It’s hard to imagine, but it has been one year since I launched this website. I’ve done my best to stay consistent, releasing one video a month and writing one article a week. When I started this project, I knew it was important to maintain a reasonable pattern for my content.
Sometimes I wish I came up with this idea of producing videos while we were living in Italy.
While I had a decent camera in Italy, it was terrible for shooting videos. The few videos I shot of my daughter while living in Italy were almost always out of focus and blurry.
Additionally, we didn’t have a smartphone. My wife and I had cheap prepaid bar phones that we used to avoid the outrageous data prices applied to smartphones. Imagine navigating through Florence and Rome without a smartphone. It’s possible. We used maps. Cross referencing street signs and using monuments to get around the country.
We bought our first smartphones in Japan. Instead of needing to remember to take my camera with me while out and about, my phone was my camera. I understand that I’m years late to this revelation, but it has made capturing moments easier while out and about. Hands down, I have more pictures of my time here in Japan than I do from Italy.
Many of the early videos on my channel were shot using a cellphone. You can see much of that footage in today’s video B-roll. It wasn’t until the middle of last year when I bought a proper camera with decent video capabilities. I love my camera, but there are still circumstances where I’m more comfortable using my cellphone. Like when filming in bad weather or when I need to capture something on the fly. Camera phones have come a long way in the past few years. Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh shot an entire film using an iPhone.
As much as I acknowledge the use of cellphones in the film making of today, one of my pet peeves is when I hand a stranger my phone to shoot a quick video of me, and they hold the phone in portrait mode.
I hate that portrait mode is becoming so prevalent in the usage of photography and video making today.
Editing today’s video was a ton of fun. I enjoyed revisiting old footage from the past few years, and tweaking them so that I’m not reusing the same shots. I want my videos to be more than a guy talking to the camera so the more b-roll I can use to tell a story, the better.
Obsidian Perspective 