to see in the future!

COVID-19 and Some Goals

The last two weeks have been absolutely insane, and I have no doubt in my mind that this will be our new normal for at least a few months. As of writing this sentence, the total number of documented cases of COVID-19 in the United States is just under 45 thousand.

Last Tuesday (3/17) I got the news that Mayo Clinic would be cancelling all elective surgeries and appointments that weren’t absolutely necessary, so I wasn’t sure I would have a job this week. As of writing, my position at Mayo has completely changed from rooming patients and scheduling appointments, to screening patients and employees as they walk in the building. Temperature checks have begun on every person coming in, with multiple screening questions asked before we determine if they can go to their appointment, or need to go be tested for the coronavirus.

Throughout the last week, I volunteered for multiple different positions dealing with the outbreak, and Thursday (3/19) around 3:45pm, I was told I would be working 12pm-7pm screening patients every day for the foreseeable future. This started the next day. Every day, and damn near every hour, protocols for screening have changed. I currently have been working since Monday the 16th, and will continue to work my 12-7 shift until the 29th. Thankfully they added in a rotation, so I will luckily have 7 days off after the 29th, and have a weekly rotation start after that. That 7 days on, 7 days off rotation is where these goals come into play.

I’m going to try and be as productive as possible with those days off, but after working 14 days straight, I imagine I’ll be sleeping a lot on that first day just trying to recover from the total exhaustion I’m experiencing now.

My biggest goal during the time off will be learning how to shoot and edit video. There are tons of free programs available for video editing. I’m excited to dive in, but also a little overwhelmed with everything that’s going on in the world, as I’m sure everyone else is. Besides my goal of learning how to shoot and edit video, my other goals are to catch up on sleep, learn some different lighting techniques (pictured above), tire Miah out, and get out to shoot some possible content for these videos.

If anyone has any requests for content, please comment below and I’ll see what I can do! One idea I have at the moment is developing film, and showing the process I go through, but that might be towards the end of my 7 days as I learn to cut together video. Otherwise, l’ll probably take some video of me and Miah doing some training, or random hiking around Minnesota.

Hopefully everyone is getting through this as best as they can, and starting to adapt to our new normal. I’ll update as often as possible, and until then, everyone stay safe and wash your damn hands.

Old Photos

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this at the end of February, so before all of the insanity of COVID-19 was around.

For the past couple months, I’ve been thinking about going through and editing old photos to bring them up to my current standards and editing style. For the first couple of years with my digital camera, I was exporting images in the wrong color profile, which would wash out the colors, making them look dull and lifeless.

P.S.A - There will be a much larger difference between photos if you look at them on a mobile device compared to a computer. sRGB photos will be on the left/top, and ProPhoto/AdobeRGB with be on the right/bottom.

Now, not to go too much into it, but the world, for the most part, uses sRGB; it’s the standard. Tablets, phones, laptops, and any other mobile device, is able to see the sRGB color spectrum, with computers typically showing a bit more into the other color spectrums.

There are many different color spectrums you can physically work in, but there are three main ones; ProPhoto RGB, AdobeRGB, and sRGB. ProPhoto gives you the widest range of colors, sRGB gives you the least, and AdobeRGB is smack dab in the middle.

Because I was editing and exporting photos in ProPhoto RGB, most of my photos ended up looking washed out on mobile devices, but fine on my laptop at the time. For nearly two years, I dealt with whatever strange phenomenon was happening to my photos. I’d bring the photo into Instagram to post it, and all of a sudden the colors were absolute trash. I’d have to re-saturate the colors, boost the contrast, and hope I was close to what I had edited it like beforehand.

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Now that I’m on one of my infamous social media breaks, I’ve actually had the mental energy and time to go through and find those old photos, and edit them like I would today. And more importantly, export them in the right fucking color space. I dug out my old hard drives, plugged them into my computer, and got incredibly lucky when they still worked. All good, photos weren’t gone, but I did have to go through and find the damn things.

I sucked at color back then, but I was abysmal at sorting my photos. It took me about 30 minutes to actually find the photos I wanted to go through. I knew the month and the year of taking the photos, but ended up combing through every single folder on the drives to find them. I had two specific trips I wanted to re-edit; my trip to Glacier National Park, and the trip we took to Canada for Miah’s first birthday.

Each of those trips had hundreds of photos, so I restarted the culling process (think picking and choosing photos to work on) and found some keepers I had for some reason ignored back then. I went through the Montana pictures, and honestly, I have no idea how I walked away with any keepers at all from that trip. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and missed focus on multiple shots that would have been amazing. How do you miss focus on a mountain? I have no clue how, but I somehow did on at least a quarter of my shots. That was disappointing, but I’ll just chalk that down to being young and ignorant. It doesn’t happen that much anymore.

So, even after missing focus on a ton of shots, I then ruined the good ones by exporting them incorrectly. I have known for years, what kind of potential the photos had, but was either too busy or too lazy to really try and tackle the issue. I’ll admit, it did take a lot of work. I spent a good 10 hours over the weekend editing the photos again, but I’m glad I did. I no longer cringe at photos whenever I see them.

This whole process has taught me a couple different things:

1. I’ve come a long way in what I know, and what I’m capable of doing with a camera,

2. Proper storage and organization of photos can be incredibly helpful if and when you need to go back to find them,

3. And lastly, editing photos with a fresh eye can help find those photos that you once glanced over.

A photo I glossed over from Miah’s birthday trip to Canada.

