Shooting video

I find blogging to be a useful exercise for organizing my thoughts and formulating ideas for photoshoots, research projects, future travel, etc. Basically, it serve a purpose of note-taking. There is a concept, neatly outlined in Charles Duhigg’s book “Smarter Faster Better” that some kind of mechanism of capturing and periodically reviewing one’s observations and thoughts is an essential tool for learning. In other words, don’t just read a book – write down what you’ve just learned. Also, don’t just look at scenery – photograph (or better yet, draw) what you are seeing.

Somehow, shooting video makes for a drastically different experience for me than, say, taking still photos or writing down text notes. For example, videography seems to distract me from the experience of the present moment much more than still photography. Whatever happens on camera seems more like a performance than a real event. Intellectually, I realize that this is a false perception, and shooting video can also be viewed simply as a means of taking notes. In fact, the amount of information that is recorded in video is significantly larger than what’s captured in photos or written notes. I think the difference is that still photography and note-taking forms you to do some processing of the information on the fly and record only the most significant parts. In video, this is deferred to the post-processing stage, which incidentally makes the reviewing of the raw footage quite daunting.

Here is a couple of practical ways that come to mind for overcoming the apparent difficulty with producing video:
a) Shoot selectively, with at least a general meaning of each particular clip in mind.
b) Treat video as a note-taking tool, not as an artistic performance. Deliberately exercise a delay between capturing raw footage and making a movie.