Okay, so I ended my first post about shooting on film with this photograph, indicating that I didn’t know what I was doing.

That’s not really fair, I was trying to shoot out the end of the roll, so I was bound to end up with at least one image like this.

I think. I’m not sure if this scenario is actually entirely avoidable or not. I’ll learn as I go.

Regardless, at this point I was just aiming and clicking in order to finish out this roll and change film in order to keep shooting. This one isn’t actually a mistake.

But my first roll had a ton of light leaks at the end of it. Take a look:

So, after some hunting around for the right camera for me, I got a Minolta SR-T 101.

I got the photos back today, let’s take a look!

When I first started as a video producer at First Methodist, I was paired with a junior video producer named Keith. Keith was the first employee I ever had, and fortunately for me Keith was both very good at his job and very easy to manage. The best possible way to start figuring out how to be a manager, I think, is to be almost entirely extraneous to the whole process. I would recommend it to anyone.

One of the habits I got into that first year was doing lighting setups with Keith as my subject, snapping a test frame with the cameras, then talking the look over with Keith before the subject arrived. Just for fun, I started saving the frames in a collection on my computer with the idea of making an Instagram post at some point.

After about a year, I got promoted to creative director and had less time to spend directing videos, so I never finished the project. But today I stumbled across the folder I was saving all of the photos in and decided to post some of them here for posterity.

It has been half a decade since I last blogged - since anyone last blogged, probably - and it’s time for this space to pivot to something else.

I’ve been working on updating this site, and while there are lots of videos and photos I’m excited to highlight, there’s also a fair amount of stuff that needs to be culled. Some of those projects I still really love, though! So I’ll be posting some of those here so that they don’t go away forever.

So, if you’re reading through these posts from newest to oldest, a) I hope there were a number of posts you’ve read already and I’ve followed through on my promise to update this page, and b) you are about to make quite a jump when you read the next post.

Okay, even if the Oscars aren't interesting (and they won't be), there's still plenty of fun that can be had. A good Oscar drinking game obviously leads to plenty of drinking and light-hearted teasing, but a better one sends you down a dark voyage of self-discovery, where you come out the other side a changed person, with a scar you can't remember getting and a series of tattoos whose meaning are a mystery that will haunt you for the rest of your days. You will probably also have to do some community service.

This is the magic of the movies.