A photo I edited with newly learned skills to improve the original, which I had cropped significantly to get rid of unwanted things in the frame.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about this whole matter, so I’ll just throw a bunch of other comparison photos for the rest of this and hope whoever is reading this can learn from my mistakes.

Drive and Direction

Every second or third Thursday, I go and see my therapist. I’ve been seeing him on and off for the past year and a half. He’s been absolutely instrumental in helping me with my direction, my personal issues, and life in general. He inspired this blog post, so, thank you Jeff.

Almost every person you meet along your way in life, has a passion of some sort. Some people have a passion for sewing, maybe painting. No matter the craft, bringing an idea into fruition is one of the most validating and rewarding things you can do. Holding something tangible, something real, that you made, it’s pure bliss.

At this very moment, I’m surrounded by different cameras, film I have developed myself, and photos I made are hanging on the wall. It’s clear to me that this is my passion. I love learning about the world around me, but this is the one thing that I have always come back to. It’s one of the few consistent things in my life (Miah of course is one), and sometimes that consistency provides solace in this hectic world of ours.

For the past two years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn this passion that I have into a career, something I can do day after day, and still be happy.

Jeff explained the situation as this (not exactly):

Passion is the engine, the fuel that makes the car go. People have the fuel, the energy, but they don’t always have the ability to direct themselves where they want to go. The steering wheel is that direction, it’s how you channel that passion.

The artist’s dilemma, how do I make this my reality? When you’re starting at the bottom, you won’t just fall into success. You have to sit down, figure out a plan, and execute it. I’ve been slowly piecing together this steering wheel, so I can finally drive the car with the roaring engine, where I want. It’s slow, there’s lots of friction, it’s frustrating, but I’m figuring it out.

I applied for a part time job, making more money hourly, but will be working much fewer hours in total. In this particular situation, getting a new job and no longer working at my full-time gig is the catalyst that will kick my ass into the next step. It’s motivation to keep pressing forward; motivation to make my dreams a reality.

I’m on the right road, at least I think I am. Wherever it takes me, I’m excited to see where it goes.

Enjoying *Most* of the Process

There are multiple reasons I started shooting film again, but the biggest reason is that it slows me down and makes me more present in the moment. Shooting film is inherently a slow process, and since I started developing and scanning at home, it has become even slower. I’m learning to set aside an hour or two a week to develop film that has been sitting idly by for sometimes two months before I get to it.

Shooting is obviously my favorite part of the whole experience. Developing only takes about 20 minutes from start to finish, hanging to dry takes about two hours. I find the process of developing very therapeutic; I am fully engulfed in the moment, and it feels like my own form of meditation.

After the film has dried, I get to cutting it up into scannable sections to hopefully make it a little more efficient.

BUT, scanning is awful. It’s painfully slow, the software is buggy and reminiscent of early 2000’s Internet Explorer. It’s like someone designed the software back in ‘01 and failed to ever update the interface. Trying to edit within the scanning software feels like walking through the woods on an unknown trail, blindfolded. You take one step off the trail, kick a rock, trip and fall into a ditch. I’m only being slightly dramatic. Pull up the histogram to edit the blacks, mid-tones, and highlights, and what you see happening to your photo doesn’t make any sense compared to what you’re doing to the histogram. It’s incredibly inaccurate and doesn’t loan much confidence in the scanning program.

Epson V750 - Nothing PRO about it.

Another issue I had with scanning was the inability to leave the computer and software to run and go do something else. If you didn't keep clicking on the screen between every photo, it would stop. How incredibly efficient. After digging through a couple pages of Google results, I actually found out there is a solution to this stop-go issue I was having. I had to download another file which was separate from the main program, restart the whole software, and then it would scan continuously like it’s supposed to. I have no clue as to why they chose to keep those things separate instead of just including it in an update. But again, early 2000’s design.

Scanning does go quite a bit faster now, but it’s still the worst part of shooting film. If I have a professional lab do the scanning, I have to pay at least $20 a roll, and that adds up quickly with how much I shoot. Scanning at home is the more economic option, but my $300 scanner doesn’t quite give the quality that the professional lab’s $15,000 scanner is capable of.

If I try to push the scans too much while editing afterwards, they get some gnarly lines going up and down the frame. Everyone loves seeing lines going across the frame and spending 30+ minutes trying to edit them out right?

Unedited scan from an unnamed lab in Arizona. Notice the vertical lines across the entire image.

Any attempt to make the scanner do what it’s designed to do, and it’ll wreak havoc on the scans. I tried to apply the “Digital ICE” function to this picture to have the dust, scratches and other blobs removed from the photo. It didn’t work in the least bit, and honestly I think it made the entire scan worse than if I had kept it off like usual. These scans were a cluster from the beginning, as the lab I went to in Arizona mailed back the negatives on top of one another, which in the film world is a huge no-no. They stuck together, ready to rip off the emulsion from the negatives.

Thing is, just because there’s one awful part to shooting film, doesn’t mean I’ll stop anytime soon. The majority of the process is a blast, scanning just sucks. I leave the negatives under books for a couple days to help flatten them out anyways, and I’ve found myself doing that more often now that I’m scanning at home. Maybe one day I’ll be able to invest in a $15,000 scanner, but that ain’t happening for a long, long time. Until then, I’ll keep dealing with this crap shoot of a system.